MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin — The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has been the victim of the “greatest misinformation campaign since the Russia hoax,” director Paul Dans told a gathering near the Republican National Convention on Monday.
Project 2025, known officially as the “Presidential Transition Project,” is an effort by conservative organizations to shape the agenda of a potential Trump administration, as well as to provide staff members and guide the transition.
The effort has produced a massive, 922-page tome that is to be a policy manual for the future administration, listing policy priorities that the White House is to pursue, together with a potentially Republican-controlled Congress.
“For the last 100 years, the progressives have built an administrative state,” Dans told attendees at the Heritage Foundation’s “Policy Fest,” just outside the gates to the convention arena. “Really, it’s the anti-democracy at work.”
Unelected bureaucrats, Dans said, make decisions about policy. Their ideas, he said, “come right out of the Ivy League academies, and they’re thrust upon you.” Project 2025 is an effort to create a conservative alternative.
Conservative author Mollie Hemingway observed that Democrats and the media had turned Project 2025 into a target, often making wild claims about its content — so much so that conservatives had begun making memes on social media to mock the hysteria. One post, she noted, claimed Project 2025 would restore the buffet at Pizza Hut.
“Ninety percent of the characterization is false,” Dans said, noting that Project 2025 was not a secretive effort but one that had involved 110 conservative organizations.
He also noted that incendiary rhetoric had created a climate of hatred that led to the shocking assassination attempt Saturday on President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
