Project 2025 was supposed to be a blueprint that would jump-start a new Republican administration. Instead, its authors at the Heritage Foundation may have saddled the GOP with their very own Green New Deal.
Democrats are using Project 2025 as a catchall for Republican policy they regard as fringe or extreme, a tactic aimed at shackling the GOP to Heritage’s much-maligned policy manual for a second Donald Trump presidency.
It’s a familiar playbook. Republicans in the last two election cycles used the Green New Deal, a progressive Democratic plan to fight climate change and usher in social reform, as a boogeyman to describe nearly any Democratic environmental policy they’ve deemed too radical.
Now with only three months until the election, Democrats see Project 2025 as the key to winning elections up and down the ballot. And they believe it could become a more potent weapon to persuade voters than the Green New Deal ever was due to its explosive and highly detailed nature.
“This is just rocket fuel for Democratic motivation and turnout,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), who leads a House Democratic task force to stop Project 2025, in an interview with POLITICO’s E&E News.
“The Green New Deal was an aspirational, nonbinding vision statement … this Project 2025 manifesto is the opposite of that, it is a very detailed blueprint for just a host of specific policies and actions.”
Huffman, a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, added, “The Green New Deal was also talking about doing things like cleaning up our air, making people healthier, giving them health care; [Project 2025] is talking about taking away people’s fundamental rights and ending democracy as we know it.”
While that characterization might raise some eyebrows, Democrats at their convention last week made a point of hammering Republicans on Project 2025, messaging on it throughout the week and repeatedly lugging an oversize tome to the convention stage to read from it.
They’ve unleashed an ad blitz in key congressional races in Michigan, New York, Ohio and Washington state linking Trump and his fellow Republicans to Project 2025.
And Republicans are starting to worry. Marc Thiessen, a former White House staffer under former President George W. Bush, slammed Heritage’s president last week.
“No think tank president has ever given the left more ammunition than @kevinroberts,” Thiessen wrote on X. “His catastrophic leadership of @Heritage could cost Republicans the White House.”
Indeed, the ideas contained in Project 2025 are deeply unpopular. A new poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that a strong plurality of Americans are opposed to the key tenets of Project 2025.
Those tenets include the mass firing and replacement of career government workers with loyalists to the incumbent president, cutting funding for renewable energy and eliminating the Education Department, among other conservative wish list priorities.
The new catchall
Ever since the Green New Deal was introduced in Congress in 2019, Republicans have employed it to attack any Democratic environmental policies they oppose — no matter how tenuous the connection. Incentives to boost energy efficiency, electric vehicle infrastructure grants and tax credits for renewable energy all have come in for criticism.
In truth, the Green New Deal seeks a rapid, 10-year decarbonization of the nation’s economy, a federal takeover of the energy industry and universal health care, among other programs.
President Joe Biden doesn’t support it, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, backed it in 2019 but hasn’t pushed for it since then. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has scoffed at it.
Progressives still back the Green New Deal, and parts are similar to the Democratic legislative wins on climate. But most in the party never saw the resolution as a serious policy proposal with a chance of becoming law, and some believe that the attacks have grown stale.
“They’ve squeezed about as much mileage out of it as they can,” Huffman said of Republican attacks on the Green New Deal. “I don’t think it really scares anyone at this point.”
That hasn’t stopped them from trying. Rep. Rick Allen’s denunciation of Biden administration appliance efficiency standards is a typical example of many.
“In this administration’s pursuit of a radical, rush-to-Green New Deal agenda, common sense has taken a back seat,” the Georgia Republican said in May on the House floor.
Trump himself throws the Green New Deal into most of his stump speeches, usually labeling Biden’s entire energy agenda the “Green New Scam.” Last month’s Republican National Convention featured multiple speakers uttering the same phrase.
The pillorying of the Green New Deal has in the past forced some Democrats in tough races to distance themselves from it. But now, amid a Democratic onslaught on Project 2025, it’s Republicans who are on the retreat.
Trump has repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 from atop the Republican ticket — despite it being written by many of his former administration officials.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump said in July on his social media company, Truth Social.
“It’s laughable,” Huffman said of Republicans trying to distance themselves from Project 2025.
Democrats have again and again tossed Project 2025 into Trump’s lap, using the label to refer to nearly any policy they say he supports, whether or not it’s in the document.
