Project 2025: What is it? How is it connected to Trump, and to NJ?

Have you heard of Project 2025?

The backlash it has provoked — from Democrats and from former President Donald Trump — has prompted the departure of Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation. He stepped down from the foundation on Tuesday, according to a report.

Project 2025 is a conservative initiative put together by the Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation that looks to radically reshape the federal government under the next presidency.

It has been trending on X in recent weeks, the actress Taraji P. Henson dropped a reference to it during the BET Awards, and President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have railed against it in public appearances.

The 78-year-old former president, while running for another term in the White House, has denied any knowledge of it.

And on Tuesday, after the departure of Dans, Trump put out a statement saying his campaign should not be associated with the campaign "in any way."

"Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you," an email to supporters said.

However, Trump critics have pointed out that his distancing himself from the 900-plus page document for Project 2025 is not believable because much of it is written by former Trump administration staffers. Also, they note his close ties with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and his bragging that his administration had implemented many of the foundation’s proposals.

Roberts had taken to defending Project 2025, explaining why it appeals to conservatives. In an interview with conservative radio host Will Cain earlier this month, Roberts called it "the most organized set of policy ideas that the conservative moment has ever put together in history" and "Regardless of what anyone thinks — on the left, right or center — the most unified project in the history of the conservative movement, and it's not going anywhere."

Project 2025 calls for cuts and restrictions that would be regressive and hurtful to various communities, including stripping civil service protections from tens of thousands of employees to make them political appointees (Page 82) and rescinding regulations prohibiting discrimination "on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics" (Page 584).

Project 2025, it turns out, also has some New Jersey connections: both Trump and one of his former employees, Edison native Ken Cuccinelli.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025, also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, was created in 2022 as part of a series of books known as the Mandate for Leadership, first published by the Heritage Foundation in 1981 as a guide for implementing conservative policies during then-President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

The Project 2025 webpage says the project “will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.”

The current Mandate for Leadership is 922 pages and contains 30 chapters written by 34 authors. The chapters are focused on various departments and offices that are part of the White House.

The backlash toward Project 2025 by the Democratic presidential candidates and on social media has been that the proposals implemented could hurt people’s daily lives in various ways. They include:

• Recommending that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 24-year-old approval of the widely used abortion pill mifepristone (Page 458) and that the Justice Department enforce the Comstock Act, passed in 1873, which prohibits the mailing of any items such as drugs used for abortion (Page 562).

• Eliminating the Education Department (Page 319) to return control of education to states, ending the Head Start program for preschool children (Page 482) and rejecting any efforts to provide universal free school meals (Page 303).

• Bringing back policies prohibiting transgender individuals from serving in the military (Page 104).

• Repealing tax breaks for green energy companies (Page 696) and withdrawing from climate change agreements that are seen as harmful to the American economy (Page 709).

Here in New Jersey, the agenda would have an impact on vulnerable groups such as the LGTBQ+ community.

"A project that aims to strip away the rights and protections of any marginalized group is a threat to the progress we have fought to achieve in America," said Christian Fuscarino, executive director of Garden State Equality.

Fuscarino said LGBTQ advocates he knows have expressed concern about the various proposals for restrictions to be placed on the community if a conservative president such as Trump gets back in office. He cites specific mention of New Jersey in the document on the matter of transgender students.

On Page 346, it's stated that in "California, New Jersey, and certain districts in Kansas and elsewhere, educators are prohibited from informing parents about children’s confusion over their sex if the children do not want their parents to know." The recommendations in Project 2025 are for school employees not to recognize students who identify by a different gender or use a different pronoun.

Project 2025 "wants to remove policies that would keep all students of diverse identities safe in schools," Fuscarino said.

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Donald Trump and Project 2025 New Jersey connections

Donald Trump is one of New Jersey's most well-known residents. Several months of the year, he makes his home in Bedminster at the Trump National Golf Club, which he purchased in 2002.

Until November, when he is not at Bedminster, he is on the road campaigning for a second term in the White House. While campaigning recently, he has denied any involvement with Project 2025.

He first tried absolving himself of any knowledge with a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, earlier this month, saying, “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. Anything they do, I wish them luck."

Trump has continued to try to put distance between himself and the conservative agenda, as was the case at his rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20 when he told the crowd, "Like some on the right, the severe right came up with this Project 25. I don't even know. Very, very conservative. Sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right. They came up with this. I don't know what it is, Project 25."

