Project 2025 — Heritage Foundation’s Blueprint for the Second Trump Administration
Status: 🔴 Heritage Foundation’s presidential transition project that produced Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the 900-page blueprint for the federal anti-trans agenda
Overview
Project 2025 is the presidential transition project organized by The Heritage Foundation to prepare policy and personnel for a second Trump administration. Its centerpiece, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (2023), is a 900-plus-page policy blueprint built with input from more than 140 former Trump administration officials. It became the operating manual for the federal rollback of transgender rights after Donald Trump took office in 2025.
Anti-Trans Provisions
- Foreword by Kevin Roberts (Heritage president): calls transgender ideology “pornography,” its “purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women,” and says educators and public librarians who purvey it “should be classed as registered sex offenders”
- Health chapter by Roger Severino: end federal support for gender-affirming care for adolescents and adults, strip sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) protections from federal regulations, and “delete the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) and gender from every federal rule, agency mission statement, regulation, contract, grant, and piece of communication”
- Personnel vetting database: a system for screening and placing loyalists in federal positions to implement the agenda
Trump publicly disavowed Project 2025 during the 2024 campaign, but its proposals were enacted at record speed after his inauguration — including executive orders 14168 and 14201, the removal of gender identity data from federal agencies, and the rollback of transgender protections at agencies including the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi Noem.
Related Pages
Sources
- Fenway Health: Project 2025 Brief (July 30, 2024)
- qnotes: Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 LGBTQ+ Agenda (January 2026)
- Newsweek: Project 2025 and the “Second American Revolution” (July 3, 2024)