Last week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the DNC projected “Project 2025 HQ” onto the side of Trump’s skyscraper in the city.
Biden and other Democrats elevated Project 2025 as the Republican platform in speeches at the convention. A host of speakers toted a copy of the treatise to the stage to denounce its contents.
Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic Michigan state senator, pointed to the document’s suggestions to remove some civil servants from office and replace them with political appointees, and to exercise more presidential control over prosecutions.
“They’re talking about replacing the entire federal government with an army of loyalists who answer only to Donald Trump,” she declared.
And in messaging from Democratic groups, Project 2025 is used as the baseline for the Trump agenda rather than his own blueprint laid out on his campaign site.
“Donald Trump’s Big Oil-authored Project 2025 plan is completely out of touch with what voters want. It gives Big Oil free rein to profiteer and pollute, while Americans are forced to clean up their mess,” Alex Glass, a spokesperson for the Democratic-aligned Climate Power, said in a statement last month on the election.
Said Huffman: “They have run around promoting these things for the last year and a half, they have been swaggering about their blueprint and their action plans and how this was day one stuff. Now all of a sudden, as they realize how toxic it is with the American people they’re trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, and it just doesn’t work.”
Democratic groups in recent weeks have bought paid advertising trying to tie Trump and downballot Republicans to Project 2025. The Save Democracy political action committee is running $2 million worth of ads about Project 2025 and Republican candidates in key congressional districts in Michigan, Nevada, New York, Ohio, California, Oregon and Washington state. Meanwhile, the DNC has bought billboards in all of the critical presidential swing states tying Trump to Project 2025.
‘They know it’s a winner’
Democrats have been buoyed by polling showing how unpopular Project 2025 is.
Tatishe Nteta, the director of the UMass Amherst poll and a political science professor at the school, said using Project 2025 as a symbol for what Republicans will do if elected bears resemblance to the villainization of the Green New Deal.
But the details of Project 2025 are much less popular with voters, spelling trouble for the GOP if Democrats’ effectively pursue the strategy, Nteta said.
“This is one of those things where it’s not just the symbol that’s unpopular, the actual substance is also unpopular,” he said. “This is a double whammy, and this is why the Democrats keep using it, keep bringing it up, keep talking about it, because they know it’s a winner.”
Democratic lawmakers contend that Project 2025 is already alive and well in Congress. Lawmakers are digging into Project 2025 to try and link Republicans legislative aims to Heritage’s blueprint — much like the GOP continues doing with the Green New Deal.
Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee issued an extensive fact sheet compiling every legislative measure Republicans on the committee have pushed that also appear in Project 2025.
That includes measures to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, repealing a slew of Biden-era executive orders to fight climate change and rolling back endangered species protections.
“Republicans have gotten pretty creative in using a variety of talking points to try to hide their pro-polluter agenda, so it’s not always as obvious as it could be,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, the panel’s top Democrat, said in a statement.
“Fortunately, for transparency’s sake anyway, Trump’s Project 2025 lays their agenda bare so they can’t hide behind this thinly veiled rhetoric anymore.”
On the House Appropriations Committee, Democrats are taking a familiar tack, trying to tie Republican cuts and riders in the fiscal 2025 spending bills to Project 2025.
“Trump’s Project 2025 is not just some list of far-right ideas and dystopian policies on a website,” Appropriations Char Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter to her Democratic colleagues. “Despite Republican attempts to distance themselves, Trump’s Project 2025 is already here, shaping legislation being considered by this Congress.”
‘Smart politics for them’
Despite Democratic enthusiasm that Project 2025 will be a key to retaking the House while maintaining the Senate and the White House, some Republicans are casting doubt on whether it will really deliver Democrats their electoral aims.
“It’s an avatar for Donald Trump, and a different way to talk about topics that a lot of the public has moved on from,” said Zack Roday, a GOP consultant and former aide to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“Hats off to the Democrats. This is smart politics for them,” Roday said. But “for our side, I wouldn’t be distracted by it. I don’t think it’s a net loser.”
Heritage commissioned its own poll seeking to clear their project’s name. The poll found that respondents supported some of Project 2025’s policy priorities, actions like building a border wall, requiring Congress to approve federal regulations, and expanding oil and gas drilling.
But ultimately the internal poll found that only 14 percent of those polled had a favorable opinion of Project 2025. Forty-seven percent opposed it.