Various evidence and analyses of Project 2025 have concluded that Trump is lying.

USA Today reported that at least 31 of the project's 38 creators were connected to the Trump administration. Some of them are familiar figures such as Dr. Ben Carson, who ran the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Trump; Peter Navarro, who was the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under Trump and spoke at the Republican National Convention this month after serving a four-month sentence for defying a congressional subpoena; and Ken Cuccinelli, who was the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security during Trump's presidency. All three authored chapters in Project 2025.

CNN.com reported that at least 140 people who worked for Trump contributed to Project 2025. The media watchdog Media Matters unearthed a 2023 interview of Paul Dans — who oversaw Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation — by right-wing podcaster Tom Zawistowski in which Dans said, "President Trump's very bought in with this," when talking about Project 2025. Dans worked as chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during Trump’s time as president.

The Trump campaign points to Agenda 47 as Trump's official policy platform instead of Project 2025, but there are similarities between the two. For example, both agendas stipulate a "Parental Bill of Rights" allowing parents to control curriculum and the elimination of "left-wing indoctrination" and critical race theory from the military (Project 2025) and from schools (Agenda 47).

Questions for this story sent to Trump by email to the Trump 2024 campaign and through his Office of Donald J. Trump website were not returned with answers.

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Ken Cuccinelli

One of the chapters in Project 2025 is focused on the Department of Homeland Security, the omnibus federal agency created in the aftermath of 9/11. That chapter was written by Ken Cuccinelli, born in Edison on July 30, 1968.

He is the third generation of the Cuccinelli family born in New Jersey, with his grandfather Dominick born in Hoboken in 1910, said a 2019 article in the magazine Mother Jones. His father, Ken Sr., said an article published in the Jersey Journal in April 1963, attended St. Joseph of the Palisades High School in West New York, where he played golf and helped organize the school's book fair.

Cuccinelli grew up in Northern Virginia, where he attended high school. After earning a degree from the University of Virginia and two from George Mason University, he started his law firm.

He then went into Virginia state politics in the early 2000s, serving two terms as a Republican state senator before becoming the state's attorney general. He would gain attention in Republican Party circles for various actions, one of them in 2010, when Virginia joined a coalition of states filing a brief in federal court supporting Arizona’s immigration reform law that required police to check the immigration status of any person they detained.

Cuccinelli was establishing himself as an anti-immigration zealot whose stances would eventually lead to a job in the Trump administration, where he was the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2019 to 2021 and then served around the same time as acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

During his time as the acting USCIS director, he pushed anti-immigration policies such as a regulation that would have blocked immigrants from receiving green cards that would make them eligible for permanent legal status if immigration officers found they used any government assistance. He also ended a program that protected immigrants with serious illnesses from being deported to their home countries. Both decisions were reversed when a federal court found that his appointment as acting USCIS director was illegal.

After Trump’s presidency, Cuccinelli joined the Heritage Foundation as a visiting fellow. During his time there, he was part of the creation of Project 2025.

Cuccinelli's chapter on the Department of Homeland Security is 36 pages. In it, he recommends that various anti-immigration measures be carried out in the next presidency. They include:

• Capping and phasing out the H-2A and H-2B visa programs that allow non-citizens to do agricultural and non-agricultural seasonal work in areas such as hospitality and construction (Pages 611 to 612).

• Denying financial aid to students who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, and to students enrolled in schools that provide in-state tuition to students described as "illegal aliens" in Cuccinelli's text (Page 167).

• Pushing for the construction of a wall along the U.S. southern border, a long-cherished project of Trump's that took place during his administration and was canceled when Joe Biden became president (Page 147).

• Repealing Temporary Protected Status designations, which provide legal protections and work authorization to individuals who cannot return to their home countries due to situations such as armed conflict (Page 150).

Cuccinelli could not be reached for comment about his work on Project 2025 via email and a phone call to the Election Transparency Initiative, where he serves as national chairman, and by email to the Center for Renewing America, where he is a senior fellow.

Ricardo Kaulessar covers race, immigration, and culture for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kaulessar@northjersey.com

Twitter: @ricardokaul

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Project 2025: What is it? What connections to Trump, to NJ?