In Trump's First 100 Days, a Fault Line Between DOGE and Project 2025 Has Become Clear
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A helpful way to think about the “Mandate for Leadership”—the radical policy blueprint laid out as part of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025—is as a kind of “political time capsule” reflecting the world as conservatives saw it in April 2023, when the document was first published . Bearing this in mind is important, because that world was very different from the one 19 months later, when President Donald Trump secured his reelection—or even the one on his second Inauguration Day, nearly two years after the mandate was released.
A lot transpired over those months and years, including, most notably, the emergence of Elon Musk as an influential player in Trump's orbit, and DOGE—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk mottoed as an institutional vehicle for carrying out the new administration's early agenda.
Still, those intervening developments have done little to quell the public's fears over the influence Project 2025 is having on Trump's second term, particularly with respect to his plans to limit abortion access, crack down on LGBTQ+ rights, and concentrate even greater power in the hands of the presidency. The vaunted 100-day mark of this new administration offers as good an excuse as any to take stock of whether those fears have borne out—and of the extent to which DOGE has contributed to or distracted from Project 2025's agenda.
At least on domestic policy, the administration has in a short period of time made a remarkable amount of progress on implementing the mandate's recommendations. Of the more than 530 executive actions across 20 agencies that the document advises, 28 percent have already been undertaken or completed .
This progress is all the more remarkable when one considers the administration's myriad other activities these past few months that, while not fulfilling the letter of Project 2025, arguably embody its spirit . Actions like rechristening the “ Gulf of America ” and extorting free labor from elite law firms contribute to its same basic goals of hindering potential accountability mechanisms and projecting knuckle-dragging belligerence on the global stage. This is also noteworthy, given the administration's sustained attention to issues like the pro-Palestine campus protests, which would not emerge until well after the mandate's publication.
Even more to the point, the White House appears to be on the cusp of checking off even more action items on the Project 2025 to-do list in the near future. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency will likely fulfill a number of the recommendations on internal office reorganization as part of a broader DOGE-led effort to gut agency capacity across the executive branch.
Indeed, as this last example suggests, DOGE has been instrumental in—even central to—the administration's efforts to effect Project 2025's agenda. This early convergence between DOGE and Project 2025 makes sense, given that both share the common goal of bringing about the “deconstruction of the administrative state”—something that has long been a rallying point for the broader conservative movement. Where the two diverge, however, is their preferred means for accomplishing that goal.
By and large, Project 2025 has set out to figuratively hack federal agencies by exploiting weaknesses in an obscure body of law known as administrative law, which governs how those agencies are supposed to operate. For example, it calls on the “next conservative president”—in this case Trump—to abuse loopholes in a statute called the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to make it easier to install leaders at agencies without having to put nominees through the standard Senate confirmation process.
In contrast, DOGE has focused on literally hacking federal agencies and their operations by exploiting weaknesses in the government's information-technology infrastructure. This strategy was on display when DOGE-affiliated personnel commandeered the Office of Personnel Management's email servers to send out threatening messages to all career civilian servants—including the now-infamous “Fork in the Road” and “5 things” emails—and when they captured the Treasury Department's payment systems in an attempt to shut down the flow of federal money to the US Agency for International Development.
A closer look at their respective strategies reveals another subtle difference: In seeking to deconstruct the administrative state, Project 2025's recommendations include a mix of gutting agency capacity and weakening or rescinding the regulations and policies they implement—often through the standard administrative process, which can be time-consuming and involves a fair degree of expertise and care.
In contrast, DOGE goes all in on gutting agency capacity with scanning attention to actual policy change. Why go through the hassle of eliminating disfavored policies when you can simply render them dead letters by depriving agencies of mission-critical staff and other essential support resources necessary for their enforcement?
Notably, this difference in approach might explain some of the Trump administration's biggest departures from the Project 2025 playbook—and thus reveal the extent of DOGE's early influence. For instance, rather than seeking USAID's wholesale elimination, as the administration has pursued, “Mandate for Leadership” calls merely for scaling back its actions and purging any so-called woke elements of the agency's agenda, such as the promotion of LGBTQ+ rights abroad.
Of even greater significance, though, is the potential conflict these contrasting approaches carry for the Trump administration in the months ahead. Conceptually speaking, tearing down agencies and programs, which has been the focus so far, was the relatively easy part. But Project 2025 also embraced a distinctive “rebuilding plan,” which involved transforming the administrative state —including by strengthening components of this apparatus—into a tool for instituting its archconservative vision of society. Among other things, the mandate's drafters imagine a Christian nationalist state in which our legal and other social institutions are aligned with fundamentalist Christian dogma, a social hierarchy built around patriarchy and white supremacy, and an economy that is extractive and heavily stratified in structure. Needless to say , accomplishing all of this requires an enormous amount of state capacity.
Yet, it is far from clear that this is the kind of society that Elon Musk would sink considerable resources into building through his DOGE project. More likely, he would embrace some version of the techno-libertarianism that most Silicon Valley elites have increasingly coalesced around since the dawn of the dot-com era. In general, this vision aspires to a future in which the nation-state-centered global world order is largely abandoned. In its place, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and other technological innovation would supply a new basis for restructuring our economic and social relationships. According to its supporters, a tech utopia would demolish existing power structures, leaving individuals freer to thrive according to their inherent merits. Conveniently, though, large tech-focused multinational corporations would no doubt take on an even greater prominence—perhaps somewhat akin to the nation-state—if the techno-libertarian dreams were ever to be realized.
The fundamental incompatibility between these Project 2025 and DOGE visions is immediately obvious. (Of course, even some overlap remains. For instance, techno-libertarians would no doubt fully embrace Project 2025's calls for significant privatization of essential government functions, such as weather forecasting and national security intelligence.) DOGE's elimination of USAID is suggestive of the conflict that may lie ahead. Project 2025 ultimately envisioned this agency being repurposed into a tool for spreading the tenets of Christian nationalism (and ultimately using foreign-aid programs to induce receiving nations to realign their domestic policies with Christian fundamentalism).
In contrast, something like USAID would have no role to play in Musk's vision of the future. This might explain DOGE's attempts to abolish the agency altogether.
The irony of all of this is that the individual who will ultimately be responsible for resolving this inevitable conflict is Trump, who famously lacks anything approaching a coherent political vision. Whatever rebuilding project his administration ends up pursuing will likely be a jumbled, self-contradictory mishmash of the Project 2025 and DOGE visions—defined more by whatever happens to stroke Trump's ego than by ideological heft. Time will tell whether this compromise, such as it is, is sufficient to keep intact the fragile coalition that managed to get Trump elected twice, or whether it will hasten its demise.
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