After Project 2025, Knives Are Out for Heritage — On the Right

Whenever Vice President Kamala Harris mentions Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s now-toxic blueprint for the next Republican administration — blood starts throbbing in the temples of certain conservative Heritage veterans. Like think tank leaders across the spectrum, the professionals are cringing at the tone-deaf naivete of an organization that touted such a polarizing document as an election-year gospel without realizing it might blow up on their own side.

“We now have a very good example of what not to do,” said Heritage alum Tim Chapman, who leads Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom nonprofit and is a former chief of staff to Heritage founder Ed Feulner.

“I cannot think of a study that has done more damage,” said Ken Weinstein, a one-time former President Donald Trump appointee and former head of the conservative Hudson Institute. “It’s the exact opposite of the Harris approach of don’t say anything about what you’re doing.”

Not long ago, the current Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, was triumphantly promising a “second American revolution” and darkly declaring that it would be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” Steve Bannon floated him as a possible White House chief of staff .

That was before Project 2025 was turned into a campaign issue by Harris — and disavowed by Trump. Last weekend, the 922-page playbook became quite possibly the first think tank paper in American history to appear in TV spots during NFL games, naturally via a scathing negative ad .

For the Heritage old guard, the bill of complaints against Project 2025 dovetails with broader gripes about Roberts, a culture-war intellectual who has dramatically reoriented the foundation in a populist, pro-Trump direction.

Instead of just sniffing about Roberts’ deviations on trade or foreign affairs, the bitterness these days focuses on a new house style that allegedly enabled the current embarrassment: an elevation of marketing over research; a chest-thumping tendency to assert dominance within the Trump-era right; an inability to distinguish partisan agitation from policy advocacy because “engagement on X, positive feedback from Slack channels or mentions in their news feeds” have become paramount, in the words of one conservative activist who watched Project 2025 take shape.

In this telling, the sequence of events that turned a white paper into a scarlet letter has little to do with the document’s contents. Think tanks across the spectrum propose stuff all the time that a crafty oppo researcher could use to rile up voters. Yet those other organizations somehow manage to avoid becoming millstones around the necks of their favorite pols.

To critics in the old Heritage diaspora, it’s all a byproduct of how the foundation operates under Roberts: While other policy outfits claim to be devoted to an abstract idea, Heritage has increasingly tied its image to a specific person. Roberts told an interviewer earlier this year that the mission was “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Heritage fundraising bragged about the large percentage of the think tank’s previous ideas that were implemented by Trump. Roberts also claimed Project 2025 spoke for the movement, boasting that “never before has the American conservative movement been this unified around a set of possible policy prescriptions.”

This vibe added up to a problem because no politician, especially Trump, enjoys being talked about like a trained monkey for some policy group, no matter how fervent its support.

“For six months before this came out, I knew more than several people who were nervous about the press that was out there,” one former Heritage staffer said, referencing Trump world’s anxieties about Project 2025’s media image. “They were like, ‘They’re not listening to the signals’” telling its sponsors to quit claiming to call the shots. “It’s in their DNA, a real desire to prove you’re at the center of things.”

Anyone who needs to raise money for a think tank, of course, knows that telling people you’re at the center of things is how you get folks to write checks. And it’s particularly important at Heritage, which is proud of not being funded by big corporate donors. When you solicit from the grassroots, you need to keep them excited — by, say, having a leader who makes ferocious statements about impending revolutions, or by larding your policy book with red-meat items that inflame the other side.

For the broader public, meanwhile, those very same imperatives helped turn Project 2025 into a big, fat “kick me” sign.

There was also the matter of timing. Notably, the hugely influential original version of Heritage’s quadrennial Mandate for Leadership , which laid out ideas for Ronald Reagan’s presidency and served as a model for Project 2025’s book of the same name, was published in January 1981 — after Reagan had won the 1980 election but before he’d taken over. That’s a logical timetable if you want to sway policy, but not if you’re trying to swagger around and play election-year kingmaker.

“Putting it out there as they did, as early as they did, is what allowed oppo researchers to create a brand around it as you saw in the DNC,” according to a former Heritage employee.

This is especially true in a year when neither campaign has offered a lot of detail. “It’s not been a policy heavy campaign cycle, to say the least,” said Abigail Ball, the executive director of American Compass, an economic policy organization associated with the populist right. “So I think that the Project 2025 thing filled that hole. Given the fact that there wasn’t a ton else to focus on, this was the thing to pin to the campaign. I don’t blame anyone — it’s just a strange quirk of history.”

