Democrats have hammered former President Donald J. Trump and Senator JD Vance of Ohio, his running mate, over Project 2025, a conservative policy plan that pledges a radical transformation of the federal government.
At the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday, Mr. Vance will spar with Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. Mr. Walz has repeatedly sought to tie Mr. Vance to the project, while Mr. Vance has tried to distance himself from it.
“If you’re going to take the time to draw up a playbook, you’re damn sure going to use it,” said Mr. Walz in August about the Trump campaign’s attempts to downplay Project 2025. While he and Ms. Harris frequently pin the project on Mr. Trump, the former president did not author it and, after Democratic attacks, disavowed it.
The document, totaling about 900 pages, details extreme executive-branch overhauls, such as plans for disbanding several federal departments including the Education Department, rejecting the concept of abortion as health care, undoing environmental regulations and criminalizing pornography. It also proposes ending protections for many civil-service roles so they may be filled with appointees loyal to the president — a notion backed by both Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance.
Project 2025 was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and created as a blueprint for the next Republican president, though Mr. Trump has his own platform called Agenda 47. But many of his allies and former officials from his administration helped author Project 2025, and there is considerable overlap between its proposals and Mr. Trump’s plans for a second term.
Mr. Vance, too, has connections to Project 2025 and its authors.
Vance wrote the foreword for a book by Kevin Roberts, who oversaw Project 2025.
“In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Mr. Vance wrote in the foreword for “Dawn’s Early Light,” a forthcoming book by Kevin D. Roberts, the leader of the Heritage Foundation and the man who oversaw Project 2025.
The book was set for publication in September, but after Project 2025 drew national scrutiny, that was postponed until after Election Day.
In his foreword, which The New Republic obtained and published, Mr. Vance also described the Heritage Foundation as “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
William Martin, a spokesman for Mr. Vance, said in an email that “the foreword has nothing to do with Project 2025,” and emphasized that the senator had “disagreements with what they’re calling for.”
A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation said in a statement that “Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign.” Mr. Roberts has said he viewed Heritage’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
Mr. Roberts has heaped praise on Mr. Vance, calling him “one of the leaders” of the conservative movement. They have appeared at public events together and co-written op-eds. He said he was “good friends” with the senator, and after Mr. Trump picked Mr. Vance as his running mate, he said Mr. Vance was “someone that privately we were really rooting for.”
He has connections to some of the Project 2025 contributors.
A former budget director in the Trump White House and the Republican National Convention’s policy director, Russell T. Vought, wrote a section of Project 2025 about executive orders. Mr. Vought told Politico in January that he was in “regular contact” with Mr. Vance’s Capitol Hill office and that he had “one of the closest relationships” with his office compared to other lawmakers’ offices on the hill.
A spokesman for Mr. Vance did not respond to a request for comment about the relationship between the two.
Mr. Vance also has ties to at least a couple of other people listed among the project’s several hundred contributors.
He frequented American Compass, a think tank run by Oren Cass that was one of over 100 groups that made up the advisory board for Project 2025. Mr. Cass, an economist, has supported some of Mr. Trump’s “America First” economic policies and contributed to the project’s chapter on labor policy. Mr. Vance has also cited Mr. Cass’s work in his economic thinking.
He has also cited Elbridge Colby as an influence on his foreign policy thinking. Mr. Colby served in Mr. Trump’s Defense Department and is a staunch anti-interventionist skeptical of multilateral institutions like NATO.
The extent of the contributions from Mr. Cass and Mr. Colby are not detailed in the project.
He wrote a preface for a separate Heritage Foundation report in 2017.
Mr. Vance has collaborated with the Heritage Foundation before. He wrote a preface for its report about families in 2017, calling the report’s policy discussions “admirable.” The package included 29 essays by conservative commentators, policy experts and Christian clergy members who largely opposed abortion and in vitro fertilization — describing I.V.F. as harmful to women — and offered guidance on raising children.
The essays said that abortion should become “unthinkable” in the U.S. and praised state laws restricting abortion access. They also included instructions on how to raise families, arguing that a two-parent heterosexual household was the “ideal” environment for children. The recommendations bear similarities to Project 2025’s proposals.
“Senator Vance has long made clear that he supports I.V.F. and does not agree with every opinion in this seven-year-old report, which features a range of unique views from dozens of conservative thinkers,” said Luke Schroeder, a spokesman for Mr. Vance.
A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation also said Mr. Vance had no involvement with the policy ideas in the report.
What has Vance said about Project 2025?
In July, after Democrats had begun attacking Mr. Trump over the project, Mr. Vance dismissed the project’s importance to most Americans, though he also said he found parts of the project agreeable. He did not specify which parts.
“There are some good ideas in there,” Mr. Vance said in an interview with Newsmax, the conservative broadcaster, adding that “there are some things I disagree with.”
In interviews, Mr. Vance has distanced himself from the project and its leader. Mr. Schroeder, his spokesman, said in a statement that attempts by the Harris campaign to demonstrate Mr. Vance’s support for Project 2025 were a “debunked conspiracy theory.”
“Project 2025 is not affiliated with the Trump campaign,” Mr. Vance said on CNN in August. “Kevin Roberts is a friend of mine, but I wouldn’t say that he speaks for the president, in the same way I wouldn’t say that he speaks for me.”
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