EXCLUSIVE: Project 2025, the right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s vision for building a “better country for all Americans” during a conservative presidential administration, will be releasing a response to critics who have characterized the endeavor as far-right and extreme.
While former President Trump has repeatedly denied any collaboration with Project 2025, its detractors are primarily on the left, Heritage Foundation officials said Wednesday.
The officials exclusively shared with Fox News Digital the dozens of fact checks they plan to roll out to blunt false claims about the framework.
The foundation, founded by former congressional aide Ed Feulner, who offered a vision of a publicly-accessible, market-driven think tank for conservatives, has released similar frameworks in election years dating back to the 1980s.
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The Heritage Foundation flag flies over a building July 30, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
While Trump’s campaign has warned “it will not end well” for anyone directly linking him to the framework overall, many left-wing figures have launched specific attacks on the 900-plus pages of proposals.
In regard to the GOP nominee, however, the makers of Project 2025 will attempt to point to multiple media fact checks confirming Trump is not behind it.
Also called the “Presidential Transition Project,” the dossier claims to be explicitly independent of the Trump campaign, and Heritage Foundation officials routinely reference “conservative” goals, not “Republican,” “Libertarian” or other distinctly partisan ends.
However, numerous figures involved in Project 2025, including recently departed director Paul Dans, have connections to the last Trump administration. Dans was a top staffer in the Office of Personnel Management.
The project’s stated goal is to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical left.”
In one of the instances of false characterizations Project 2025 will cite, Vice President Kamala Harris claimed in her first campaign rally as presumptive Democratic nominee that the framework calls for cutting Social Security.
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Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts addresses delegates during the second day of the National Conservatism conference at the Emmanuel Centre May 16, 2023, in London. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Despite the Trump campaign’s warnings, Harris cited “Donald Trump” when referencing what the framework wants to accomplish.
“[He] intends to cut Social Security and Medicare,” Harris said in Wisconsin Tuesday.
Project 2025 plans to respond by highlighting CNN’s own fact check, which points out the term “Social Security” appears only a few times in the nearly 1,000 pages and never in reference to cuts.
Heritage Foundation spokesperson Mary Vought said Project 2025 proposes “no changes to Social Security.”
Vought told the outlet Harris should “follow her own advice and read the book, instead of promoting lies and disinformation.”
Officials with the project also plan to respond to claims vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, is a partner in the framework amid his prospective boss’s criticisms.
Vance has written a foreword to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book, wherein he writes that the nonprofit is not “some random outpost on Capitol Hill,” but the “most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
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JD Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio and a 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate, and his wife Usha Vance greet attendees during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, July 15, 2024. (Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, Project 2025 intends to blunt another Harris claim that the manual includes restrictions on IVF and contraception. Citing PolitiFact, Project 2025 plans to point out the term IVF, in-vitro fertilization, never appears in the document.
Responding chiefly to Harris’ claims, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said the presumptive Democratic nominee’s claims are “breathtaking in [their] dishonesty.”
“It’s so blatant that even corporate media outlets like CNN are calling out her lies. She has no policy record to run on, except her shambolic tenure as border czar.”
Roberts said Project 2025 is being barraged by “two sets of lies. First, that Project 2025 is connected with the Trump campaign. It’s not,” he said. “Second, that Project 2025 proposes all manner of wild, extreme policies. It doesn’t. Dozens of independent fact checks prove that [Harris] is lying, along with an army of paid influencers online. But the truth will win out in the end.”
For his part, Trump has expressed his disagreement with the faction of the right that opposes IVF after an Alabama court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law.
Project 2025 does, however, provide recommendations on limiting access to abortion.
Project 2025 also plans to respond to critics who have pointed to a widely disseminated post later found to be satire that claimed it sought to mandate “period passports” that track women’s menstrual cycles under penalty of law.
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An official with the project pointed Fox News Digital to a Reuters fact check that confirmed the claim was erroneously taken seriously online.
Other fact checks Project 2025 officials seek to roll out include responses to claims the framework seeks to end gay marriage and makes references to “valid family” structures, though it does seek to promote “stable and flourishing married families.”
Project 2025 also seeks to introduce changes to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, not to abolish it, as some critics have claimed.
In another regard, Starbucks’ decision to provide coffee to first responders at the Republican National Convention led to outrage at the Seattle-based brewer. Upset patrons began claiming it is therefore backing Project 2025 and called for boycotts.
Project 2025 spokesman Noah Weinrich told fact-checker Verify the claim is “purely misinformation.”
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