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It’s not often that the work of a think tank, even one as prominent as the conservative Heritage Foundation, draws much attention. And even the name of Heritage’s proposed agenda for a second Trump administration — Project 2025 — may sound like the plot device in a bad spy novel.
But in recent weeks, Democrats such as Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman have flagged it as the Rosetta Stone for Trump’s plans if voters return him to office.
There is, for example, its recommendation that the government should “reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs,” a move that would drastically limit access to abortion nationwide. There are 900 more pages where that came from, including proposals to undermine climate protections, replace thousands of employees with Trump loyalists and concentrate more power in the Oval Office.
Trump has disavowed some of its recommendations as “abysmal.” Then again, he’s also improbably claiming he has “no idea who is behind” them — even though the authors include several members of his previous administration.
One of them has Pittsburgh ties.
Kiron Skinner, who wrote the project’s treatise on the U.S. State Department, headed a strategic planning office for Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. She now works at Pepperdine University, but she once taught at Carnegie Mellon University and founded its Institute for Politics and Strategy.
While there, she touched off a campus controversy by appointing Ric Grenell, a polarizing Trump official with a penchant for trolling, to the institute. And much of her 29-page Project 2025 proposal urges a similarly bold HR strategy for Trump’s possible return.
“No one in a leadership position on the morning of [inauguration day] should hold that position at the end of the day,” she writes. “Large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda.”
Such concerns echo Trump’s hostility to the so-called “Deep State,” the government workers he accuses of sandbagging his initiatives. Project 2025 includes numerous proposals to put them more solidly under Trump’s control. They include recommendations that the U.S. Justice Department’s “litigation decisions are consistent with the President’s agenda.”
In the State Department, the fear is that more experienced civil servants would be replaced by Trump loyalists.
“Politicizing any part of the State Department’s workforce would undermine their ability to provide objective, expert advice,” warned Tom Yazdgerdi, who leads the organization that represents those workers, the American Foreign Service Association.
Asked in the podcast “In the Room” to identify a case where State Department workers undermined Trump, Skinner said the opposition was “so broad-based it’s hard to point out one.” But her Project 2025 paper includes a number of shifts to which those employees would have to adjust.
Some are unsurprising, such as a forceful approach to China that has been a hallmark of Trump’s worldview. (By contrast, her take on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is ambivalent, calling it “unjust” but offering few recommendations about how the U.S. should proceed.) But if you’re upset at the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza, you might want to note her proposal that the Palestinian Authority be “defunded” of U.S. aid entirely. She also recommends scaling back support for LGBT rights in countries where the issue is “divisive,” while amping up efforts to protect Christians abroad.
I reached out to Skinner about the proposal, and Trump’s efforts to distance himself from former staffers like her. She asked for previous articles I’d written about the Project, and went silent after I told her I hadn’t done any. But University of Pittsburgh professor Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, who has worked in foreign service and teaches governance and foreign policy, urged readers to stay calm.
“I see this as people saying what they think Trump wants to hear,” she said. “I think it's a lot of people vying for jobs” if Trump wins.
Murtazashvili is skeptical both of some Project 2025 recommendations and of warnings about the End Times. "I think our institutions are durable, and that the things that held [Trump’s first-term agenda] back will hold again,” she told me.
Attempts to purge government workers, for example, would spawn lawsuits from groups like Yazdgerdi’s. On “In the Room,” Skinner herself allowed, “I don’t think anyone would be … saying, ‘Oh my God — January 20th, 12:05, this [treaty] is dead.’”
But Murtazashvili said conservative distrust of rank-and-file government workers was understandable. Biden, too, weathered defiance from State employees about his Gaza policy.
The broader issue, she said, is that “public service has become more partisan.” That’s partly due to cultural shifts: How you vote increasingly shapes where you live, shop, and work. In college, Murtazashvili said, public-policy schools “tend to attract students from one side of the aisle, while business school attracts people from the other.”
Unlike previous Republican presidents who sought to restrain government, Trumpism is about using it unapologetically to reverse those trends. As one observer put it, the movement seeks to abandon “small-government conservatism [for] institutional power that can take on leftist cultural and economic trends.”
That has already meant more government pressure on companies like, say, Disney. Trump’s promise to settle such scores using government power is part of what Republicans love about him … and what Democrats fear.
And Murtazashvili warned, "We should worry if our civil service is politicized.” Foreign policy often undergoes “whiplash” as administrations change, “But you don’t want to see that in drug regulation or other things that affect people’s day-to-day lives.”
Of course, Trump might not need to change the Justice Department to fulfill Democrats’ warnings that he’ll seek revenge on foes. He’s already threatened to go after them with military tribunals. And while Murtazashvili said Skinner’s paper “was actually more open to supporting Ukraine than I would have thought,” Trump may not listen. There are fears he could abandon Ukraine outright, brokering a peace that rewards Russian aggression.
“The things that worry me most,” Murtazashvili said of Trump’s potential return, “aren’t what is in this report.”
