The Heritage Foundation recruits an army to build a Trump presidency playbook

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. Project 2025 has been working for months to compile (and train, via its “Presidential Administration Academy”) a database of conservatives for the next Republican administration to choose from while also developing a hefty policy book.

The last pillar in the effort focuses on developing a 180-day playbook of regulations and executive orders that could be signed and implemented by the next president on his (or her) first days in office. With over 100 coalition partners now tapped to serve, Project 2025 can begin ramping up its work on this final, and key, initiative.

“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.

Dans noted that there’s “a lot to pick” from when it comes to what documents they’ll develop for the next Republican president. The group’s policy book, which Dans says has been downloaded as a PDF over 400,000 times, “is pretty comprehensive” but is not intended to match up perfectly with what the next president wants to do. Still, it will offer Project 2025 a roadmap, particularly in terms of topics, to sift through as they develop ideas on initiatives that a future administration could use.

While Project 2025 bills itself as being “candidate agnostic,” Dans noted that at this point in the primary, they expect “and hope” that Donald Trump will ultimately end up in office again. Those helping with Project 2025, he added, include people “who maybe favored one candidate over the next” but are willing “to come together and really put pen to paper with their policy ideas in advance.” Still, many of those involved with the project at this point previously worked closely with the last Trump administration — which could incentivize Trump to actually tap Project 2025 down the road.

“Many of us would be honored to be asked again, to be in that service,” Dans said. “We don’t speak for the campaign, we’ve been very clear.”

Project 2025 was formed in part as a response to Trump’s 2016 win, which took many conservatives by surprise and resulted in a movement unprepared to help him in his first days in office.

Its work has garnered significant attention as a potential blueprint for a second Trump presidency, though it’s not an official platform. At the end of last year, the Trump campaign sought to distance itself from organizations like Project 2025 after a series of stories speculating on plans for a future administration based on outside think tanks and advisors. Last week, a policy paper from the group drew attention that spotlighted ways a Republican White House could limit abortion access with executive orders using the Comstock Act — a long-inactive 19th century law that banned birth control and abortifacients by mail.

That doesn’t mean Trump won’t end up using some of what Project 2025 is trying to do. It does, however, mean that the group — and others like it — have to be careful in how they approach the next year. Dans noted that “it’s entirely up to” Trump and his campaign how much they end up leaning on the group’s efforts, even as the group is clearly catering to his needs and interests.

“By virtue of our size, and I think the gravity of the folks working in this movement, [we] have ideas that very much mirror what President Trump is providing on the campaign stump,” Dans said. “We think hopefully a lot of this work gets transplanted in large measure to facilitate a transition.”

The other big conservative organization looking to help out in a future Republican administration is AFPI, which put out its own policy book in 2022, Semafor reported at the time. While the two groups publicly deny any feuding, Heritage Foundation’s effort poached a top AFPI staffer in 2023, suggesting there could be some quiet drama building.