A Heritage spokesperson told me that the notoriety around Project 2025 is the work of Democratic strategists.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with Heritage and has everything to do with the Democrats and the left creating a bogeyman,” the spokesperson said. “They came up with a plan to lie about the project and say we call for a nationwide abortion ban or ending birthright citizenship, and then they went on to lie and say Trump’s behind it.”

As for the timing, Heritage says they released the blueprint early in order to shape the Republican primary campaign at a time when Trump’s renomination was not at all obvious.

Feulner, who founded Heritage in 1973, didn’t speak with me and hasn’t joined in any dissing of his successors. But his contribution to the public debate this summer was telling: In July, he and Pence co-wrote a Washington Post essay about the importance of defending Taiwan , saying that “we cannot give in to the isolationists.” Opposing China may be a widely shared cause, but the subtext — an old-fashioned call for American global steadfastness — made for quite the contrast to the Trumpy rhetoric of the current Heritage leadership.

In a way, Heritage has already lost, at least in terms of the one currency Beltway policy shops most crave: influence.

When Trump rolled out his transition team soon after the scary Project 2025 headlines, Roberts and crew were not front and center. So much for Bannon’s chief of staff speculation: The effort will instead be led by Linda McMahon, board chair at the rival America First Policy Institute. Founded by Trump administration veterans, the organization is just as odious to lefties as Heritage — but considerably less of a campaign-season refrain. My colleagues Hailey Fuchs and Meridith McGraw reported last month that America First Policy Institute’s CEO, Brooke Rollins, is working closely on transition plans.

“If you compare and contrast the Project 2025 stuff with what the AFPI has done, you haven’t seen the same level of rhetoric being used against AFPI and Brooke Rollins,” said Avik Roy, the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity think tank and a longtime conservative policy wonk from the non-MAGA right. “Brooke Rollins had much more of a heads-down approach where they didn’t make those kinds of boasts and where they didn’t seek publicity.”

Like denizens of policy organizations right, left and center, Roy was bemused by the irony of the fracas: For any think tank chief, the idea of publishing a paper that three-quarters of likely voters have heard of would seem like a dream come true, not a PR disaster.

“AEI published one for 2020,” said Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, referring to his own think tank’s guide for whoever won that year’s election. A bulwark of non-Trumpy conservatism, the organization was unlikely to emerge as the agenda-setter for either of the candidates. And, in fact, it didn’t: “I don’t think you noticed it,” Levin joked.

But now that one wonky what-to-do compendium has become a campaign-season bludgeon, is he worried that some other think tank might be next? Not so much. “We were trying to persuade the candidates. We weren’t speaking for them,” Levin said. Heritage “always ran this risk, and they were warned of it, of seeming to lead him.”

Indeed, in conversations with think tank graybeards, one theme that emerged across the spectrum was a kind of professional amazement that any serious policy organization could put itself in a position of becoming the story.

“It’s not just that they were thumping their chest, but they were sticking out their chins,” said Patrick Gaspard, who runs the liberal Center for American Progress, an organization that was famously close to the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns — but never a household name that could be bogeymanned to a mass audience.

Gaspard told me he’s not worried about some future CAP project earning similar headlines. “None of us are calling for a second American Revolution at the point of violence,” he said. “We are working squarely in the space of crafting policy proposals, crafting theories of the case for how those policies can be communicated and might be able to take root. … That’s how the vast majority of think tanks work, on both the left and the right. And once upon a time, it’s how the Heritage Foundation used to work.”

In fact, the confounding thing about Project 2025 is that it actually is full of policy ideas about even obscure corners of the federal government. Some of them are shockingly radical, like the idea of replacing thousands of professional public servants with political loyalists, but many of them are familiar conservative boilerplate.

The problem is, the wonkery coexists with an organizational public image — complete with an aggressive stream of not-very-scholarly political-attack tweets and sketchy operative-style output like misleading election-fraud videos — that creates a dynamic more like a GOP political campaign than a conservative policy shop. Throw in the embrace of Trump and it helps create a situation where the candidate gets asked to answer for Heritage’s work.

“The best thing for us to do as conservative policy advocates is to discuss policies, build support and not get involved with any campaigns,” said Chapman.

In the long run, that’s probably good for the campaigns as well as the think tanks.

Mario Cuomo famously said that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. But the upshot of Project 2025 was that it managed to tie Trump to 922 pages of often radioactive prose right when the moment called for something lyrical.

“It was like a think tank equivalent of a neutron bomb,” one longtime conservative policy intellectual told me. “It left the campaign standing but it did a huge amount of damage.”