Every new administration that wins power away from the opposing party contends that whatever its predecessors did was terrible and that victory constitutes a popular mandate to fix or get rid of it all. Elections have consequences, politicians love to remind us, and a big one entails trying to change everything, right away.
It is possible to read “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — an 887-page document proposing to remake the executive branch, department by department, agency by agency, office by office — as one more go-round in this Washington tradition. With contributions by dozens of conservative thinkers and activists under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the book announces itself as part of a “unified effort to be ready for the next conservative administration to govern at 12:00 noon, Jan. 20, 2025.” There is much work ahead, it states, “just to undo the significant damage that will have been done during the Biden years.”
The book has not been blessed by Donald Trump or his campaign, and the authors emphasize that they want to help the next conservative president, “whoever he or she may be.” But with so many former Trump officials among its contributors, so much praise for him throughout its pages (he is mentioned some 300 times, compared with once for Nikki Haley) and such clear affinity between Trump’s impulses and the document’s proposals, it is easy to imagine “Mandate for Leadership” wielding influence in a second Trump term. It is an off-the-shelf governing plan for a leader who took office last time with no clear plan and no real ability to govern. This book attempts to supply him with both.
There is plenty here that one would expect from a contemporary conservative agenda: calls for lower corporate taxes and against abortion rights; criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the “climate fanaticism” of the Biden administration; and plans to militarize the southern border and target the “administrative state,” which is depicted here as a powerful and unmanageable federal bureaucracy bent on left-wing social engineering. Yet what is most striking about the book is not the specific policy agenda it outlines but how far the authors are willing to go in pursuit of that agenda and how reckless their assumptions are about law, power and public service.
“Mandate for Leadership,” which was edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation, is not about anything as simplistic as being dictator for a day but about consolidating authority and eroding accountability for the long haul. It calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds. Though it assures readers that the president and his or her subordinates “must be committed to the Constitution and the rule of law,” it portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance. It elevates the role of religious beliefs in government affairs and regards the powers of Congress and the judiciary with dismissiveness.
And for all the book’s rhetoric about the need to “dismantle the administrative state,” it soon becomes clear that vanquishing the federal bureaucracy is not the document’s animating ambition. There may be plenty worth jettisoning from the executive branch, but “Mandate for Leadership” is about capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.
“Mandate for Leadership” is not the kind of book meant to be read straight through from beginning to end, certainly not by any one person. (Trust me.) Each chapter features one or more authors exploring a particular department or agency in detail, so grasping the entirety of the book’s proposals would require deep expertise in multiple fields — trade negotiations, environmental science, diplomacy, nuclear power, to name a few — and in the intricacies of Washington wonkdom. The book’s prose is dense, packed with bullet points and bureaucratese, and reading about so many obscure offices, page after page, left me sympathetic to its complaints about an elephantine fourth branch of government. The introduction asserts that “one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th president of the United States,” but I wouldn’t count on any future president poring over these pages, highlighter in hand, nodding sagely. “Mandate for Leadership” is not an exercise in persuasion but a statement of purpose.
The mayhem of the Trump presidency’s early days might have occurred partly by design — recall Steve Bannon’s strategy to “flood the zone” with an expletive — but it is not an experience that the authors of this volume wish to repeat. The book’s existence is an implicit admission that the Trump administration’s haphazard approach to governance was a missed opportunity. Executing a conservative president’s agenda “requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it,” the document says on its opening page. The phrasing quickly grows militaristic: The authors wish to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day 1 to deconstruct the administrative state.”
That deconstruction can be blunt. Portions of “Mandate for Leadership” read as though the authors did a Control-F search of the executive branch for any terms they deemed suspect and then deleted the offending programs or offices. The White House’s Gender Policy Council must go, along with its Office of Domestic Climate Policy. The Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is a no-no. The E.P.A. can do without its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be dismantled because it constitutes “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
Sometimes search and destroy gives way to search and replace. At the Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force, which the Biden administration created five months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, must be supplanted by a pro-life task force that ensures that all Health and Human Services divisions “use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.” The document also asserts that the department should be known as the “Department of Life.” There is little interest here in the notion that different states can reach their own conclusions on abortion rights, as Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. Instead, the next president should work with federal lawmakers “to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support.” (The focus on life is somewhat selective; while urging the next president to work on “restoring a culture of life in America,” the document also calls for “finality” in dealing with the dozens of inmates on death row.)
