The Heritage Foundation's President Kevin Roberts on Project 2025
The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors, has a long history as a prominent conservative think tank. Much of its gravitas and reputation is rooted in the significant role it played in shaping policy during the Reagan era, then again in the Gingrich era. Heritage also played a significant role by giving intellectual ammunition to conservatives resisting the expansion of government during the Obama years. From the fight over Obamacare to the budget battles, conservative lawmakers came to rely heavily upon policy work done by Heritage, especially as complex multi-thousand page bills became the norm and outstripped the capacity of policy staff on the Hill.
As a think tank built on generating ideas and policy proposals to put into the hands of lawmakers and their staff, Heritage had largely avoided much public attention outside of professional political circles. That is, up until recent months when the Biden-Harris campaign and its surrogates began hammering Heritage’s Project 2025, a wide-ranging conservative policy blueprint and personnel database intended for the next administration. Biden and Harris began calling it “Trump’s Project 2025”, characterizing it as a “radical”, “extreme”, and “dangerous.” After the first presidential debate, an embattled President Biden ratcheted up the rhetoric with statements like: “Project 2025 will destroy America.” In response, President Trump disavowed Project 2025, stating on several occasions that he has not had anything to do with the project and has issued his own policy manifesto, called Agenda 47.
While the political and media focus has been on the policies outlined in Project 2025, several former Trump administration officials have told me that the main value of the project has been the vetting of prospective candidates who could competently and loyally fill some of the thousands of political appointments that are made by the President. That effort has been overseen by Paul Dans, who served in the Trump administration as chief of staff in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and John McEntee, who President Trump made Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in 2020. After the personnel problems of President Trump’s first transition, which saw more than a few staunchly anti-Trump figures being hired for key roles in his administration, the personnel database has come to be viewed as a key tool in ensuring that those who would staff a second Trump administration would be far more loyal than those who staffed the first.
Democrats may be proximately responsible for The Heritage Foundation now being a household name, but the prime mover in making that happen is Kevin Roberts, who took over as President of Heritage in December 2021. Under Roberts’ leadership, Heritage has been marked by a bolder and more assertive posture, a new emphasis on messaging and special projects, and a shift away from neoconservatism to a foreign policy of national interest and restraint.
I sat down with President Roberts this Wednesday, July 31st, to discuss Project 2025 and his work at Heritage.
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Note: The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Benjamin Braddock: The Heritage Foundation has been in the spotlight a lot recently. I remember when this was a pretty low-key organization, widely respected on the Hill, but you didn’t hear much about it outside of Washington. What changed?
Kevin Roberts: Two and a half years ago I started here with a mandate from the board to make sure that Heritage would continue to do what we’ve always been known for, namely policy and ideas. but also to think more about communications and messaging around the American Dream. That sounds trite, but we had done a lot of listening, focus groups and polls, and the message we’d been hearing from the majority of Americans was the feeling that someone had taken the American dream from them. That helped us to realize the urgency of the moment. All of the energy that we channel towards developing policy has to be accompanied by making Americans understand that we are working for them and giving them hope that the American Dream will survive. That’s been the strategy, and we’ve been successful.
Benjamin Braddock: When did Project 2025 start?
Kevin Roberts: We started laying the foundation in April 2022, before the GOP Presidential Primaries. At that point no one was certain if President Trump was running for re-election. So when we say that we’re “candidate agnostic”, that’s true, because it’s all about the policies and the ideas. If there’s hubris in that, it’s not on behalf of Heritage or Project 2025 per se but on behalf of the ideas. The Conservative movement has been fractious for about a generation. We believe that this project has helped to make it as coherent as it probably can be.
Benjamin Braddock: And as a 501(c)3, of course, you can’t do any sort of coordination with President Trump…
Kevin Roberts: Nope, not with anybody. We’re so fastidious about that, after we published the Project 2025 book in April 2023 we offered the briefing to every presidential contender, including President Biden. There were rumors for a while that Senator Manchin was going to jump in, so we delivered him the book and offered the policy briefing to him. We also offered it to RFK Jr. This is what we do, we offer candidate briefings to people running for office. Over the years, some Democrats have taken us up on that, and we’re just as happy to give it to them as we are to Republicans.
