Trump's blueprint for power

Donald Trump started his second term using Project 2025, a detailed policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation showing how a conservative president could aggressively use executive authority to reshape government.

Vought leads the charge

Trump appointed Russell Vought, the intellectual force behind Project 2025, to lead his Office of Management and Budget and put its ideas into practice.

Government broken by design

Trump's administration has fired hundreds of thousands of employees, torn up policymaking procedures, and demolished guardrails protecting democracy, leaving the next president with a structurally broken government.

Democrats see the lesson

Democrats now understand that wielding power requires not just policy vision but a theory of government, a plan to reshape the state's structure to make new laws work in practice.

The real Project 2029

Unlike the official Project 2029 think tank effort, a quieter real Project 2029 is emerging from collaboration between NGOs, ex-officials, and academics with a true equivalent to Project 2025.

No single leader, shared vision

Unlike Project 2025's single organization, the real Project 2029 emerges from loose groupings with no central planner. Its core ideas have become consensus across Democratic Party factions and top 2028 hopefuls.

“There is no one plan, this is the biggest thing I want to convey.”

Two movements converge

State capacity reformers want efficient government to deliver services quickly. Pro-democracy advocates want to constrain executive power. Trump's assault on both made these separate movements suddenly urgent and aligned.

The two faces of government

K. Sabeel Rahman and Sam Berger argue the federal government has two faces: a civil state delivering benefits, bogged down by procedure, and a coercive state moving at lightning speed with few checks.

“The levers of state power most unrestrained are the ones most prone to abuse.”

Speed up good, slow down bad

The emerging goal is to speed up implementation of duly passed laws while slowing down presidential emergency powers and executive discretion, creating a more efficient and more constrained government.

Civil service reform proposal

Former Biden officials Loren DeJonge Schulman and Rob Shriver propose reforming Title 5 to shorten hiring processes, create merit-based performance assessment, and raise civil service salaries to compete with private sector.

Concrete policy ideas emerging

Key proposals include new civil service rules, agencies dedicated to fighting corruption, overhauled privacy laws, capping emergency declarations at thirty days, and rewriting the nineteen forty-six law governing executive implementation.

Structural changes on the table

More contentious proposals include filibuster abolition, Washington DC and Puerto Rico statehood, and Supreme Court overhaul, though these remain far more divisive than executive branch reforms.

Consensus across factions

The Roosevelt Institute, led by Elizabeth Wilkins, has partnered with Searchlight and the Niskanen Center to build shared left-center vision for fixing government, bridging previously hostile factional divides.

Buttigieg leads the charge

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has gone furthest in embracing Project 2029, making institutional reform his central pitch and defining the foundational issue as building a government that works and protects freedom.

“The kitchen table cannot be improved unless we are also reforming the institutional and political floor on which that kitchen table sits.”

The efficiency-restraint tension

Alex Mechanick warns that making government more efficient could create better tools for authoritarian abuse. The two Project 2029 goals of efficiency and executive constraint may genuinely conflict.

“If you go down the line of the things the government ordinarily does, and you cross-reference them against abuses of power, I'm not sure that you get a clean separation.”

The Privacy Act dilemma

Democracy reformers want stricter data-sharing rules to prevent DOGE and ICE abuse. State capacity thinkers see the Privacy Act of nineteen seventy-four as a barrier to swift policy implementation.

Political obstacles remain

Democrats may not win a trifecta in twenty twenty-eight. Even with one, Senate moderates may refuse to abolish the filibuster or expand the Supreme Court, making the full agenda politically uncertain.

Bipartisan path possible

Some reformers think bipartisan legislation might be more viable than party-line pushes. Republicans have historically cut red tape, and both parties supported the Electoral Count Reform Act in twenty twenty-two.

Still far from ready

Key policy and political strategy issues remain unsettled. The real Project 2029 has far to go before it is ready for implementation, though its ideas have penetrated nearly every corner of the Democratic Party.