One of the book’s most frequent targets is D.E.I. — the diversity, equity and inclusion infrastructure erected throughout the federal government in recent years that “Mandate for Leadership” equates with racism. Just about every corner of the administration, from the Department of Labor to the U.S. Agency for International Development, must be scrubbed clean of D.E.I., and the measures to accomplish this can be brutish. At the Treasury Department, for instance, a new conservative administration would identify and interview every official who has taken part in D.E.I. programs to assess the scope of the efforts and ensure that they are eliminated, and it would “treat the participation in any critical race theory or D.E.I. initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment.”
The excesses of diversity, equity and inclusion programs are hardly a concern only for the political right, but this isn’t just the countermanding of an ideology. It is a purging of anyone touched by it. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the D.E.I. party?
If “Mandate for Leadership” has its way, the next conservative administration will also target the data gathering and analysis that undergirds public policy. Every U.S. state should be required by Health and Human Services to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence and by what method.” By contrast, the government should prohibit the collection of employment statistics based on race or ethnicity, and the Centers for Disease Control should discontinue gathering data on gender identity, on the grounds that such collection “encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities.” (Why the executive branch might concern itself with the subjective identities of American citizens becomes clearer some 25 pages later, when the document affirms that the government should “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”)
The portion of the book dedicated to the Census Bureau warns that the Biden administration’s data collection “could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas,” yet “Mandate for Leadership” does not seem to grasp how its own proposals could prompt the same concerns in the opposite direction. It doesn’t take a conspiratorial mind to wonder about this; the document states its goal forthrightly: “Strong political leadership is needed to increase efficiency and align the Census Bureau’s mission with conservative principles.”
Even a leader who declared that he alone could fix things cannot accomplish all this alone. Joining the next conservative president would be that army of appointees marching to conquer the executive branch. One of the “pillars” of Project 2025 is the creation of a personnel database — a sort of “right-wing LinkedIn,” The Times has reported, seeking to attract some 20,000 potential administration officials. “Mandate for Leadership” maintains that “empowering political appointees across the administration is crucial to a president’s success,” and virtually every chapter calls for additional appointees to wrest power from longtime career staff members in their respective departments.
This is especially notable at both the State Department and the Department of Justice, which are considered susceptible to unsavory influences, in almost identical terms. “Large swaths of the State Department’s work force are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative president’s policy agenda and vision,” the book reads. Of the Department of Justice: “Large swaths of the department have been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices.” (Lesson: Beware of swaths.)
It is, no doubt, the prerogative of all incoming presidents to appoint officials who support their agenda; in fact, since presidents are elected on their proposed agendas, it is right that they would do so. In “Mandate for Leadership,” longtime career civil servants are disparaged as “holdovers” with suspect loyalties, lacking the “moral legitimacy” that comes from being appointed by a president who is constitutionally bound to see that the laws are faithfully executed. The book calls for the reinstatement of Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order that would allow the president and political appointees to convert many career civil service positions into appointed roles, thus making those people easier to dismiss and replace with loyalists. In a memorable euphemism, the book refers to this effort as “identifying programmatic political work force needs.”
But there is a difference between fostering a work force that is accountable to the president and simply politicizing all aspects of the executive branch, including areas that require specific expertise. “Mandate for Leadership” leans toward the politicizing approach.
At the E.P.A., for example, the document calls for a new science adviser and at least six new appointees charged with reforming the agency’s scientific research; qualifications for those roles should stress managerial skills rather than “personal scientific output.” Throughout the book, descriptions of new research agendas are often paired with the explicit findings that such research should yield, whether on the mental and physical damage that abortion inflicts on women or the pernicious impact of taxes and regulations on minority-owned businesses. Later, tucked into a discussion of the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the Commerce Department — yes, the weeds are tall and scratchy here — the document urges a new administration to ensure that “any research conducted with taxpayer dollars serves the national interest in a concrete way in line with conservative principles.” It’s an effective sleight of hand: politicizing government-funded scientific research by tying the national interest to conservative priorities.
