Newsday, February 2025
On the presidential campaign trail, candidate Donald Trump consistently distanced himself from Project 2025, a conservative think tank initiative that proposed sweeping changes to the federal government. “I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump said in a July social media post days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, as national polls showed a majority of voters were unsupportive of the book’s proposals.
Now as president, Trump is trying to put many of the proposals into place, through his growing list of executive orders and actions in his first weeks back in office. He is working at shrinking the federal workforce, eliminating diversity programs, stepping up the military’s role in immigration enforcement — all initiatives laid out in the 900-page “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” an initiative funded by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.