Benjamin Braddock: Are there any equivalents of Project 2025 on the institutional Left?
Kevin Roberts: Yes, the Center for American Progress and the work that they do is probably the closest equivalent. Their work has really been the roadmap for the Biden-Harris administration.
Benjamin Braddock: What was the thinking behind releasing this as a book for general public consumption, so far out ahead of the election? Was it to lay the groundwork for a transition team?
Kevin Roberts: Something upstream of that. The President-elect and Vice-President-elect determine the transition team. Our goal was to insert a desperately needed policy conversation into the political discourse. As I’m sure you can imagine, we’re frustrated with the purposeful mischaracterizations of Project 2025 that we’ve seen in the media. On the other hand, people are talking about the policy proposals in the book. We don’t need everyone to agree with us; what we want is to do is contribute a conversation on policies that has been lamentably missing from American political discourse.
Benjamin Braddock: The conversations that are being had though seem to be mostly cherry-picked or made-up. Reading through the document I was surprised at just how little social policy it contained compared to how it has been characterized. The main focus seems to be an agency-by-agency breakdown of how to make the departments and agencies work better and more efficiently.
Kevin Roberts: It really is an aggregation of a bunch of work that a lot of people have done over the years. The real benefit of this for people who are versed in policy is that all of this work has been put into one volume, and one plan, divided agency by agency. Which would be helpful to a transition team, no doubt. That is one of its purposes. But we have never been so presumptuous as to assume that, whoever the nominee would be, he or she was going to say, “oh, I’m using 100% of this.” That wasn’t the idea.
Benjamin Braddock: It’s not a total surprise that the Left would try to weaponize something like this in a campaign. And beyond that, they can map out their own resistance strategy – preparing lawsuits and that sort of thing. Was there an element of wanting to get public buy-in ahead of an election?
Kevin Roberts: There’s definitely a component of wanting to get public buy-in. That’s how the Heritage enterprise operates. We’re distinctive among D.C. policy organizations in that we’re funded overwhelmingly by individual Americans as opposed to corporations and foundations. And one of the reasons why we work like this is that it helps policymakers to understand that our proposals have been socialized, that there’s buy-in. But gaming this out, yes, we also expected a response from the Left. Did we expect it to be as vitriolic and mischaracterized as it has been? No. Would we have expected more of a concerted and cohesive push back by the Right on that mischaracterization? Yes. It took a week or so. It’s obviously happening now. But still, are there conversations about policies that would not have happened had we not published this? Yes. And so it’s achieved that objective.
Benjamin Braddock: Let’s talk about the vitriol and mischaracterizations. The Biden-Harris campaign and their allies have branded President Trump as a “threat to democracy” and claim that he wants to turn America into a dictatorship. Heritage and Project 2025 have often been attacked in the same breath. President Biden claims Project 2025 is “the biggest attack on our system of government and on our personal freedom that’s ever been proposed in the history of this country.” It has been widely suggested that this rhetoric was a motivating factor in the attempted assassination of President Trump just a couple of weeks ago. From a safety perspective, how do you feel as the leader of an organization that is being targeted with potentially dangerous rhetoric?
Kevin Roberts: Well, it’s terrible. You know, it’s not how the Right operates, thank goodness. And it’s also, I should say, not how most of the Left operates. Your average liberal voter in the United States is not a violent person. But the radical Left has, for years, been instigating the majority of political violence in this country by a country mile. And so to be on the receiving end of that: number one, I lament that that’s where the republic is. I would never wish that on anyone on the Left. And call us naive, but we’re going to continue to be idealists on that. Obviously what some people on the Left want is to push people off the field. That’s the whole motivation of this and it comes back the point I made earlier. That’s where we are, and that’s the urgency of the movement.
BB: The other component of Project 2025, probably even more important to an incoming conservative administration, is the personnel database. What is the status of that?
