This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here. When Donald Trump took office last year, he brought Project 2025 to the White House with him.
The Heritage Foundation plan lays out a sweeping conservative playbook for how to govern America, and the Trump administration quickly got to work. The US Agency for International Development was gutted, environmental regulations went up in smoke, and universities found themselves under attack.
One year later, the administration is still working through its list. So what can Project 2025 tell us about where the Trump administration is going next? To answer that question, Today, Explained podcast host Noel King talked to David Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Project 2025 was 922 or so pages. How much of what’s in there has the Trump administration accomplished?
There’s a good tracker out there online that puts the number right above 50 percent. And I think that’s useful, but you have to take it with a grain of salt, because some of these things are just hard to equate on a numerical level.
That tracker says Trump eliminated USAID, which is a goal. Project 2025 wanted to reform USAID in different ways, but not to abolish it. So, it doesn’t always fit one-to-one.
The other thing that I would say is, so much of what they want to do depends on having this really powerful president — sort of an unfettered, no checks-and-balances situation. And they’ve made so much progress on that in the first year. I think that will enable more progress towards their goals in the future.
How did they get so much done, this administration?
A way that I’ve heard people talk about it is you don’t get a lot of chances for a president to try things, leave office for four years, and then get another shot at it.
So many of the people involved were veterans of the first Trump administration or had been closely related to it, and they saw what went wrong and they had theories [as to why]. And they also learned a lot about how the government works.
And so, that meant that they could come in on the first day and be just so ready, so organized, and so energized. I think that gave them the chance to sort of conduct this blitzkrieg that took the courts by surprise. It seems to have taken Congress by surprise. And I think it took a lot of the public by surprise.
And I think I hear you telling me that there is still a lot in that big book of ideas and policies that they would like to get done.
Oh yes. You could spend years pushing a lot of these things, and the ambitions are pretty big. I mean, they really want to reshape society, and that is a project you can make some work on in a year. But I think they’re on a timeframe of years or decades.
What did they fail to get done?
There are several areas where they haven’t done much.
I think one is in this area of pro-family policy or socially conservative policy. We haven’t seen a lot of encouraging higher birthrate stuff either.
We haven’t seen the kind of labor policy that would bolster a more pro-family vision, like things that JD Vance was talking about in the campaign. And we haven’t seen a sort of major shift of social welfare programs away from the government and towards religious organizations.
What do you think we’re going to see more of in the year ahead? What maybe have we not been paying enough attention to that they’ve been banging the drum on and we should?
Something that I think is underappreciated even as it has gotten attention is the takeover of the independent regulatory agencies: the NLRB, the FEC, the FCC.
We’re expecting a Supreme Court decision soon that seems likely to give the president control over all these agencies with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve. I think that’s going to change the way everybody interacts with the government. The FCC, in particular, has gotten some attention. We saw the chair of the FCC basically try to get Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel.
Now, imagine that in so many other areas of life: the way you work through labor protections, the way you interact with the Social Security Administration, the way you interact with any number of walks of your life. I think we’re going to see the president controlling that and making it an arm of policy.
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