President Joe Biden and his allies have dramatically ramped up their focus on Project 2025, the conservative policy proposals put together by the Heritage Foundation and a constellation of right-leaning groups.
But the attacks frequently involve mischaracterizations of what the proposals represent and how closely associated they are with former President Donald Trump. They have called it a “right-wing manifesto” and warned it contains plans for a “patriarchal theocracy” under a second Trump administration.
Project 2025 is more like a wish list from outside conservative groups than a blueprint from Trump himself. The Trump campaign has repeatedly distanced itself from the enterprise.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote on social media last week. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Based in large part on a document titled Mandate for Leadership, which is what the Heritage Foundation has called editions of its sweeping policy recommendations since the 1980s, Project 2025 involves proposals that would shrink and reorient the federal government around conservative priorities. The term also refers to an effort by outside groups to identify personnel who could serve in key positions in a Republican administration, seeking to correct for the mistakes of the ill-prepared Trump transition team in 2016.
Here are some of the claims Democrats have made about Project 2025:
DOJ ‘murdering spree’
“The Department of Justice would go on a murdering spree. It would rush to use the death penalty and expand its use to even more people while circumventing due process protections.” — Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)
Project 2025 does not include calls for the DOJ to go on a murdering spree.
The Mandate for Leadership document, which includes more than 900 pages of proposals, appears to address the death penalty in a single paragraph. The proposal calls on the federal government to “enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable,” and does not appear to call for an expansion of the crimes that qualify for the death penalty.
“Capital punishment is a sensitive matter, as it should be, but the current crime wave makes deterrence vital at the federal, state, and local levels,” the document reads. “However, providing this punishment without ever enforcing it provides justice neither for the victims’ families nor for the defendant. The next conservative Administration should therefore do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.”
While the proposal does call for applying the death penalty more frequently for “particularly heinous crimes,” it does not advocate any changes to existing laws surrounding capital punishment.
IVF in the crosshairs
“They’re going after IVF. They’re going after contraception.” —Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
Nowhere in the Project 2025 blueprint is any proposal resembling a ban on birth control.
“Mandate for Leadership says nothing about banning or restricting contraception,” the group behind it wrote on X this week.
Trump himself has explicitly ruled out supporting birth control restrictions.
“I do not support a ban on birth control, and neither will the Republican Party,” he said in May.
To the extent that the Project 2025 plan references contraception at all, it does not propose any kind of ban on birth control. Instead, the plan calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to rescind a Biden administration rule change that eliminated a “moral exemption” for employers offering health insurance coverage that could include contraception.
The conservative proposal involves returning HHS regulations to the pre-Biden standard, which allowed “religious and moral exemptions and accommodations for coverage of certain preventive services,” and it does not suggest any new limits on contraception.
“There is no need for further rulemaking that curtails existing exemptions and accommodations,” Mandate for Leadership reads.
Much of the political narrative surrounding contraception has to do with the failure of bills at the federal and state levels that would codify existing access to birth control, not with proactive efforts to ban it.
Last month, a bill that would have enshrined protections for birth control access failed in the Senate. Republicans who voted against it argued the legislation was not necessary because contraception is widely available and will remain so.
Gov. Glen Youngkin (R-VA) vetoed a bill in May that state Democrats said would enshrine protections for contraception. Youngkin said he supported access to birth control and even proposed his own birth control protections to the state legislature, but he vetoed the bill passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature over religious exemption and parental rights concerns.
As for in vitro fertilization, Mandate for Leadership does not appear to address the matter at all. Republicans have not proposed a ban on IVF treatments to help families struggling to conceive — in fact, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) proposed a bill protecting IVF access in May. Trump has said he supports IVF, and the proposed Republican platform, to be ratified at the Republican National Convention next week, supports access to IVF and fertility treatments.
The claim about threats to IVF does not appear to be connected to Project 2025 itself. Instead, it sprung out of a court decision in Alabama earlier this year that had to do with liability for the destruction of frozen embryos at an IVF clinic.
The Heritage Foundation has weighed in on the IVF debate since, separately from Project 2025. However, the conservative group advocated more regulations on the IVF industry, such as implementing standards that offer heightened protections against the destruction of viable embryos, not for restrictions on the availability of the fertility treatment.
‘Terminates the constitution’
One of the most concerning claims the Biden campaign has made about Project 2025 is that the plan “terminates the Constitution.” Biden’s team made the claim in a new website to amplify Democratic attacks on the conservative plan.
But the document the Biden campaign cites does not even come close to calling for an end to the Constitution. In fact, the plan advocates a closer reading of the Constitution across hundreds of pages of policy proposals.
“In the case of making the federal government smaller, more effective, and accountable, the simple answer is the Constitution itself,” the Project 2025 document reads.
The plan’s authors noted that presidents should be especially loyal to constitutional principles, including by leaving lawmaking to Congress.
“Above all, the President and those who serve under him or her must be committed to the Constitution and the rule of law,” the document reads. “This is particularly true of a conservative Administration, which knows that the President is there to uphold the Constitution, not the other way around.”
Civil rights scale-back
“Trump’s henchmen want to eliminate the Department of Education. … They want to scale back enforcement of civil rights laws, like Title IX, which prohibits gender-based discrimination. … They want to take federal funding away from schools with curricula, books, or classes that address race, racism, gender, and sexuality.” — Joy Reid, MSNBC
In a segment billed as “Project 2025 Exposed,” Reid correctly noted that the plan proposes shuttering the Department of Education. However, her other claims were misleading.
Conservative groups argue that the federal government should have a dramatically smaller role in regulating schools.
“This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm,” Mandate for Leadership reads.
The proposals suggest distributing federal education dollars as grants, giving local governments more discretion over how to spend the money.
“Congress could have, and once did, distribute management of federal education programs outside of a single department,” the document says. “The next Administration will need a plan to redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government, eliminate those that are ineffective or duplicative, and then eliminate the unproductive red tape and rules by entrusting states and districts with flexible, formula-driven block grants.”
The plan does not, however, call for reducing the enforcement of civil rights laws. Project 2025’s authors proposed moving the existing authority that the Department of Education has to enforce civil rights laws to the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights.
“[S]pecifically for K–12 systems under federal authority, Congress and the next Administration should support existing state and federal civil rights laws and add to such laws a prohibition on compelled speech,” the document reads.
It also calls for a return to the pre-Biden interpretation of Title IX, which protects against sex-based discrimination in schools. The rule has historically protected women from discrimination, such as by providing them their own sports leagues, but the Biden administration has worked to overhaul Title IX by rewriting the definition of sex to include transgender identities.
Project 2025 proposes returning to the Title IX standard that existed for decades.
And the recommendations do not advocate banning books or lessons that even mention the concept of race. Instead, the proposal pushes for a federal standard to remove controversial teachings about the United States being an inherently racist country, among other contentious concepts, from classrooms.
“The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country,” Mandate for Leadership reads.
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However, the proposals in the Project 2025 blueprint specifically advocate against censoring diverse viewpoints.
“Educators should not be forced to discuss contemporary political issues but neither should they refrain from discussing certain subjects in an attempt to protect students from ideas with which they disagree,” the plan reads. “Proposals such as this should result in robust classroom discussions, not censorship.”
