Project 2025 shows why politicians often stay silent on their priorities

By Matthew Gagnon

Say what you want to about Project 2025, it was still a very rare thing in modern American politics: straightforward, detailed and open to the public about its priorities. 

Clocking in at more than 900 pages, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is the Heritage Foundation’s attempt to define the course of the next presidential administration, and steer it in a direction that it defines as “conservative.” It is the result of years of work by more than 350 Heritage-affiliated right-of-center voices, and at one point was viewed as a blueprint for what the next Republican administration would do once in office.

That was before, of course, the Democratic Party started to comb through the 900 pages, cherry-picking what it considered the most problematic parts, and then attacking them as a means of attacking a potential second term of Donald Trump. 

That was before Trump, sensitive to the attacks and to the notion that he was being manipulated and controlled by an outside group, decided to mock and ridicule it himself. 

Now, the entire project, having become a punching bag for the Democrats and a liability for the Republicans is in mothballs, with Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, stepping away, and Heritage announcing that its policy work was concluding. 

This rapid rise and fall of the effort is instructive as to the perils of daring to say what you actually think, and do so in specific ways. 

Go to any political candidate’s website today and look for an “issues” section. If you head to Kamala Harris’ nascent presidential campaign website today, there isn’t even one there at all. She does get a bit of a pass given the recentness of her campaign and unprecedented way in which it began, but still she has been the sitting vice president of the United States for four years, so it shouldn’t be hard to put something up relatively quickly. 

Trump, who is now working on his third consecutive race for the White House, has only a vague list of priorities — a platform, he says — on his website. The policy depth we get there? Little more than statements like “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion,” or “end inflation, and make america affordable again,” or “make america the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!”

There isn’t much more depth as you go down the list of political offices. Here in Maine, U.S. Sen. Angus King, who is in cycle this year, has a list of “priorities” that he has for his potential 13th through 18th years in the U.S. Senate. Those priorities are vague statements like “supporting Maine’s businesses” or “modernizing Maine” followed by fluffy paragraphs that add few details. 

In Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, Republican challenger Austin Theriault doesn’t even bother having any kind of issues list on his website at all, though his news section has some intermittent statements on issues here or there. Incumbent Jared Golden, in contrast, does have a fairly extensive issues section with a more substantial list of things he is advocating for. It is still by no means a hyperdetailed 900-page manifesto, and much of what he has stated are things I disagree with, but he does get some points for trying. 

Those who choose to have nothing, or to feature meaningless gibberish, do so for a very specific reason. Sure, sometimes politicians have empty heads and couldn’t come up with an original thought to save their life, but more often they actually do have strident and specific beliefs, and they have been conditioned over the years to stay silent about them. 

The Project 2025 experience shows you why. Listing your priorities for public consumption, and giving detailed explanations behind those priorities, simply opens you up to criticism and complaint. Liberals had a field day with Project 2025, as did many on the right. I think some of the effort is good, much of it is unoriginal and banal, and other parts of it are not at all what I believe. Then again, I do not much like the populist turn on domestic and foreign policy at the Heritage Foundation, or among the conservative movement at large, in the last several years. 

It may be that those on the proverbial “other side” may hold more extremist and bizarre, even destructive ideas, but if they stay silent about them and you volunteer your thoughts, it ends up being you that gets hammered for doing so while they skate. And so, in the end, it is better for those who want to direct the future of this country to just shut up and say nothing.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.