Trump’s Agenda 47 vs. Project 2025: What’s the difference?
Agenda 47 is a blueprint from the Trump campaign team that outlines what a second Trump administration could look like. How is it different from Project 2025?
Democrats have tried to link former President Donald Trump to Project 2025 in recent months, and Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was no exception.
Harris called Project 2025 a “detailed and dangerous plan” that she believes Trump “intends to implement” if he is elected to a second term. She also referred to it as “his Project 2025.”
But in the debate and elsewhere, Trump claimed he had “nothing to do with Project 2025.”
“I haven’t read it,” Trump said during the debate. “I intentionally don’t want to read it. I’m not going to read it. That was a group of people who got together and came up with some ideas. I guess some of them were good, some of them were bad. But it doesn’t make any difference.”
Trump had previously stated that he disagreed with certain elements of Project 2025, but did not specify which elements of the project these were.
USA TODAY previously debunked the claim that Project 2025 was Trump’s plan, but as we noted at the time, there is some overlap between Trump’s camp and the effort.
Project 2025 includes former Trump employees
The Heritage Foundation and more than 100 other conservative groups collaborated on Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project. The resulting 900-page document contains policy recommendations for the next Republican president that reflect the think tank’s goal of “rescuing the country from the grip of the radical left.”
Although Project 2025 states that it “does not speak for any candidate or campaign,” there is much overlap between the project and the people and politics in Trump’s world.
Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff in the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, is the former director of Project 2025. Trump adviser Stephen Miller and Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt also appeared in a video endorsing the project’s Presidential Administration Academy.
Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, wrote the foreword to a book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, due out in November. Roberts wrote the foreword to Project 2025, describing it as “a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against the rule of elites and woke culture warriors.”
Vance’s spokesman Will Martin told the New York Times in July that Vance’s foreword had “nothing to do with Project 2025” and that the vice presidential candidate “disagrees in many ways with what is called for there.”
Project 2025 calls for an end to illegal immigration, and Trump has announced that if re-elected, he will “conduct the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and “end any open border policies of the Biden administration.”
The project also supports the closure of the Department of Education, which Trump promised in a 2023 campaign video.
In a January 2018 press release, the Heritage Foundation stated that Trump had implemented nearly two-thirds of its policy recommendations within his first year in office.
USA TODAY has debunked a number of claims about Project 2025, including false claims that, according to page 451, the “only valid family” consists of a working father and a stay-at-home wife, and that women are required to carry a “period card.”
