A year into Trump's second term, many Project 2025 proposals he once distanced himself from are policy

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump insisted he had "nothing to do with Project 2025," a conservative policy plan that became a flashpoint in the race. A year after that election, a number of its proposals, from tougher immigration enforcement to dismantling the Department of Education, have been carried out.

The blueprint, which runs roughly 900 pages and was led by the Heritage Foundation, was aimed at remaking the federal government. Democrats worked to turn it into a political bogeyman and had some success, though not enough to win the election. Concern had been building since the spring of 2024 and intensified when actress Taraji P. Henson raised it while hosting the BET awards. "Pay attention. It's not a secret. Look it up!" she said.

Trump, then a candidate, called the ideas "ridiculous" and said he did not know who was behind them, even though people who helped develop the plans had served in his first administration. As the controversy persisted, his campaign turned on the project's organizers. Senior adviser Chris LaCivita called them "a pain in the a**" at a CNN and Politico event during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Days after winning, however, Trump chose Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, to run the Office of Management and Budget, which is considered the nerve center of the White House. Other contributors to the project followed. Trump then issued a rapid series of orders reshaping the government, many of them outlined in the plan. In his inaugural address he declared it would be official U.S. policy that there are only two genders. He also ended diversity, equity and inclusion programs, launched large-scale immigration enforcement and began overhauling the federal workforce.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the project defined Trump's first year back in office. He said the nation's 23 Democratic attorneys general studied the document, consulted one another and prepared a response to each potential action. "The existence of Project 2025 was the Trump administration telling us exactly what they were going to do and sending it to us in writing," Bonta said. He has filed or joined lawsuits that successfully blocked policies requiring states such as California to join the immigration crackdown, a freeze on domestic federal funding, and layoffs at agencies including the Department of Education.

The White House has dismissed the concerns as irrelevant theories from Beltway insiders. "President Trump is implementing the agenda he campaigned on and that the American people voted for," said spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, who said the focus was on lowering gas prices, accelerating economic growth and securing the border.

Presidential historian Tevi Troy, a former White House aide to George W. Bush, said Trump may have inflamed the issue by rejecting the plan. He described Project 2025 as largely standard conservative fare with "a bit more of a MAGA flavor than previously," and compared it to the policy proposals that think tanks on the left and right have long prepared for incoming presidents, citing the Hoover Institution's influence on the Bush administration and the Center for American Progress's on the Obama administration. Had the campaign acknowledged it as an ordinary think tank product, Troy said, it might not have become so toxic.

Paul Dans, the project's director, who also served in Trump's first administration, said he never took the attacks personally and saw them as political calculation. He likened watching Trump sign orders that began on his desk to an animator seeing a sketchbook come to life on the big screen. "Every day that President Trump rolls out another Project 2025 item, it's really an endorsement of our work," he said. Dans is now running for the Senate against Republican Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally.

Trump eventually embraced the project during last fall's shutdown fight, boasting of meeting with "Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame" while threatening to dismantle federal agencies.