This commentary was originally published in Slate. Click to read the full text.
A helpful way to think about the “Mandate for Leadership”—the radical policy blueprint laid out as part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—is as a kind of “political time capsule” reflecting the world as conservatives saw it in April 2023, when the document was first published. Bearing this in mind is important, because that world was very different from the one 19 months later, when President Donald Trump secured his reelection—or even the one on his second Inauguration Day, nearly two years after the mandate was released.
A lot transpired over those months and years, including, most notably, the emergence of Elon Musk as an influential player in Trump’s orbit, and DOGE—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk devised as an institutional vehicle for carrying out the new administration’s early agenda.
Still, those intervening developments have done little to quell the public’s fears over the influence Project 2025 is having on Trump’s second term, particularly with respect to its plans to limit abortion access, crack down on LGBTQ+ rights, and concentrate even greater power in the hands of the presidency. The vaunted 100-day mark of this new administration offers as good an excuse as any to take stock of whether those fears have borne out—and of the extent to which DOGE has contributed to or distracted from Project 2025’s agenda.
