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.
