Trump Admin Implements More Than Half of Project 2025, Heritage’s President Claims

President Donald Trump’s administration has implemented more than half of the recommendations in Project 2025, according to The Heritage Foundation’s president.

According to a June 23 fundraising email obtained by The New American, Heritage President Kevin Roberts asserted that “the Trump administration has already implemented 53% of Project 2025’s policy recommendations.” Roberts cited “strengthening border enforcement and tightening asylum standards,” “eliminating wasteful government agencies like USAID,” “removing leftist ideologies like DEI from government policies,” and “lowering taxes on hardworking Americans” as among the policies implemented.

Roberts’ announcement is consistent with data from other groups. For example, the leftist Center for Progressive Reform estimated in February that the Trump administration had “initiated or completed 53 percent of Project 2025’s domestic administrative policy agenda,” or “283 of the 532 recommended actions” that the group identified. And according to the website Project 2025 Tracker, the administration had implemented 54 percent of 320 “objectives” tracked, as of mid-July.

Mandate for Leadership

Although the left-wing media reacted hysterically to Project 2025 during the 2024 presidential campaign, it is merely the ninth installment of The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, a list of policy recommendations for the federal government that the organization has published periodically since 1981.

By comparison, Heritage’s website boasts that the Ronald Reagan administration implemented “nearly two-thirds of the 2,000 policy recommendations” from the 1981 Mandate for Leadership. Additionally, in its first year, the first Trump administration implemented 64 percent of the 334 recommendations in the 2016 edition. Instead of emphasizing how much of Project 2025 has been implemented, the media should ask why the Trump administration has adopted such a small percentage compared to previous administrations.

Conservative, or Constitutional?

As The New American noted in May 2024, although Project 2025 contains some constitutional proposals — including abolishing the Department of Education and opposing UN “sustainable development” schemes — it is primarily a “conservative” document that does not fully align with constitutional principles. For example, it accepts Social Security, does not question the existence of most federal agencies, and calls for “reforming” Medicare instead of abolishing it.

This demonstrates the importance of looking to the Declaration of Independence, which outlines the purpose of government, and the U.S. Constitution, which established a government structure based on the principles of the Declaration, as goalposts. When politicians or organizations fail to do this, their policy proposals become unmoored from America’s founding principles.

This does not require rejecting incrementalism. As Thomas Jefferson asserted in a 1789 letter to James Madison, “If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can.” However, that incrementalism must be moored strictly to Americanism. Instead of focusing on how much of Project 2025 the Trump administration has implemented, we must examine to what extent the administration has followed the U.S. Constitution.

This article is part of The New American’s weekly online newsletter Insider Report, which is emailed to TNA subscribers each week. Click here to subscribe to The New American to receive the Insider Report and access exclusive content.