The Heritage Foundation’s latest leadership mission and its overarching Project 2025 It has become a right-wing “boogeyman”-style Democratic talking point and fodder for Trump critics, but its founders and current leaders insist its past and current accomplishments speak for themselves.
President Donald Trump also criticized the latest report and denied having any involvement in its creation: “I don't agree with some of the things they say, some of the things they say are just ridiculous and egregious,” he said last month.
From the Reagan administration to the present, the Heritage Foundation has published the “A Call to Leadership” series almost every election cycle.
But the project leaders, including a former attorney general, Edwin Meese III, Now considered the conservative movement's foremost “elder statesman,” he insists there is nothing radical about the approach.
In an interview Wednesday, Mies said the main difference between 1980 and 2024 is that the way the project works has changed.
“The first survey in 1981 was much more systemic, with information on organizational structures and organizational norms, but from 1989 onwards it became more based on specific policy issues,” he said.
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Former Attorney General Edwin Meese speaks after being awarded the National Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump during a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House on October 8, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
After then-President-elect Reagan appointed Meese to head his transition team, Meese recalled being invited to a dinner with the Heritage Foundation and other conservatives and being offered an early version of the 1981 “Mission to Leadership” itself.
Charles Heatherly, who worked on the original project during the 1980 election cycle, said Thursday that Carter's team had been asked to discuss the plan, a move that would appear to undermine current assertions that the project was a one-sided, partisan issue.
“Both the Reagan and Carter campaigns were invited to send representatives to the dinner. The Carter campaign did not respond,” he said.
Meanwhile, Meese said the 1981 project was “particularly useful” during the Reagan administration because nothing like it had been done for a long time.
“Many years ago, I think there was a coalition government during the Johnson administration. That was well before 1980. So, really [for this project]. . . “
“It was a really great effort. [Heritage] They are [policy] Having actually worked in those and other departments, [areas]This gave them an opportunity to see how the rest of the government works.”
“And there was a chapter for each ministry and agency. I recall it being about 500 pages long. So I was very impressed with what was happening.”
Meese recalled telling Reagan about the new project, and said the California Republican was eager to see the finished product right away.
“President Reagan was so impressed that he called a cabinet meeting before the inauguration and put the book on everyone's desk.”
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Charles “Chuck” Heatherly (Thetaylorboyer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
The meeting took place at the State Department's conference center, and each secretary was told to “find their own chapter,” Meese said.
From that point on, what began as a meeting of conservative experts began to have a positive impact on efficiency and policymaking within the new conservative White House.
excerpt UPI reported: In 1981 the new administration recommended opposing affirmative action, stating that civil rights policy should be “based on the notion that all persons have an inherent right to the economic or other rewards they have earned through merit and that it is inherently wrong to punish those who have earned those rewards by giving preferential treatment and benefits to those who have not.”
As for how the Reagan administration used the results of the first project, Heatherly said the president's political appointees at the time were a “variety of people,” which led to differences in consideration.
“Some agencies took this more seriously than others,” he said.
Heatherly also recently Wall Street Journal column Defending the project then and now:
He said he assembled a team of 20 experts from former White Houses, academic institutions and the then-fledgling Heritage Foundation itself.
The 1980 book project was on the Washington Post best-seller list for three weeks, he added.
Steve Groves He served as assistant special counsel in the Trump administration while President Trump was under investigation by former FBI Director Bob Mueller.
He is also co-editor of this edition of Leadership’s Mission, the policy writing portion of Project 2025.
Groves denied the idea that Project 2025 or the book were deliberately tailored for Trump.
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Steve Groves (Heritage Foundation)
“This is a lot of sloppy journalism,” he said. “Most of it [journalists] Don’t chase the facts to get the facts right.”
Groves said mentions of Project 2025 in the media “exploded” after Biden's political collapse during the June debate.
He said this was evidence that the media, liberals and political coalition needed a new narrative, which had made “A Mandate for Leadership” a “crazy document.” Groves said many of the claims, such as calling for the next president to criminalize abortion and repeal birthright citizenship, were completely false.
