E.J. Fagan: I'd like to add some historical context to the discussions around Project 2025. The discourse misses why Project 2025 is so important. As I write about in my book, Heritage has built something like Project 2025 for every election since 1980, but this time it's different. Big 🧵

I'd like to add some historical context to the discussions around Project 2025. The discourse misses why Project 2025 is so important. As I write about in my book, Heritage has built something like Project 2025 for every election since 1980, but this time it's different. Big 🧵

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The Heritage Foundation was established in 1973. It's founders created the "advocacy" model - a hybrid of think tank and pressure group. They were outsiders in the Nixon/Ford era, but formed an alliance with the movement conservative faction led by Ronald Reagan.

Their big move came in 1980. They published Mandate for Leadership, a thick book filled with hundreds of policy recommendations for every major executive branch agency. Reagan bought in. Heritage claimed that the administration implemented more than half of their recommendations.

Why was Mandate so successful? In part, because Reagan bought in. But mostly because presidential candidates don't do a lot of real policy planning, just outlines for big campaign promises. The Center for American Progress has done similar work for Democrats.

Heritage also worked to get its employees and other like-minded movement conservatives appointed to positions in the Reagan government. They created directories of conservative policy experts that you can still get in most university libraries.

Heritage made big claims about how successful their rolodex was. They claim that they got "more than two hundred" people hired into the Reagan Administration. I have my suspicions about this claim, but we can point to quite a few Heritage employees in Republican admins since.

Project 2025 is just the newest incarnation of the Mandate/conservative rolodex that Heritage maintains. However, this one is different. Heritage had gradually grown less influential in Republican admin staffing post-Reagan. After 2020, Heritage changed its strategy.