The Rapture may not be around the corner. QAnon’s storm may not be approaching. There‘s a lot more to it than Donald Trump craving to be a dictator “for one day.” It’s more serious than placing cronies, supplicants and grifters in key government positions. And it’s more than destroying the so-called administrative state (ironically replacing it with another). The Heritage Foundation’s 800-+ page “Mandate for Leadership” is a blueprint for a full-bore assault on democracy. The document boldly declares that the government should “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
Over the past four-+ decades, conservative/right wing/neo-Nazi/white supremacist organizations have come and gone. One of the organizations with staying power and its eyes on the prize is the Heritage Foundation.
It’s all-in time at the Heritage Foundation, the most politically powerful right-wing institution in the country. In “Mandate for Leadership’s” introductory note titled “A Promise to America,” Kevin D. Roberts, PhD, provides a modern-day version of the 10 plagues. Instead of water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and the killing of firstborn children, we have the corrupt political class, inflation, drug overdose deaths, “children suffer[ing] the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries,” “a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing … engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people,” and cultural Marxism ascending.
According to Semafor, “Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s $22 million effort aimed at staffing up and preparing the next Republican administration, has signed on just over 100 coalition partners for its advisory board. The lineup is a mix of traditional issue advocacy groups and New Right political organizations that offer a glimpse at the shifting landscape of Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”
“The project’s coalition partners include a number of well-known conservative groups: The anti-abortion organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, The Conservative Partnership Institute, The Claremont Institute, and Turning Point USA, among others, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott reported (https://www.semafor.com/article/02/20/2024/heritage-recruits-an-army-to-build-a-trump-presidency-playbook).
“A Note on ‘Project 25’” declares its intentions: History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, united plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. In recent election cycles, presidential candidates normally began transition planning in the late spring of election year or even after the party’s nomination was secured. That is too late. The federal government’s complexity and growth advance at a seemingly logarithmic rate every four years. For conservatives to have a ghting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now. The entirety of this e ort is to support the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be.”
In January 1981, The Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation published its first “Mandate for Leadership” briefing book for the Reagan Administration, which essentially united the conservative movement. The Heritage team created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook containing more than 2,000 conservative policies “to reform the federal government and rescue the American people from Washington dysfunction.”
According to Edward Fuelner, a founder of Heritage, and long term president, “Soon after President Donald Trump was sworn in, his Administration began to implement major parts of the 2016 Mandate. After his first year in office, the Administration had implemented 64 percent of its policy recommendations.”
Now, its Project 25 has an 887-page document called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” (https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf), which it intends to be the playbook for an administration aimed at eviscerating government as we know it.
Heritage recognizes that it’s not 1980 anymore. “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right.”
Thanks to The New York Times’ Carlos Losada, we have an in-depth look at what awaits Americans should a second Trump administration materialize. Losada, who read the entire volume, points out that the opening pages of “Mandate” makes its agenda clear in that it “requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it.” Losada notes that the authors aim to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day 1 to deconstruct the administrative state.”
The “Mandate,” edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves is divided into five sections, with each section providing essays by so-called experts in their fields:
SECTION 1: TAKING THE REINS OF GOVERNMENT:
WHITE HOUSE OFFICE. -- Rick Dearborn
EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. -- Russ Vought
CENTRAL PERSONNEL AGENCIES: MANAGING THE BUREAUCRACY -- Donald Devine, Dennis Dean Kirk, and Paul Dans
SECTION 2: THE COMMON DEFENSE
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE -- Christopher Miller
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY -- Ken Cuccinelli
DEPARTMENT OF STATE -- Kiron K. Skinner
INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY -- Dustin J. Carmack
MEDIA AGENCIES
U.S. AGENCY FOR GLOBAL MEDIA. -- Mora Namda
CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING. -- Mike Gonzalez
AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT -- Max Primorac
SECTION 3: THE GENERAL WELFARE
DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. -- Daren Bakst
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION. -- Lindsey M. Burke
DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY AND RELATED COMMISSIONS -- Bernard L. McNamee
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY -- Mandy M. Gunasekara
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES -- Roger Severino
DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT -- Benjamin S. Carson, Sr., MD
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR -- William Perry Pendley
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE -- Gene Hamilton
DEPARTMENT OF LABOR AND RELATED AGENCIES -- Jonathan Berry
DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION -- Diana Furchtgott-Roth
DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS. -- Brooks D. Tucker
SECTION 4: THE ECONOMY
DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE -- Thomas F. Gilman
DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY -- William L. Walton, Stephen Moore, and David R. Burton
EXPORT–IMPORT BANK
THE EXPORT–IMPORT BANK SHOULD BE ABOLISHED. -- Veronique de Rugy
THE CASE FOR THE EXPORT–IMPORT BANK -- Jennifer Hazelton
FEDERAL RESERVE -- Paul Winfree
SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION -- Karen Kerrigan
26. TRADE
THE CASE FOR FAIR TRADE -- Peter Navarro
THE CASE FOR FREE TRADE -- Kent Lassman
SECTION 5: INDEPENDENT REGULATORY AGENCIES
FINANCIAL REGULATORY AGENCIES
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION AND RELATED AGENCIES -- David R. Bur
CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU -- Robert Bowes
FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION -- Brendan Carr
FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION -- Hans A. von Spakovsky
FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION -- Adam Candeub
“That’s really what our meat and potatoes work is — that playbook where we are doing diagnostics on each federal agency and filling the templates and preparing drafts of documents, whether they be executive orders, or perhaps even regulations, new guidance, statements and really a system for a new operator to come aboard,” Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, told Semafor in an interview.
As Carlos Losada pointed out, “Mandate for Leadership” “is about capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.”
That shuffling sound you hear is Heritage Foundation staffers clearing their desks and getting ready to move on into a Trump administration. Interestingly enough, however, if President Biden defeats Trump, Heritage is certainly committed enough to hold its fire until the next presidential election. For more than fifty years Heritage has been playing the long game. There’s no reason to expect it to stop now.