“They just wanted to change the subject,” he said.
“[The idea] “It's a lie to say it's a Trump project,” Groves added, pointing to the fact that the anthology will be published in 2023 and was created in 2022, when the presidential election was still in anyone's hands.
Groves and Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, agreed on that point. Groves noted that many chapters in this year's study don't present a single ideological perspective.
When it comes to trade policy in particular, conservatives hold opposing views, both of which belong to the so-called “big tent” right.
As Groves points out, the chapter was co-authored by Peter Navarro, an ally of President Trump and a known “fair trade” advocate, and Kent Rathman, CEO of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a “free trade” advocate.
Groves said Rathmann's mandate more closely aligns with the Heritage Foundation's longstanding policy, but that Navarro's inclusion further undermines suspicions that the project is pro-Trump, far-right propaganda.
Roberts, meanwhile, suggested that these circumstances are what set The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 apart from actual partisan policymaking efforts.
For the 2024 election cycle, he said, the Heritage Foundation provided Project 2025 materials to all candidates and prospective candidates for the 2022-2023 term, including Biden, Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“President Biden did not respond, but if he had, I would have been happy, not sarcastic, to go personally to the White House and offer an explanation,” Roberts said.
“In terms of the origins of this mandate, we've always provided briefings to presidential candidates who are interested in being briefed. So we provide congressional briefings to Democrats. Of course, here in Washington, fewer and fewer people respond to our offers over the years. But maybe one day that will happen again.”
Roberts said there's also a misconception that the Heritage Foundation puts out the same types of “projects” every election, a claim he said is wrong on two counts.
First, there was no reason to completely rewrite the conservatism manual in an election like 2004, either for George W. Bush or then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), because Bush's reelection would have meant policy continuity.
Spencer ChretienAt the launch of Project 2025, John McClellan, deputy director of Project 2025, said conservatism has also changed since the 1980 election. Conservatives used to be opposed to things like the 1975 Church Committee, a congressional committee led by then-Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho that investigated the internal affairs and “abuses” of the intelligence agencies.
Church's committee may be welcomed by conservatives who are tired of the left's acceptance of “great government power,” many of whom no longer see it as a “weird, left-wing attack” on brave public servants and who themselves want accountability for the actions of unelected officials there, he said.
Roberts argued that Project 2025 is otherwise similar to the original 1980-81 iteration in that it represents a constellation of sometimes contradictory perspectives that fall within the conservative sphere, rather than a policy document based on a single Heritage perspective.
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Dr. Kevin Roberts, President, The Heritage Foundation (Getty)
Roberts also spoke about concerns on the right about the project, including its widespread condemnation by President Trump, because while many of Project 2025's authors were former administration officials, like Navarro, others, like Rathmann, were not.
“That speaks to the essence of the project,” Roberts said. “It's really candidate-agnostic, so it's interesting to see the spectrum of opinions ranging from, 'This is specific to Trump,' to, 'This isn't really specific to Trump.'”
“This underscores how serious we are about being candidate agnostic. This is of course important given the IRS designation, but more importantly, our own ethics in relation to Mr. Trump's campaign distancing itself from this, which is totally understandable.”
Roberts pointed out how the media has made Project 2025 into a “boogeyman.” When Americans from all walks of life are told exactly what the project is, they are more receptive to it than critics make them out to be.
Heritage editor-in-chief Roberts also denied rumors that the resignation of co-editor Paul Dans in July had anything to do with Trump's comments or the media censure. Dans' job has ended and he has moved on to other projects, Roberts said.
He added that just as when Heritage presented its first project to Meese and Reagan, there's no presumption that any candidate, conservative or not, will run with it.
“This is work that the Heritage Foundation does all the time. Our honest reaction to President Trump's response is that we are pleased that a lot of things seem to have calmed down,” he said.
“We want to wake up in a normal country. We want to wake up in a country where the American Dream is alive. That's what this project is about.”
