I Helped Write the Project 2025 Rules. Let’s Set the Record Straight | Opinion

As a nationwide debate about President Joe Biden’s mental capacity heated up over the Fourth of July weekend, the president issued a statement that certainly didn’t help him sound more grounded in reality: He claimed that his opponent, Donald Trump, had embraced an “extreme Project 2025 agenda” that “should terrify every American.” That “agenda,” Biden warned, “would give Trump unbridled power over our daily lives and allow him to… gut the checks and balances” of the Constitution.

Biden’s media allies dutifully parroted his drivel. Some called Project 2025 a “transformational government plan” and a “dramatic expansion of presidential power.” Others said the project was “fiendishly authoritarian” and apparently inspired by Adolf Hitler. New York Times stated that Project 2025 “rejects the idea that government is comprised of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other.”

These claims are completely backward. The 2025 Project’s proposals would strengthen our system of government, not take it away from it. They would strengthen our checks and balances, not weaken them. “The fundamental transformation of the United States of America,” as Barack Obama said, is the stated mission of the left, not the right. Far from encouraging the exercise of unchecked power, the 2025 Project is a celebration of the Constitution.

The 2025 Project has published a thoughtful, sweeping policy plan called Mandate for Leadership 2025 that a conservative (or any) president could freely use or ignore. As the author of the introductions to all five sections of the book, I am probably one of the few people who actually knows the entire work—and it is nothing like what Biden suggests. As I wrote in the introduction to Section 1: “First and foremost, the president and those under his or her command must be committed to the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Indeed, perhaps the most radical thing about the Mandate for Leadership is its unwavering commitment to the Constitution as it stands. Far from attempting to “gut” that great document, Project 2025 seeks to restore its frayed fibers. It aims to strengthen the separation of powers, as well as federalism—the division of powers between the federal government and the states. James Madison, in Federalist 51, said that these dual safeguards provide “double security… to the rights of the people.”

The 2025 Project, led by the Heritage Foundation, includes an advisory board that includes Hillsdale College, the National Association of Scholars, and my own group, the American Main Street Initiative—along with more than 100 other conservative organizations. The primary goal of the effort is that the unelected, unaccountable administrative state is out of control. As Heritage CEO Kevin Roberts writes, the Mandate for Leadership outlines “how to restore the constitutional authority of the American people over the administrative state.”

Donald Devine, Dennis Kirk, and Paul Dans expand on this theme: “The people elect a president who is obligated by Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution to see that the laws are ‘faithfully executed,’ and his political appointees are democratically connected to this legitimizing responsibility.” And “An autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore, career civil servants should not alone spearhead major policy changes and reforms.” One imagines that most Americans would agree.

Moreover, executive agency rule undermines checks and balances. Russ Vought writes that “the modern executive branch”—“whether controlled by a bureaucracy or by a president”—“writes federal policy, enforces that policy, and often adjudicates whether that policy was properly designed and enforced.” He calls the result “constitutionally abysmal” and “urgently in need of repair.” This is not a call for unchecked executive power—quite the opposite.

In recent decades, the executive branch has routinely circumvented the Constitution and federal law to advance its own agenda. This has been particularly egregious in Biden’s case. The current administration has created an immigration crisis by refusing to enforce federal law, by asserting quasi-legislative authority to mandate masks and vaccinations, by brazenly decreeing what kinds of cars Americans can buy, and by issuing a royal order to transfer student loan debt from borrowers to all taxpayers.

The mandate for leadership highlights at least five specific ways that, under a conservative president, our nation could restore key aspects of our constitutional design. First, “the president must enforce the Constitution and laws as written, rather than unilaterally promulgating new ‘law’… Legislatures make laws in a republic, not executive branches.”

Second, “we must rediscover and honor the Founding Fathers’ wise division of war powers, in which Congress, the most representative and decisive branch, decides whether to go to war; and the executive branch, the most energetic and decisive, decides how to carry it out once it begins.” Our seven-year experiment with presidentially initiated wars—from Korea to the present—shows that “we depart from our constitutional design at our peril.”

Third, the president and the State Department should “stop circumventing the Constitution’s treaty-making requirements and stop enforcing ‘agreements’ that have not been ratified by the Senate, as required by the Constitution, as if they were treaties.

Fourth, “the Senate has been extraordinarily lax in carrying out its constitutional duty to confirm the President’s appointees.” As a result, unconfirmed “acting” officials have continued to serve in the executive branch for months or years without the Senate’s signature.

Fifth, the Justice Department should “respect the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech rather than attempting to control speech on the Internet.”

Each of these five points is about limiting or controlling, not expanding, executive power. The fact that Biden and his leftist allies nonetheless characterize Project 2025 as paving the way for a presidential takeover seems like a classic case of projection.

The truth is that progressives like “our democracy” a lot more than they like our Constitution. In fact, their contempt for our founding charter makes them sound the alarm whenever an initiative like Project 2025 shows a genuine commitment to restoring it.

Jeffrey H. Anderson is president of the American Main Street Initiative, a think tank for ordinary Americans. He served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author.