The administration of relief funds would also assume an ideological bent. “Mandate for Leadership” looks askance at Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, which makes investments to promote growth and innovation in struggling communities and helps distribute emergency funding. Ideally, the book says, a new conservative administration would abolish the agency and send its resources elsewhere. However, if congressional opposition makes that impossible, the Economic Development Administration should instead “better align funding with conservative political purposes.” There’s little subtlety: The book then argues that providing agency funds to “rural communities destroyed by the Biden administration’s attack on domestic energy production would be well within the scope of E.D.A.’s mission.” If you can’t beat them, at least make them work for you.
Despite its professed desire to reduce the size and ambition of government “back to something resembling the original constitutional intent,” in practice, the document’s contributors are willing to build significant bureaucracies. “Mandate for Leadership” calls for dismantling the Department of Homeland Security, for example, and instead creating a major stand-alone federal immigration department. It would piece together Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as portions of the Health and Human Services and Justice Departments to build a Cabinet-level body employing more than 100,000 federal workers. This would be “the third-largest department measured by manpower,” the book boasts.
Proposed immigration policies include the “indefinite curtailment” of refugee admissions, completing a southwestern border wall and deploying “active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen to assist in arrest operations along the border — something that has not yet been done.” It even imagines a new immigration-related revenue stream: charging asylum seekers for “premium processing” of their claims, an innovation that would offer “an opportunity for a significant influx of money.”
The authors recognize the bipartisan dangers of excessive political appointments in the executive branch, but they worry about that mainly when their opponents are the ones benefiting. “The desire to infiltrate political appointees improperly into the high career civil service has been widespread in every administration, whether Democrat or Republican,” the document acknowledges. “Democratic administrations, however, are typically more successful because they require the cooperation of careerists, who generally lean heavily to the left.”
This book does not call for an effort to depoliticize the administrative state. It simply wishes to politicize it in favor of a new side. Everybody does it; now it’s our turn. Get over it.
This attitude proves especially consequential in the book’s treatment of the Justice Department, which has “lost its way,” becoming “a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda.” To find its way back in a new conservative administration, “Mandate for Leadership” implies, the department must become subservient to the White House.
The document cites several reasons the Justice Department has “forfeited the trust” of many Americans, including its promotion of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and the abdication of its duty to enforce immigration laws. Therefore, a “vast expansion” of political appointees across the department is required, beyond those traditionally appointed to the office of the attorney general and deputy attorney general.
All such appointees must work closely with the White House; in fact, the Justice Department and the White House counsel should act “as a team.” And while the book notes that contact between the White House and the Department of Justice traditionally occurs between the office of the White House counsel and the attorney general or deputy attorney general — a practice that aims to reduce the risk of political interference in law enforcement — “Mandate for Leadership” encourages a new administration to “re-examine this policy and determine whether it might be more efficient or more appropriate for communication to occur through additional channels.”
It is more efficient and appropriate if the goal is to permit greater White House pressure on the nation’s senior law enforcement officers. Even the F.B.I. director, the document argues, must be as politically accountable to the president as any other senior official. “To ensure prompt political accountability and to rein in perceived or actual abuses,” it asserts, “the next conservative administration should seek a legislative change to align the F.B.I. director’s position with those of the heads of all other major departments and agencies.” Trump has complained that the F.B.I. and Justice Department have been weaponized against him; these reforms would ensure their politicization.
After all, when the Justice Department and White House must work as a team, it is clear who serves as team captain. “While the supervision of litigation is a D.O.J. responsibility, the department falls under the direct supervision and control of the president,” the book states. Even though the department will invariably face “tough calls” in its litigation decisions, “those calls must always be consistent with the president’s policy agenda and the rule of law.”
What happens when the agenda and the law conflict? The answer is implicit throughout “Mandate for Leadership.” At the Department of Homeland Security, for example, the general counsel should hire more political appointees to supervise the office’s career lawyers, because “the legal function cannot be allowed to thwart the administration’s agenda by providing stilted or erroneous legal positions.” The law must submit to the president’s priorities. If not, the lawyers are doing it wrong.
