Banning transgender troops from service, revoking the VA’s ability to provide abortion-related care and slashing the number of general officers in the ranks are just a few of the policy proposals laid out in a political playbook for what the next Republican administration could look like.
Known as Project 2025, the plan organized by the conservative think thank The Heritage Foundation would make sizable changes to the lives of service members and veterans if implemented.
The lengthy guidebook that seeks to reform several facets of the federal government has taken the spotlight in the 2024 presidential race.
While Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, Democrats have called the agenda a “dangerous blueprint” for what his second term could look like.
Project 2025 was authored by many officials who served in the first Trump administration.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump said in July on Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
He doubled down on that message just days later, and did so again in a campaign speech delivered following an attempted assassination against him.
But Democrats are not ready to let him off the hook yet. Vice President Kamala Harris, who received an endorsement from President Joe Biden to serve as the next commander-in-chief after he dropped out from the presidential election this past weekend, warned in a social media video that Trump and his team intend to implement Project 2025.
What exactly is Project 2025?
The Project 2025 initiative includes a roughly 900-page policy agenda, a personnel database for those who could serve in the next Republican administration, a training for those individuals called the “Presidential Administration Academy” and also plans for a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of office.
The effort includes recommendations by former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, and has been led by other former Trump administration officials including Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to the president and associate director of presidential personnel.
Policy recommendations stretch across the executive branch, from the White House to the Department of Justice to independent regulatory agencies, each broadly seeking to reduce the size and scope of the federal government.
“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,” a prelude to the handbook states.
The “administrative state” refers to executive branch agencies exercising the power to create, enforce and adjudicate their own rules. Those who oppose such a setup, primarily Republicans, argue that unelected officials should not have such powers.
How would Project 2025 impact troops?
The policy chapter on remaking the Department of Defense includes reducing the number of generals and reinstituting policies barring transgender individuals from serving in the military.
That portion of the guidebook was written by Miller, who served as acting defense secretary in the final months of the Trump administration.
“Our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, our impossibly muddled China strategy, the growing involvement of senior military officers in the political arena, and deep confusion about the purpose of our military are clear signals of a disturbing decay and markers of a dangerous decline in our nation’s capabilities and will,” Miller wrote.
Some of the suggested personnel changes Miller put forth fall in line with conservative culture war arguments, including:
- Reinstating service members to active duty who were separated for not receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, restoring their rank and providing them back pay.
- Abolishing diversity, equity and inclusion offices and staffs.
- Reversing a policy that lets DOD cover travel costs for troops seeking reproductive care, including abortion services.
- Eliminating “Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs,” which the text does not provide examples of.
Other prescriptions include:
- Suspending the use of the recently introduced Military Health System Genesis, where military applicants are medically examined before they can sign up.
- Requiring completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the military entrance examination, by all students in schools that receive federal funding.
- Increasing the Army force structure by 50,000.
- Aligning the Marine Corps’ combat arms rank structure with the Army’s.
- Maintaining between 28 and 31 larger amphibious warships as opposed to the what is specified in current Navy shipbuilding plans.
- Increasing F-35A procurement to 60–80 per year.
- Providing necessary support to Department of Homeland Security border protection operations.
- Improving base housing and considering the military family “holistically” when considering change-of-station moves.
Separately, in a chapter dedicated to revisions to the Department of Homeland Security, it was suggested that the Coast Guard, which currently operates under DHS during peacetime, be transferred out to another department.
Ken Cuccinelli, a former DHS official from the Trump administration, who wrote that section of the guidebook, said the maritime service should instead be moved to the Department of Justice when not at war, or alternatively to DOD for all purposes.
How would Project 2025 impact veterans?
The policy chapter on reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs involves rescinding VA’s ability to provide abortion services and revising hybrid and remote work options for the department’s employees.
That section of the handbook was written by Brooks Tucker, who served as the VA’s acting chief of staff in the last year of the Trump administration.
“The VA must continually strive to be recognized as a ‘best in class,’ ‘Veteran-centric’ system with an organizational ethos inspired by and accountable to the needs and problems of veterans, not subservient to the parochial preferences of a bureaucracy,” Tucker said.
Changes that Tucker advocated for include:
- Rescinding all departmental clinical policy directives related to abortion services and gender reassignment surgeries.
- Reviewing in-person work options. Tucker cited that, specifically for VA staff in the nation’s capital, the remote work policy is “undermining the cohesiveness and competencies of some staff functions and diluting general organizational accountability and responsiveness.”
- Requiring Veterans Health Administration facilities to increase the number of patients seen each day to equal the number seen by DOD medical facilities: approximately 19 patients per provider per day. Currently, Tucker said, VA facilities may be seeing as few as six patients per provider per day.
Not everyone however agreed with taking that approach.
“VHA healthcare providers need to spend more time with veterans during their appointments to effectively address their complex health needs,” Russell Lemle and Jasper Craven, from the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, wrote in a Task & Purpose op-ed. “By demanding that VHA facilities match the patient volume at DOD facilities, Project 2025 risks shortchanging veterans and compromising the quality of care they receive by treating them as if they are in the prime of their youth,” they added.
Other recommendations from Tucker included:
- Embracing the expansion of Community Based Outpatient Clinics without “investing further in obsolete and unaffordable VA health care campuses.”
- Revising disability rating awards for future claimants while “preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants.”
- Establishing a veterans “bill of rights” so vets and VA staff know exactly what benefits veterans are entitled to receive.
- Transferring all career Senior Executive Service individuals out of specific positions on the first day to “ensure political control of the VA.”
Michael Embrich, a former member of the Advisory Committee on the Readjustment of Veterans, shared in an op-ed for GovExec that following Project 2025′s plans to reshape the government workforce “would disproportionately affect veterans, many of whom rely on these positions not only for employment but also for a sense of purpose and community.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to an email request for comment.
Jonathan is a staff writer and editor of the Early Bird Brief newsletter for Military Times. Follow him on Twitter @lehrfeld_media
