People walk past a Heritage Foundation welcome sign for the Republican National Convention at the Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport on July 12, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Project 2025 is one of the most pernicious plans for an American presidential administration ever conceived, not just for what it is but also for how it might be implemented.
Its far-right policy prescriptions could transform the federal government into a MAGA instrument of authoritarianism. Many of them are in fact familiar planks that have been recycled through decades of hardline conservative platforms. But in Project 2025 they’ve taken on an America-First snarl and sweep, and they would be most destructive in the hands of an unscrupulous second Trump administration.
Equally alarming is that Project 2025’s authors appear prepared to use violence to realize its vision.
“We are in the process of the Second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” warned Kevin Roberts, president of Project 2025 creator The Heritage Foundation, during an appearance this month on Real America’s Voice’s “ War Room .”
Project 2025 includes a volume of policy goals more than 900 pages long known as the “ Mandate for Leadership .” The document is the latest edition of the “Mandate,” which the organization first published in 1981 as a roadmap for the new Reagan administration. Heritage has updated it roughly every four years ever since. It was estimated that two-thirds of its recommendations were adopted in Reagan’s first year in office, and there is every reason to expect the latest version to guide former President Donald Trump, if he wins the November election, to a comparable extent.
This formidable legacy of influence can be traced back to a person whose name is well known to Coloradans: Coors.
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Joe Coors was the grandson of brewer Adolph Coors. Though his family is famous for building one of Colorado’s most successful business empires, Joe Coors’ most consequential efforts came in conservative politics. He hitched himself early to Reagan, having cast a vote for the future president as a Republican delegate from Colorado at the 1968 Republican National Convention.
Over the next several years, he was among a group of conservatives who saw the need for a right-wing think tank in Washington, D.C., and, with $250,000 in seed money from Coors, the Heritage Foundation was born in 1973. Coors, commonly called Heritage’s founder, provided the think tank an annual grant of $300,000 for years.
“There wouldn’t be a Heritage Foundation without Joe Coors,” former Heritage president Edwin J. Feulner said.
Heritage was just one of many conservative Coors creations. He was instrumental in starting the Free Congress Foundation think tank, the Mountain States Legal Foundation law firm, and the Denver-based Independence Institute think tank.
He wasn’t just a money man. The same policies pushed by Heritage in the original “Mandate” he would advocate through what The Guardian termed “ backstairs influence .” Coors was a member of Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet” of advisors, and he engineered the appointment of a fellow Coloradan, Anne Gorsuch, mother of a future Supreme Court justice, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, which she set out to dismantle from the inside.
“The conservative movement simply would not exist in the form it does today without the profound influence of Joe Coors,” the Wall Street Journal said in an obituary when Coors died at 85 in 2003.
One theme that threads through Heritage projects, and which could be the most malign quality of a second Trump administration, is a push to deconstruct the administrative state. This was a goal in the 1981 “Mandate,” and it’s a defining feature of the current plan. Project 2025 would impose a new Schedule F employment category to install Trump loyalists in tens of thousands of positions that otherwise are filled based on merit. Government agencies would be reprogrammed to serve the interests of the president, not the people, and where once professionals and experts worked for the public good now legions of toadies would carry out whatever authoritarian order came down from the Oval Office, however unconstitutional or corrupt. This is the main Heritage method for “ institutionalizing Trumpism .”
There wouldn't be a Heritage Foundation without Joe Coors.
– Edwin J. Feulner, former Heritage Foundation president
Heritage agitates for the wholesale reduction of the federal government. The Department of Education should be “completely restructured,” Heritage said in 1981.
Today it says the department should be “eliminated.”
Several passages from the modern “Mandate” are of particular concern to Coloradans, especially in a section on the Department of the Interior. The section was written by Reagan administration veteran William Perry Pendley, an Evergreen resident who was Trump’s acting director of the Bureau of Land Management and is a former president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation.
In general Pendley wants to see the government wring economic benefit out of public lands, primarily through fossil fuel extraction, and he would roll back the withdrawal of federal lands from mineral extraction in the Thompson Divide.
Under Trump, the BLM relocated its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, a move the Biden administration reversed . Pendley calls for the headquarters to be moved back West, and he lauds supposed advantages of the Grand Junction site.
Pendley suggests that the first national monument designated by Biden, the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado, could be reduced — “adjusted downward,” in his parlance — under a new Trump administration, and he writes that the Antiquities Act of 1906, under which Biden made the designation, should be repealed.
Elsewhere, in a section on the Department of Transportation, the document implies that the Federal Railroad Administration is misspending money at the Transportation Technology Center, a federal testing and training facility in Pueblo, and suggests research funds should be pulled from the facility.
A section on the Department of Commerce calls for the federal government to “break up” and downsize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has a substantial presence and provides many jobs in Boulder. Project 2025 disdains NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and says its “functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.”
The larger goals of the “Mandate” are at least as much of a threat to Coloradans as to every other American. It would give more control to Trump over the Department of Justice, crack down on immigration, revoke federal approval of the abortion pill, and police women who seek out-of-state abortions. The authors envision a country where pornography is outlawed, Christian faith is elevated, and the traditional family unit is at the center of American life.
“Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering.” Those are the “building blocks of any healthy society,” Roberts tells us in the foreword.
In “The Coors Connection,” a 1988 book about how the Coors family’s philanthropic products, such as The Heritage Foundation, “undermines democratic pluralism,” Russ Bellant wrote, “The Coors family funds ‘pro-family’ organizations which advocate maintaining a rigid social order in the midst of a society experiencing rapid change. They support groups which lament the breakdown of what is called the traditional American family, where the mother raises the children and the father earns their living … The Coors family funds organizations which believe in Christian, segregated schools,” and it has supported groups that “have called for the abolition of American democracy and the establishment of a theocratic state.”
The goals of the American far-right haven’t changed much, but in Trump it might have found its most effective vehicle yet. Joe Coors no doubt would have been very pleased.
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