Donald Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint to remake the federal government -- including farm and nutrition programs -- has only attracted more attention to the plan, but not in a favorable way.
At the Republican National Convention and afterwards, Trump has professed ignorance about the plan and also critically called the plan's authors "radical right." But the plan was developed by some former senior members of his administration and is being pushed by the best-known conservative think tank in the country.
President Joe Biden's campaign had been making Project 2025 a key line of attack for some time before he dropped out of the race on Sunday and endorsed Kamala Harris for the nomination. A new survey released Tuesday by Navigator Research, a left-of-center polling organization, found the project “has seen a significant increase in both awareness and unfavorability” in the last month.
“Fifty-four percent of Americans report being familiar with Project 2025, up 25 points since our last survey in late June,” Navigator said. “Among those familiar with the Project 2025, just 11% view it favorably, while 43% view it unfavorably, a 24-point increase” from June.
The project’s 922-page policy document, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” lays out sweeping recommendations for how a new, conservative administration should overhaul the way the executive branch works. In short, it’s a how-to guide designed to help Trump achieve conservative goals, emphasizing “core” missions of agencies and down-sizing government.
Says Heritage: “Project 2025 is the effort of a massive coalition of conservative organizations that have come together to ensure a successful administration begins in January 2025. With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.” The project includes a 180-day “playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.”
Details in the policy book, which examines the government agency by agency, offers a trove of material for Harris and other Democrats in the campaign. In her first campaign talk, she called the project extreme, saying it would “weaken the middle class and bring us backward."
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Tom Homan, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Trump administration and a leader of the project, told reporters at the GOP convention in Milwaukee that he knows Trump “pretty damn good” and that Trump will not simply endorse every one of the project’s proposals.
“He’s not going to read any plan and say ‘OK, I’m going to do this,’” the Associated Press reported. “He’s going to do what he’s going to do.”
Trump has called some of the proposals “abysmal,” though he did not specify which ones.
Heritage’s wish list for agriculture is authored by Daren Bakst, a longtime critic of farm programs while a research fellow at the organization. His ideas for scaling back farm programs have gotten little traction on Capitol Hill.
Daren Bakst The ag chapter recommends scrapping the sugar program and, “ideally,” getting rid of both the Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage programs. It would at least prohibit farmers from receiving crop insurance payments and payments under either ARC or PLC in the same year. Heritage also would eliminate the Conservation Reserve Program. “Farmers should not be paid in such a sweeping way not to farm their land,” the policy book says. “If there is a desire to ensure that extremely sensitive land is not farmed, this should be addressed through targeted efforts that are clearly connected to addressing a specific and concrete environmental harm.”
Heritage would move all food aid programs from USDA to the Department of Health and Human Services. It also would trim costs under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by eliminating a “loophole” that allows states to increase benefits by using the Low Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program and rewriting community eligibility standards for school meals.
In addition, the next administration “should denounce efforts to place ancillary issues like climate change ahead of food productivity and affordability when it comes to agriculture” and “remove the U.S. from any association with [United Nations] and other efforts to push sustainable-development schemes connected to food production.”
Project 2025 recommends repeal of marketing orders and checkoff programs, leaving industry to operate private sector efforts to achieve their goals. It also would do away with USDA export promotion programs, because "businesses and industries can and should do so on their own."
But proposals to eliminate such programs are unlikely to find much support in Congress.
“The Project 2025 farm recommendations run counter to what soybean farmers have promoted for well over two years in both their farm bill priorities and other legislation — and as part of their recent asks of Congress during their summer Hill fly-in,” Christy Seyfert, the American Soybean Association's executive director of government affairs, says in a statement. “Soybean farmers want a stronger farm safety net and greater trade promotion resources in the farm bill, not a repeal of these critical initiatives.”
Christy Seyfert“I appreciate the work that Heritage always puts into thinking about these things — the whole notion of limited government,” says Chuck Conner, president and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. Conner helped direct farm policy under the George W. Bush administration.
“I have seen these things come and go, dating back to 1981 when Ronald Reagan came flying in. There were all kinds of proposals, including ones from Heritage out there, to suggest a rewrite of farm policy in a totally different direction. And in reality, even under Reagan and the huge wave that generated, none of that happened,” he said.
Conner also said that “despite the pretty sharp rhetoric in that [Heritage] document, the cost of farm programs and the level of government help out there for farmers has declined substantially in real dollars” since the 1980s.
To Conner, that means there are probably better places to look to cut government spending,
“In addition to [being] politically not likely to happen, I think more realistically, there ought to be a lot of other targets out there other than agriculture,” he said. “Farmers and ranchers have literally given up enormous subsidies over the last 25 to 30 years or so. And I don't really know of any other sector that's done that.”
The American Farm Bureau Federation said it doesn’t comment on candidate platforms. However, Sam Kieffer, vice president, public policy, said AFBF policies “recognize the inherent risks in farming and therefore have long differed from Heritage recommendations related to agriculture” and noted that Project 2025 “has not been adopted by any presidential candidate.”
“Once presidential nominees are identified, we send each a policy questionnaire and give them the opportunity via their responses to make the case for their candidacy to our nearly six-million-member families,” Kieffer said.
Capitol Hill Republicans seem to be taking an approach similar to Trump's when it comes to Project 2025. Asked about it, Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., a member of the House Agriculture Committee, appeared to have never heard of the Heritage Foundation.
“Oh, so this is an independent think tank,” he said when Agri-Pulse asked him about Project 2025.
“There are 10,000 think tanks and nonprofits that focus on public policy,” he said. “If I took time to read every single report — the good ones, the bad ones and the in-between ones — I don't know that I'd get any real work done trying to govern America,” Johnson said.
And Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., said, “I’m not familiar with Project 2025 enough to speak about it.”
Harris is likely to make Project 2025 a central talking point in her campaign. In a post on X before traveling to Wisconsin for her first campaign appearance Tuesday, she said she was excited to “speak about what is at stake in this election — and how we will defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.”
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