Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, this week likened his organization’s Project 2025 manifesto to a sprawling menu at a chain restaurant.
“I like to refer to it as sort of the menu from Cheesecake Factory,” he said of a document that calls for outlawing pornography and withdrawing FDA approval for abortion medications, among its 900 pages of choice offerings. “It’s every possible thing that somebody might want to take on.”
“It is impossible for every individual conservative to agree with everything in the document,” he told reporters at a Heritage event outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
But conservatives increasingly are finding this menu hard to swallow. A growing number of groups that Heritage previously listed as part of the effort’s advisory board are jumping ship, and even some whose staff helped craft Project 2025.
The Intercept’s review of the Project 2025 website identified seven conservative organizations that have been removed from the advisory board member list since Heritage first announced it two years ago. Among these are four newly identified groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an influential think tank.
The Defectors and the Departed
As of publication, the Project 2025 website lists more than 100 organizations as part of the “broad coalition” that helped shape the effort alongside Heritage. This coalition morphed over the last two years, The Intercept found, including by quiet attrition of some prominent members. Some dropped off the website even before the Trump campaign started distancing itself from Project 2025 in early July.
We traced the timeline of vanishing advisers by comparing Heritage press releases, the Project 2025 playbook, data pulled from the website, and archived versions of the advisory board page.
In June 2022, Heritage announced that it had formed an advisory board of “leading conservative partners” for Project 2025, which had 21 organizations. Of these original members, three are no longer on the Project 2025 website. This includes two newly identified influential libertarian groups — the now-defunct FreedomWorks and the Competitive Enterprise Institute — plus Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation, as previously reported.
In February 2024, FreedomWorks was the first to disappear from the Project 2025 advisory board page. Three months later, in May, FreedomWorks dissolved very publicly, but it continued its policy advocacy up to its final gasps.
When Heritage released the Project 2025 playbook in April 2023, it listed FreedomWorks as part of the advisory board, as did press releases in May 2023 and last October. Three former FreedomWorks staffers contributed to the Project 2025 manifesto, including Stephen Moore, an economist and former Trump adviser, who co-authored the Treasury Department chapter.
Former FreedomWorks leaders did not respond to inquiries about the group’s removal from the Project 2025 page prior to its dissolution.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, was also acknowledged in the Project 2025 playbook. Its president and CEO, Kent Lassman, contributed a chapter, as did Daren Bakst, a CEI senior fellow. A handful of other CEI staff were also contributors, including its general counsel Dan Greenberg, and Iain Murray, vice president for strategy.
Last August, economist and columnist Paul Krugman specifically called out CEI in his review of Project 2025’s effort to recast climate change as a culture war issue.
“Project 2025 appears to have been largely devised by the usual suspects,” Krugman wrote in the New York Times, “fossil-fueled think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute that have been crusading against climate science and climate action for many years.” CEI’s website has a clip of Krugman’s takedown.
Quite recently, CEI staffers trumpeted their involvement in Project 2025. In a January 2024 speech at Heritage, Murray said he was “delighted to contribute” to the “deregulatory proposals.”
“There’s a blueprint for a better tomorrow,” Murray said. In a February blog post, CEI economist Ryan Young, who got a shoutout in the playbook, pointed to Project 2025 as an example of “a successful approach to trade policy.”
Heritage continued to list CEI in Project 2025 press releases as recently as February 2024, and CEI remained on the online list of advisory board members until early March 2024. By March 15, CEI’s logo had been removed from the web page.
The next week, Heritage added a disclaimer to the Project 2025 page.
“The opinions of Project 2025 and The Heritage Foundation do not necessarily represent the opinions of every one of its advisory board partners,” it reads. The disclaimer apparently didn’t stanch the flow.
By late March, another group dropped off the page: the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish foreign policy think tank that seemed confused at why it was on Project 2025 lists in the first place. FDD was not in the inaugural advisory board cohort, but Heritage included it in the Project 2025 playbook and in press releases from May 2023 until this February.
FDD appeared on the online advisory board list as recently as March 15.
“FDD was included in error,” a spokesperson told The Intercept. “This was quickly corrected once known to us.”
FDD did not answer follow-up questions about how it failed to notice its inclusion in the Project 2025 playbook and advisory board lists for nearly a year.
In late June, the Discovery Institute, a think tank focused on “intelligent design” and “Judeo-Christian culture,” among other concepts, also disappeared from the Project 2025 site. The Discovery Institute, which did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, was first announced as part of the advisory board in a February 2024 press release. Its logo was on the Project 2025 website as recently as June 25, but by June 28, it was gone.
July brought more defections, including a vocal exit from America First Legal, whose staff played multiple roles in both the Project 2025 playbook and its training academy.
Most recently, as The Intercept reported, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan-based think tank, asked to be taken off the advisory board. Both groups disappeared from the website at some point between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday, and both were first listed as members in a February 2024 press release.
Neither elaborated in detail on their reasons for exiting the Project 2025 coalition.
“Being listed on an advisory board indicated that we endorsed everything listed in the project, which was not the case,” said Holly Wetzel of the Mackinac Center. “We do not sign our name to things that we do not fully endorse.”
Wetzel did not respond to follow-up questions about how the Mackinac Center ended up on the Project 2025 advisory board list in the first place.
The Heritage Foundation did not respond to emailed questions.
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