What Is Project 2025 and Is It Actually Happening?

During the 2024 campaign, Trump said he had not read Project 2025 and did not know who wrote it. The people who wrote it were former Trump officials. Many of them are now back in the administration, implementing it.

Project 2025 is a 900-page document. (Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership) Most people have not read it. The people executing it have.

The core idea is simple and radical: the modern federal government is controlled by a "deep state" of career bureaucrats who block the president's agenda. The solution is to fire them and replace them with political loyalists who will execute whatever the president wants without resistance.

This is not a conspiracy theory — it is explicitly what the document says. It is also exactly what Schedule F, one of Trump's first executive orders upon returning to office, was designed to accomplish. Schedule F reclassifies tens of thousands of career federal employees, stripping them of civil service protections and making them easy to fire.

The federal civil service was created after the 19th-century spoils system produced catastrophic incompetence and corruption. The idea was that technical jobs — tax collection, food safety inspection, air traffic control — should be done by qualified professionals who cannot be fired for political reasons. Project 2025 wants to undo that. (Office of Personnel Management, Civil Service History)

It also calls for restructuring the Department of Justice to remove its operational independence from the White House, eliminating the Department of Education, gutting the EPA, and restructuring intelligence agencies to report more directly to the president.

You do not have to believe in a deep state to understand why having the FBI director serve at the president's pleasure — and know it — changes how investigations get prioritized.

Project 2025 was not fringe. It was a plan. And the plan is being executed.