This post is the second of a three-part series. Read Parts I and III here and here.
In the first part of this series, we introduced the major findings of the tracker we built with our colleagues at Governing for Impact for monitoring the Trump administration’s progress in implementing Project 2025’s comprehensive policy blueprint, Mandate for Leadership. Specifically, we found that over its first 100 days, the administration pursued or completed 28 percent of the more than 530 recommended domestic policy executive actions that we included in our tracker.
The post went on to provide context for these findings by tracing Project 2025’s circuitous route from obscure presidential transition report to controversial playbook for the Trump administration. Here, we provide further context for our findings by examining some factors that shed light on how significant this progress really is.
After all, in pure terms, a 28-percent progress rate in just 100 days seems like a lot. But in some ways, this might seem a little inflated. Most of the items contributing to that progress rate were achieved through executive orders or other similar actions that require little formal process and thus can be rushed out the door. Indeed, Project 2025 even seemed to anticipate a quick start with its “fourth pillar,” the so-called “180-Day Transition Playbook.” Unlike the Mandate, this playbook was never made public. But it was widely understood to include several executive orders ready to pull off the shelf. If so, this could help explain the administration’s quick jump out of the starters’ gate.
But still, the consideration of other, countervailing contextual factors tends to cast the administration’s progress on Project 2025 in an entirely different light. As a preliminary matter, the world changed a lot between when Project 2025 was first published in April 2023 and Trump’s second Inauguration Day. Elon Musk had not yet emerged as an influential figure in Trump’s orbit. The pro-Palestine protests that erupted on many university campuses had not yet launched.
Yet, both Musk — along with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative — and the university protests have been the subject of considerable attention from the Trump administration over the last several months. One can imagine that both of these developments would have featured prominently in Project 2025 had the document been published later. What’s more, if they had, then the administration’s progress rate would likely have been considerably higher than 28 percent.
At the same time, it’s important not to get too bogged down in the details of Project 2025, either. In part that’s because Project 2025 — while a presidential transition memo — was an unusual one in that it was as much an attempt to influence President Trump as it was an educated guess at what Trump would likely want to do anyway. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts admitted as much when he characterized Project 2025 as a plan for “institutionalizing Trumpism.” As such, Trump exerted as much of a gravitational pull on Project 2025 as Project 2025 can be fairly said to exert on Trump.
In addition, while the specific, concrete recommendations it outlines are significant in and of themselves, Project 2025 was also about conveying a much broader governing vision, which the details were intended to illustrate. Put differently, although Project 2025 provides a detailed set of policies for the incoming administration, the program embodies a set of core ideas — the “spirit” of Project 2025 — that go beyond the document’s precise “letter.”
For instance, not included in the policy provisions of Project 2025 are name changes for monuments and geographic features, yet the entire document builds on a strong preference for white nationalism — defined by a call to national greatness, toughness, and a rejection for multilateral relations with other nations — which helps explain why Denali is now Mount McKinley, and why the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America.
Similarly, another core idea of Project 2025 is the further entrenchment of an extreme version of the “unitary executive theory,” or the notion that the president’s authority over purely executive functions is absolute and cannot be constrained by the coordinate branches. So far, we have seen the Trump administration take actions beyond those specifically recommended for putting this theory into practice, including its attacks against educational institutions, law firms, and environmental nonprofits, leaving them at the mercy of a turbocharged executive with little regard for the rule of law.
In short, while quantitative analyses of the Trump administration’s progress on Project 2025 are instructive, the numbers alone can obscure a lot of important details. In the final post in this series, we can highlight a few additional factors for putting our tracker’s topline findings into context.
Showing 2,898 results
Federico Holm, James Goodwin | May 6, 2025
In the first part of this series, we introduced the major findings of the tracker we built with our colleagues at Governing for Impact for monitoring the Trump administration’s progress in implementing Project 2025’s comprehensive policy blueprint, Mandate for Leadership. Specifically, we found that over its first 100 days, the administration pursued or completed 28 percent of the more than 530 recommended domestic policy executive actions that we included in our tracker. The post went on to provide context for these findings by tracing Project 2025’s circuitous route from obscure presidential transition report to controversial playbook for the Trump administration. Here, we provide further context for our findings by examining some factors that shed light on how significant this progress really is.
Federico Holm, James Goodwin | May 5, 2025
The extent of harm that the Trump administration inflicted over its first 100 days was nothing short of breathtaking. That it accomplished much of this by transforming our regulatory system into a tool of authoritarian rule speaks to the influence that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has had on this agenda, despite Trump’s half-hearted attempts to disavow the playbook on the campaign trail.
Robert L. Glicksman | May 1, 2025
Many risks to public health, safety, and the environment are insufficiently understood. Indeed, what some scholars have referred to as “ignorance of mechanism” may be the defining characteristic of many of the nation’s most pressing environmental problems. The U.S. Congress has understood the significance of this uncertainty ever since the birth of modern environmental law in the United States around 1970.
James Goodwin | April 30, 2025
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.
Bryan Dunning, Federico Holm | April 29, 2025
In April, the Trump administration published an executive order (EO) boosting the coal industry in hopes of a grand revival for an energy source that has been in stark decline since more cost-effective sources, including gas and renewables, drove it from its peak nearly two decades ago. Included in this order was a two-year exemption to a rule that would have required some of the country’s most polluting power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants that harm our health.
Federico Holm | April 28, 2025
Since our last update (April 21), we have seen some important developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. So far, three resolutions have become law and four more have cleared both chambers. Although we have not received any information that these will be sent to the president’s desk in the coming days, we continue to monitor their status as they could soon be on the move. The most consequential development is the announcement that House Republicans will press ahead and vote on three resolutions that target waivers granted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the state of California to develop vehicle emissions guidelines.
Daniel Farber | April 24, 2025
It’s a tribute to the significance of state climate policies that President Donald Trump devoted an entire executive order to excoriating them as “fundamentally irreconcilable” with his own, fossil fuel-promoting energy policy. Yet, despite all the drama in DC, state governments have continued to make quiet progress in their efforts to expand clean energy and phase out fossil fuels. These states are focused on tangible steps forward, not on capturing online clicks, so their efforts may escape notice. But the cumulative effect of these month-by-month, smaller-scale initiatives is significant.
James Goodwin | April 23, 2025
On April 23, the Trump administration formally published a rulemaking proposal in the Federal Register that would lay the legal groundwork for creating a new category of civil service personnel called “Schedule Policy/Career” — better known as “Schedule F.” Long anticipated, this policy would strip civil service employees of century-old employment protections, effectively making them “at will” employees, much like a president’s political appointees.
Sophie Loeb | April 23, 2025
As North Carolinians continue to grapple with rolling blackouts, rising energy bills, and recovery from a once-in-a-generation hurricane event, another pending environmental catastrophe is developing in our backyards. On Monday, May 5, the North Carolina Utilities Commission will hold a public hearing to gather feedback on Duke Energy’s plans to build a second new methane gas power plant near its existing coal plant on Hyco Lake in Person County as part of the state’s decarbonization plan.