Exclusive: Project 2025, the right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s vision for building “a better country for all Americans” under a conservative presidential administration, is set to release a response to critics who have described the effort as far-right and extreme.
Former President Trump has repeatedly denied any cooperation with Project 2025, but the project’s critics are primarily on the left, Heritage Foundation officials said Wednesday.
Officials revealed exclusively to Fox News Digital dozens of fact-checks they plan to deploy to counter false claims about the framework.
Founded by Ed Fellner, a former congressional aide who proposed a public, market-driven think tank for conservatives, the foundation has released similar frameworks in election years dating back to the 1980s.
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The Heritage Foundation flag was raised atop a building in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. (Andrew Harnick/Getty Images)
While the Trump campaign has warned that “it won’t end well” for anyone who directly links the entire framework to Trump, many figures on the left have launched specific attacks on the more than 900-page proposal.
But when it comes to the Republican candidate, the creators of “Project 2025” will likely try to point to multiple media fact-checks that confirm that Trump is not behind it.
The dossier, also known as the “Presidential Transition Project,” claims to be explicitly independent of the Trump campaign, and Heritage Foundation officials frequently refer to “conservative” goals rather than “Republican,” “libertarian” or other explicitly partisan objectives.
But many people involved in Project 2025 have ties to the former Trump administration, including its recently resigned director, Paul Danz, who was a top staffer in the Office of Personnel Management.
The project’s stated goal is to “save the country from the rule of the radical left.”
In one example of misrepresentation cited by Project 2025, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed at her first campaign rally as the presumptive Democratic nominee that the framework called for cuts to Social Security.
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Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, addresses delegates on the second day of the 2023 National Conference on Conservatism at the Emmanuel Center in London on May 16, 2023. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Despite warnings from the Trump campaign, Harris referenced “Donald Trump” when explaining what the framework hopes to accomplish.
“[He] “I’m going to cut Social Security and I’m going to cut Medicare,” Harris said Tuesday in Wisconsin.
Project 2025 plans to push back, highlighting CNN’s own fact check, which points out that the word “Social Security” appears only a few times in the nearly 1,000-page document and never mentions cuts.
Heritage Foundation spokeswoman Mary Vaught said Project 2025 “does not propose any changes to Social Security.”
Vought told the outlet that Harris should “follow her own advice and read books instead of spreading lies and disinformation.”
Officials in the project also plan to respond to allegations that vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) is a supporter of the framework despite criticism from his future boss.
Vance wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, writing that the nonprofit is not “somewhere on Capitol Hill” but “the most influential ideological force for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
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Ohio Senator and 2024 Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, address attendees on the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on July 15. (Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, Project 2025 intends to blunt another of Harris’s claims that the manual contains restrictions on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and contraception. PolitiFact, Project 2025 I will point out that the word “IVF” never appears in the document.
Roberts was primarily responding to Harris’ allegations, calling the Democratic nominee’s claims “astonishing.” [their] Fraud.”
“It’s so blatant that even major media outlets like CNN are calling her out for lying. She has no policy record to back an electoral case other than her disastrous tenure as border commissioner,” he argued.
Roberts said Project 2025 is being assailed by “two lies.” “First, that Project 2025 has ties to the Trump campaign. That’s not true,” he said. “Second, that Project 2025 proposes all sorts of outlandish and extreme policies. That’s not true. Dozens of independent fact checks prove that.” [Harris] With an army of paid influencers online, they will lie, but in the end the truth will prevail.”
Meanwhile, President Trump expressed his disagreement with right-wing opponents of IVF after an Alabama court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law.
But Project 2025 does make recommendations about restricting access to abortion.
Project 2025 also plans to respond to critics who pointed to a widely shared post, later found to be satire, that suggested “period passports” tracking women’s menstrual cycles should be made mandatory, a move that could be punished by law.
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A source with the project pointed Fox News Digital to a Reuters fact-check confirming that the claim had been mistakenly taken seriously online.
Other fact-checks Project 2025 officials plan to deploy include addressing claims that the framework seeks to end same-sex marriage and refers to “working family” structures, even though the framework seeks to promote “stable, thriving married families.”
Project 2025 aims to introduce reforms to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration rather than abolish it, as some critics have argued.
In other respects, Starbucks’ decision A Seattle-based brewery has sparked protests after it served coffee to emergency workers at the Republican National Convention, with angry patrons calling for a boycott and claiming the company supports Project 2025.
Project 2025 spokesman Noah Weinrich told fact-checker Verify that the claim was “completely misinformation.”
