The 2025 Presidential
Transition Project

A NOTE ON“PROJECT 2025”

We want you! The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative
movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative
Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. Welcome
to the mission. By opening this book, you are now a part of it. Indeed, one setof eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the UnitedStates, and we hope every other reader will join in making the incoming Administration a success.
History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during
the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated,unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. In recent
election cycles, presidential candidates normally began transition planning in the latespring of election year or even after the party’s nomination was secured. That is too late.
The federal government’s complexity and growth advance at a seemingly logarithmic
rate every four years. For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now. The entiretyof this effort is to support the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be.
In the winter of 1980, the fledging Heritage Foundation handed to President-electRonald Reagan the inaugural Mandate for Leadership. This collective work by conservative thought leaders and former government hands—most of whom were not part ofHeritage—set out policy prescriptions, agency by agency for the incoming President.
The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, andthe revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed andvolunteer activists. With this volume, we have gone back to the future—and then some.

— xiii —Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative PromiseIt’s not 1980. In 2023, the game has changed. The long march of cultural Marxism
through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth,
weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom andliberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore
our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop
to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening
approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right.
Project 2025 is more than 50 (and growing) of the nation’s leading conservative
organizations joining forces to prepare and seize the day. The axiom goes “personnel is policy,” and we need a new generation of Americans to answer the call andcome to serve. This book is functionally an invitation for you the reader—Mr. Smith,Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith—to come to Washington or support those who can. Our
goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives
to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.
The project is built on four pillars.
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Pillar I—this volume—puts in one place a consensus view of how major
federal agencies must be governed and where disagreement exists brackets
out these differences for the next President to choose a path.
Pillar II is a personnel database that allows candidates to build their own
professional profiles and our coalition members to review and voice theirrecommendations. These recommendations will then be collated and sharedwith the President-elect’s team, greatly streamlining the appointment process.
Pillar III is the Presidential Administration Academy, an online
educational system taught by experts from our coalition. For the newcomer,
this will explain how the government functions and how to function ingovernment. For the experienced, we will host in-person seminars withadvanced training and set the bar for what is expected of senior leadership.
In Pillar IV—the Playbook—we are forming agency teams and drafting transition plans to move out upon the President’s utterance of “so help me God.”As Americans living at the approach of our nation’s 250th birthday, we have been
given much. As conservatives, we are as much required to steward this precious
heritage for the next generation. On behalf of our coalition partners, we thank youand invite you to come join with us at project2025.org.
Paul Dans
Director, Project 2025

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