Kevin Roberts: It is a database for the conservative movement for personnel for federal, state and local levels. We’ve still got to build out the latter two: that is part of the objective. So the personnel database apparatus isn’t going anywhere. It goes back to the point about being candidate agnostic. We kept hearing that there are issues with staffing when a Republican President goes in, because the vast majority of federal personnel are opposed to his or her agenda, and we also hear that about the Hill. And we hear it from governors, especially first-term governors, and from county commissioners and county executives. So while the immediate need is staffing federal positions, since we’re building infrastructure, let’s also build out capacity for the state and local levels simultaneously. We’ll turn more attention to that after this current election cycle, but it’s always been part of the plan. It’s going to be around going forward. That’s the point.
Then-President Trump speaks at a Heritage Foundation meeting (October 2017).
Then-President Trump speaks at a Heritage Foundation meeting (October 2017)
Benjamin Braddock: I assume the impetus for the personnel database was the first Trump administration struggling with its own bureaucrats writing anonymous New York Times op-eds, saying, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”. We saw an incredible amount of people who were political appointees working against the President who hired them. I don’t think we’ve seen that in any previous Republican administration.
Kevin Roberts: This never happened on that scale before. And for everyone involved in this project, not only Heritage, but also the people who submitted their names to the database, and who volunteered to write parts of the book – their motivation came precisely from that. For some of them, no doubt, this motivation comes from loyalty to Trump. But it’s really just about things being proper and orderly in any administration.
Benjamin Braddock: I was surprised to see that Heritage launched its own parallel investigation into the attempted assassination of President Trump. What was the impetus behind that?
Kevin Roberts: Kevin Roberts: The Oversight Project is an attempt to make sure that policymakers, and federal policymakers in particular, have sufficient evidence for their investigation. I didn’t know until a year and a half ago that members of Congress, even Chairmen of subcommittees, can get stonewalled because of limitations in the FOIA statute. So the Oversight Project was created to close that gap. What we also discovered last year is that there was no other organizations on the Right that can move as quickly as we can with such a good team of lawyers. Obviously, we weren’t anticipating an assassination. But it was immediately obvious following the assassination attempt, that whatever the truth was, we weren’t going to get it so easily. The investigation now is in the hands of Congress, which means that we’re not going to know anything anytime soon. But we’re going to continue to conduct our investigation, even though we don’t have legal standing. But that’s not the purpose of the Oversight Project. The purpose is to educate the public and educate policymakers, and give them the evidence that lets them keep digging. Because if as assassination attempt had happened to President Biden we would be just as horrified, and we would be just as concerned. This goes back to the threat of political violence from the Left. This republic is fraying at the seams. At some point you have to recognize there’s a reason the public trusts so few institutions.
Benjamin Braddock: Do you think prior investigations have undermined the public trust to the extent that it is now necessary to conduct an outside investigation?
Kevin Roberts: The history of those commissions indicates real problems. I’ll say the caveat. I fully believe the intentions of Speaker Johnson are to get to the bottom of this. Including the composition of the committee. I’m not questioning that. In fact, we’ve applauded it. But we understand why, given the history of similar investigations and the politics of D.C., particularly in the present moment we’re in, an average person might say, “we’re not going to find out anything.”
Benjamin Braddock: Are you able to coordinate investigations at all with the official committees?
Kevin Roberts: It’s another component using the same tactics and delivery mechanisms that we usually use. In terms of coordinating hearings, official committees will call us and invite our people to testify a lot. We always say yes.
Benjamin Braddock: So you’ve gamed out a Republican win. Have you gamed out a potential Democratic win?
Kevin Roberts: One of the things we do here internally is gaming out different scenarios. In the event of a Democratic win a lot of our activity will involve reassuring conservatives, and people in the center that America is still worth fighting for. Other activity will involve more tactically offensive things, like litigation. Obviously, there will have to be a lot of defense played, which is largely what we’ve been doing under the Biden administration. So we are already versed in those tactics. I would even say that Heritage is very good at this. But I think the vitriol of the campaign suggests that if Vice President Harris wins this there will be real vitriol aimed at regular Americans even more than what we’ve seen in the last three and a half years. And I think Americans have real reason to be worried about that. So Heritage will stand in the breach.
