Project 2025: What it is and what it's doing

Civics 101

NHPR

Society & Culture, Government, History

4.6 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has published a Mandate for Leadership since 1981, making policy recommendations to the federal government. The latest edition is part of something much bigger: Project 2025. The newest Mandate is part of a four-pillar project designed to fundamentally change the federal government from the inside. Though President Trump and his team spent his third presidential campaign claiming they had nothing to do with it, Trump is no longer distancing himself from Project 2025. So let's dig in. Our guide to Project 2025 is the former director of factcheck.org and author of A Guide to Project 2025, Eugene Kiely. For more information on Project 2025, you can access the full policy playbook at the link above or by clicking here. You can watch the fourteen hours of instructional videos obtained by ProPublica here. More information about The Heritage Foundation and its stated values and goals can be found at their website. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, Nick.
0:00.8	Hi, Hannah.
0:01.7	Hi, Civics 101.
0:03.9	Now, normally, Nick, I would start with some kind of anecdote here, right?
0:07.9	Or some kind of joke to ease us in.
0:10.7	But today, I just want to get right to the point.
0:14.0	Project 2025.
0:16.0	I spoke with Paul Danz, who is the director of Project 2025.
0:21.6	And he said his number one goal was something that was called
0:26.6	Dismantle the Administrative State, which basically is what's happening now,
0:32.6	by cutting the federal workforce and by eliminating or neutering a lot of the agency's regulatory
0:42.2	powers. So this is what the conservatives wanted and this is what now the conservatives are
0:49.9	getting. This is Eugene Kylie. I'm the former director of fact check.org, although I still do some part-time work for them.
0:57.8	That part-time work includes writing a five-part series on this project, this plan, initiative
1:05.7	proposal, blueprint, to transform the federal government.
1:10.6	When I started writing about this, I didn't sit out to do a series of five stories.
1:16.7	I wasn't going to do that. But there's just so much here that it really required it.
1:26.2	All right, Hannah, you know I have wanted to do an episode on this for a long while.
1:30.0	I do.
1:30.5	And before we dig deeper into what Project 2025 actually is, can we tell the people why we're
1:37.2	finally making this episode right now?
1:39.5	Sure.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NHPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NHPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.