ATLANTA — ATLANTA (AP) – Donald Trump insists that Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page blueprint for a hard-right shift in American government and society, does not reflect his priorities for the White House.
“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, on purpose,” said the Republican presidential candidate on September 10. discussion stage.
However, from economic, immigration and education policy to civil rights and foreign affairs, there are common ideas and a shared ideology. 2025 project and Trump’s scheme for another term—his official’s— “Agenda 47” slate, the Republican platform he personally endorsed, and his other statements.
There are also differences: Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation and written by many conservatives who worked in or with the Trump administration, offers more detail on some issues than the former president.
Here’s how Trump’s 2024 campaign and Project 2025 align and diverge:
TRUMP: His tax policies target corporations and wealthier Americans. This is mainly due to the commitment to extend the 2017 review and to reduce the corporate rate from the current 21% to 15%. It would also end the Inflation Reduction Act taxes that fund energy measures to combat climate change. Aside from those ideas, Trump has placed more emphasis on plans aimed at working and middle-class Americans: exempting earned tips, Social Security payments and overtime wages from income taxes. His proposal on tips, however, could provide a backdoor tax break to high-paid workers, allowing some wages to be reclassified as tip income, and at its most extreme, hedge fund managers or high-profile lawyers could take advantage. Of a provision Trump is putting in place to help restaurant servers, bartenders and other service workers.
BILL 2025: The document goes beyond Trump, calling for two federal income tax rates – 15% and 30% – eliminating most deductions and credits. It envisions a “virtually flat tax on wage income beyond the standard deduction,” adjusting for payroll taxes paid by Social Security and Medicare. A flat in the effective tax rate would increase the overall share of taxes paid by poorer and middle-class Americans. As such, many state and local tax codes, anchored by transaction taxes and flat income taxes, are more regressive than current federal income taxes. Project 2025 also calls for a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise corporate or individual income taxes in the future.
TRUMP: “Build the wall!” Since 2016 creating “the largest mass deportation program in history”. Trump is calling for the National Guard and the police to be mobilized, though he has not said how he would ensure they only target people in the US illegally. He has introduced “ideological projection” for would-be candidates and an end to birthright citizenship (which would probably require a constitutional amendment). He also said he would reinstate first-term policies such as “stay in Mexico,” restricting migrants on public health grounds and severely limiting or banning entry from certain Muslim-majority nations. As a whole, his approach would not only reduce illegal migration, but limit immigration altogether.
PROJECT 2025: There are specific proposals for US immigration statutes, executive branch rules, and agreements with other countries: reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients, and asylum seekers, for example. Perhaps the most telling statement of Project 2025 is the call to reinstate “all immigration-related regulations issued” during Trump’s 2017-2021 term.
TRUMP: He’s pitching regulatory cuts as an economic cure. He commits to dramatic reductions in US household utility bills by removing speed limits on fossil fuel production, including opening up all federal lands to exploration. (U.S. energy production and exports are highest under President Joe Biden.) Trump promises to increase the housing stock by reducing regulations, even though most building regulations come from state and local governments.
Two proposals and broad ideas stand out: The first would make it easier to lay off federal workers, classifying thousands of them as outside the protections of other civil services. This would almost certainly weaken the government’s ability to enforce statutes and regulations by reducing the number of workers on the job. The second is Trump’s assertion that the president has exclusive authority to control federal spending despite the appropriations power of Congress. Trump has argued that lawmakers have set a “ceiling” on spending, but not a floor, meaning that the president’s constitutional duty to “faithfully execute the laws” allows him to decide whether to spend the money.
PROJECT 2025: The authors make numerous calls for the president, the cabinet and other political appointees to cut regulations, reclassify federal workers, ease layoffs, reduce “unaccountable federal spending” and set a path through the West Wing. “The Administrative State is not going anywhere until Congress acts to take back its power from the bureaucrats and the White House,” they wrote. “Meanwhile, there are many executive tools that a bold conservative president can use to handcuff the bureaucracy (and) dismantle the Administrative State.”
TRUMP: The former president wants to end government diversity programs, leverage federal funding, and target existing protections for LGBTQ people. On transgender rights, he promises to end “boys in girls’ sports,” a practice he claims is widespread, without evidence. Trump and Biden IX. The title’s civil rights protections would reverse the extension granted to transgender students and require Congress to allow only two gender options at birth.
PROJECT 2025: The government should “affirm that children need and deserve the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.” This philosophy permeates Project 2025, which defines the ideal family—and the individual—in narrow, traditionalist terms. The authors envision consolidating federal civil rights efforts in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, with enforcement coming solely through litigation. This would allow the attorney general—and, by extension, the White House—to effectively discuss how and when to enforce civil rights law.
TRUMP: The goal would be to eliminate the Department of Education. That doesn’t mean Trump wants Washington out of classrooms. Among other maneuvers, It would use federal appropriations to eliminate diversity programs at all levels of education and force K-12 schools to eliminate tenure and adopt merit pay for teachers. It calls for defunding “any school or program that promotes racial theories, gender ideologies, or racially, sexually or politically inappropriate content to our children.”
Trump calls for redirecting college endowment online” American Academy” provide college credentials to all Americans without charging tuition. “It will be completely non-political, and no vigilantism or jihadism will be tolerated,” Trump said on November 1, 2023.
PROJECT 2025: Congress should “shut down” the Department of Education and “return control of education to the states,” Project 2025 says, echoing Trump’s argument that the US education infrastructure is enabling progressive indoctrination. The authors propose, among other things, eliminating the Head Start program, turning the Title I program into grants and eventually phasing out that federal funding and using the tax code to promote in-home child care, something GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance is pushing for. the defenders
TRUMP: Trump falsely claims climate change is a “hoax” as Biden downplays US spending on cleaner energy designed to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Trump would anchor energy and transportation policy on fossil fuels: roads, bridges, and combustion engine vehicles. Trump says he is not against electric vehicles, but he has promised to end the incentives that drive the development of the EV market. And it would lower fuel efficiency standards.
PROJECT 2025: The document criticizes the “climate fanaticism” of the Biden administration. It proposes to close or curtail many environmental protection and regulation programs, including those that many Americans take for granted: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Project 2025 would eliminate, and the Weather Service, which the document would exclusively direct. selling weather data to private broadcasters would keep the National Hurricane Center in place, even though the NHC would depend on the National Weather Service to make forecasts.
TRUMP: His strategy is more diplomatically isolationist, militarily non-interventionist and economically protectionist than the US has had since World War II. But the details are more complicated. Trump makes a commitment military expansionHe promises robust Pentagon spending and proposes a missile defense shield – a Reagan-era idea. He insisted that Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict could end, although he did not explain how. He remains critical of NATO and the superior US military. “I don’t consider them leaders,” he says. And he repeatedly praises authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
DRAFT 2025: Echoing Trump’s climate, the document calls for “tough love” in international relations, but with a distinction from Trump. As for military training, the 2025 Project would reduce the number of generals but expand the number of personnel, although the authors do not call for the reinstatement of a draft, as critics have alleged. Project 2025 is perhaps even more aggressive than Trump in its China rhetoric: “Economic engagement with China must be ended, not rethought,” it says in its preface.
As for NATO, the plan echoes Trump’s emphasis on making other member nations pay more for their defense, but lacks the inherent skepticism of NATO alliances that Trump has projected over the years. And while Trump steadfastly refuses to criticize Putin for invading Ukraine, Project 2025 says: “Regardless of viewpoint, all sides agree that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjust and that the Ukrainian people have the right to defend their homeland.”