Benjamin Braddock: Do you worry about any possibility that a Harris administration might try to come after Heritage itself?
Kevin Roberts: I have no doubt about it. I think every major institution on the Right will be a target. And anyone who thinks that that’s not a possibility isn’t paying attention.
Benjamin Braddock: We’ve already seen them go after organizations, other 501(c)3s, they go after the tax status or conduct sham investigations to bankrupt them with legal fees.
Kevin Roberts: Beyond our corporate ethics, which demand that we do what we say we do, the law is very clear, and that’s why we’re so earnest about compliance. We’re also a really big target. And we’ve been a target back in the 90s and then again under Obama. So we know how this game is played. But the worrisome thing is how explicit some of Harris’s people are about this. And I should also say that if conservatives are in power, they shouldn’t do the same thing to the Left. Part of what we’re lacking in the United States is institutional health. The government just needs to let these institutions do their thing as long as they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
Benjamin Braddock: Do you think there should be some level of response though to show that it can cut both ways? So that everyone can see the need to abide by a common set of rules?
Kevin Roberts: I think it’s good to show a little leg. When conservatives are elected, whether it’s the President, Governor, Mayor, or school board chair, because we’re conservatives we tend not to wield the power that we have. Wielding power is not a bad thing. Wielding power abusively is a bad thing. And I think we need to buck up a lot of our conservatives. I think Governor DeSantis is a great example of someone who’s used his authority, as Alexander Hamilton would say, vigorously but very, very appropriately. Governor Youngkin as well in Virginia, which is a place where it’s hard to do that but his appointments to university boards and other boards and commissions show he’s wielding that power fully, vigorously, cheerfully in a way that doesn’t target the Left but that is focused on recapturing institutions, and I think that’s good.
Benjamin Braddock: I think a lot of what people on the Right may call ‘retribution’ is just holding the Left to the same level of law enforcement scrutiny as the Right has been held to. That would be enough to get them to back off. Not even revenge, but just making them follow their own rules.
Kevin Roberts: I get that. And that’s really where the zone is, right? And that double standard is driving people crazy. It’s like, I don’t want to be vengeful here. I just want you to have to follow the same laws and rules that I do. We are the frogs in the proverbial pot of almost boiling water and we’ve gotten used to the temperature. And so much of what the “new” Heritage is trying to do is to tell people, we’re those frogs and we need to jump out of the pot. And it’s uncertain what that looks like. But if we stay in the pot, it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen to us. And that’s why it’s gratifying for us to see such support for Project 2025, in spite of all of this mischaracterization, and even comments from Trump’s campaign people, which we understand on the political level. We’ve had almost 6,000 people enter the database just in the last few weeks when this maelstrom started. That’s an indication of something positive, namely that Americans get it. They want to be part of the reform. They want to be part of bringing order to chaos. But our time to get that done in this republic – and I’m an optimist – is pretty narrow.
Benjamin Braddock: There was a somewhat threatening statement put out yesterday by Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, the co-managers of the Trump campaign. It suggested that Project 2025 was being scrapped. But your statements have largely been to the effect that work on the project was already wrapping up.
Kevin Roberts: Yes. By the end of the conventions, so by the end of August, we had always planned for the policy work to be wrapped up, and it almost is. And our director, Paul Dans, was planning to move on. So while maybe for the news cycle we could have said something different than that, we’re been very transparent, as evidenced by the publication being out for 18 months. So this has always been part of the plan. What has also always been part of the plan is for the personnel database to continue. I’ll have to leave to LaCivita and Wiles their understanding of that. They’re great campaign people, so that’s up to them. But I speak for Heritage and for the project, and to some extent even the movement, and the movement’s not going anywhere. No one’s going to elbow us out.
