Earlier this month, Paul Dans announced that he was leaving the Heritage Foundation. At the conservative think tank, Dans was tasked with directing Project 2025, a multi-pronged initiative to support the next Republican president. The idea was to build a database of conservative players who could work on a future administration—a “conservative LinkedIn,” as Dans puts it—and put together a full set of policy proposals.
In recent months, that policy agenda has become fodder for Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats, who have drawn attention to their controversial recommendations on the campaign trail and personal attacks on Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and denied any involvement. “It’s a very determined group of people,” he told Fox News in July. “And they wrote a text that many points are correct. Most of the points are completely absurd.”
But several of the people responsible for writing the project’s policy proposals—including Dans—have worked in the Trump administration, and Trump associate JD Vance has his own connections to Project 2025. (Vance wrote the foreword to an upcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts.) According to a ProPublica According to the report, the designers of Project 2025 wanted to ensure there was a pipeline of Trump supporters who could enter executive roles—and a blueprint for how to reshape the executive branch.
The Heritage Foundation said with Dans’ departure, the work on the Project 2025 policy has come to an end. Still, the plan offers insight into how Trump’s second administration might tackle key issues. Project 2025 outlines a number of radical policy recommendations, from disbanding the Department of Education to politicizing experienced civil servants. But the policy plan also returns repeatedly to the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout its nearly 900 pages, aiming to implement DEI in the executive branch and government agencies.
The preamble clearly shows the objectives of the project, and at the moment when the DEI works at all levels—whether in the government or in the private sector—it is attacked almost constantly. “The next conservative President must make America’s public institutions hard targets for resurgent culture warriors,” the authors wrote. “This starts with removing the principles of gender identity and sexuality (“SOGI”), diversity, equality, and inclusion (“DEI”), sexuality, gender equality, gender equality, gender awareness, gender sensitivity, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, or any other term used to deprive the American people of their First Amendment rights in every federal law, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and existing piece of legislation.”
Conservative backlash at DEI
The policy plan is a summary of all the talking points conservatives have come out with in recent years, painting DEI as a dangerous influence that needs to be eradicated. There are many indications of the “awakening” program carried out by the Biden administration and the critical race theory, which has been the target of Republican politicians since 2020 and the cause of the outbreak of state laws that sought to control that schools and other public. institutions address issues of racial equality.
In the Department of Education section, the authors want the next president to issue an executive order requiring “an accounting of how federal programs/grants spread DEI/CRT/gender stereotypes.” Although the topic has received more attention than in the context of education and schools, anti-DEI propaganda is embedded in every page of the Project 2025 policy document. taken by the Biden Administration to promote progressive ideas.”
The authors urge the Department of Energy to be wary of programs that try to smuggle “communications programs” into energy policy. “Innocent-sounding programs, such as “energy justice,” Justice40, and DEI, can be manipulated to advance political agendas,” he wrote.
The authors characterize DEI’s workplace efforts as violations of anti-discrimination laws, directing the Justice Department to task the Civil Rights Division with “recovery enforcement” and investigate public and private employers. “While many federal laws prohibit discrimination based on unchanging characteristics such as race and gender, the Biden Administration—through the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and other federal agencies—has emphasized affirmative action in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equality.’ ,’” they wrote.
Reversal of DEI policies and precedent
In 2021, Biden signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to invest in DEI training and appoint leaders to lead DEI programs. Many of the recommendations in the document focus on rolling back those workplace DEI programs, which have become commonplace in corporate America and have been a priority for the Biden administration in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.
In a section provided by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the authors suggest that the role of chief diversity officer should be eliminated, along with an agency-wide charter that tracks the implementation of DEI programs. When the authors spoke to the Department of Finance, they suggested not only scrapping all of the agency’s efforts to promote equality, but also holding its employees accountable for participating in those programs. “Treat participation in any critical racial theory or DEI initiative, without objection on constitutional or moral grounds, as grounds for termination of employment,” they wrote, in addition to encouraging the publicization of all communications related to DEI.
The authors even oppose efforts by the National Institutes of Health to increase the representation of women speakers at scientific conferences. “Under Francis Collins, the NIH became so focused on the #MeToo movement that it refused to fund scientific conferences unless there were a certain number of women candidates, in violation of the human rights organization’s law against gender discrimination,” they wrote. “This practice of moderation must be ended, and the NIH Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, which suppresses such illegal practices, must be terminated.”
But Project 2025’s policy blueprint goes too far at times, proposing ideas that could reverse decades of precedent in the field of labor policy. One such proposal is to eliminate EEO-1 reports, which require private employers with at least 100 employees—and federal contractors with more than 50 employees—to disclose their employee demographics to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission annually. The authors also say that Title VII—the section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that protects against discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin—should be amended to prohibit the EEOC from requesting EEO-1 reports. or “any other racial discrimination in employment in both the private and public sectors.”
The EEOC has collected this type of data since 1966, enabling the agency to track increases in the workforce participation of women and underrepresented groups and to capture historical trends during a time of rapid change in the workforce. More recently, this data has helped inform corporate diversity reports. (However, employers strive to keep EEO-1 reports from public view Reveal it obtained demographic data for government contractors in 2023 following a lengthy legal battle.) Project 2025’s recommendation to increase this precedent is consistent with its idea of scrapping DEI from the federal government, but it would also empower private employers to opt out of those programs—at the same time. when the DEI function of the company is already losing power.
If Trump wins the election, it is unlikely that all these proposals will be accepted by the new administration; Trump himself described some of the recommendations in Project 2025 as “absolutely ridiculous and bad.” At the same time, he has long been vocal in his disdain for the DEI and has a history of using force to undermine diversity efforts. During a rally in New Hampshire in January, Trump said that if re-elected, he would “end all diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the entire federal government” – which sounds similar to what the authors of Project 2025 envision.
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