Declaring inconvenient laws inapplicable is another option. For example, when the secretary of homeland security decides that “an actual or anticipated mass migration of aliens” headed to the United States “presents urgent circumstances,” the secretary may issue whatever rules and regulations are deemed necessary, for as long as necessary, “including through the expulsion of such aliens,” with a final proviso that “such rule and regulation making shall not be subject to the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.” Read the act, and you’ll see that it governs the process by which agency rules are exposed to public comment and are subject to review by the courts. That lone sentence, tacked on at the end of a paragraph on Page 152 of “Mandate for Leadership,” is a bureaucratic invitation to legal impunity.
The book regards pursuit of the president’s agenda — variously described as the president’s “needs,” “goals” or “desires” — as always consistent with the law. “The modern conservative president’s task is to limit, control and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people,” it states. And the American people’s needs, goals and desires are conflated with those of the leader.
Ironically, in this worldview, the people’s needs and desires can become circumscribed. In the book’s foreword, Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes that the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence should be understood as the “pursuit of blessedness,” that is, that “an individual must be free to live as his creator ordained — to flourish.” The Constitution, he explains, “grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.” The book ties this argument to the philosophical and legal concept of “ordered liberty,” in which individual rights are weighed against social stability.
The notion that liberty entails the discipline to do the right thing, as opposed to the choice to do whatever things we want, has a long lineage in American political thought, dating back to the Puritans and the “city on a hill.” But in “Mandate for Leadership,” the answer to what we ought to do depends on the cultural and religious proclivities of the authors. “This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family — marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners and the like,” Roberts writes. It is also found in work, charity and, above all, in “religious devotion and spirituality.” Later, in a chapter on the Department of Labor, the book suggests that because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest,” American workers should be paid extra for working on that day. “A shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals,” it says.
“Mandate for Leadership” often strains to reconcile what we ought to do with what the authors want us to do. In the same chapter on the Department of Labor, for example, the book calls on Congress to require that for all new federal contracts, at least 70 percent of contractors’ employees must be U.S. citizens (with the bar rising to at least 95 percent over time). Such a law is necessary, the book explains, “so that employers can again have the freedom to make hiring Americans a priority.”
If you want to make federal contractors hire more American workers, then, by all means, propose such a law. But couching it as a way to provide greater “freedom” to employers so they can do what the government is compelling them to do debases the notion of freedom. And it makes the book’s interpretation of “ordered liberty” seem more focused on giving orders than protecting liberty.
“Mandate for Leadership” is about not just a president exerting control over the executive branch but also the executive expanding its power over the other branches of government. In the book, the legislature and judiciary suffer from many small cuts and a few big ones.
Congress’s powers of oversight, for instance, would diminish in various ways. Rather than endure the process of congressional confirmation for people taking on key positions in the executive branch, the new administration should just place those officials in acting roles, which would allow them to begin pursuing the president’s agenda “while still honoring the confirmation requirement.” (That is, if bypassing the requirement is a form of honor.) Lawmakers would no longer review U.S. foreign arms sales, the book states, except when “unanimous congressional support is guaranteed,” a requirement that renders those reviews pointless. The Department of Homeland Security should have the power to select and limit its congressional oversight committees. And the White House can tell the State Department when to remain “radio silent” in the face of congressional inquiries.
In a section titled “Affirming the Separation of Powers,” the book contends that the executive branch — that is, the president and his team at the Justice Department — is just as empowered as any other branch of government to “assess constitutionality.” A new conservative administration must “embrace the Constitution and understand the obligation of the executive branch to use its independent resources and authorities to restrain the excesses of both the legislative and judicial branches.” The president must make sure that the leaders of the Justice Department share this view of the separation of powers.
It is the role of the judiciary, not of the president and a pliable attorney general, to decide whether laws and policies are constitutional. Believing otherwise does not “affirm” checks and balances; it undercuts them. “Mandate for Leadership” turns the separation of powers among the three branches into a game of rock, paper, scissors — except rock beats everything. It is consistent, though, with the leadership of a president who likes to talk of the nation’s top jurists as “my judges” and who referred to a former speaker of the House of Representatives as “my Kevin.”
It’s far from clear, of course, that Trump would turn to “Mandate for Leadership” as a default governing plan for a second term. Various organizations are proposing their own versions of a new conservative policy project, and it’s hard to say which, if any, might prevail. Trump’s campaign has made clear that no outside group speaks for him or represents his agenda. Keeping up with Trump’s views is the eternal challenge for anyone attempting to turn the former president’s impulses — those needs and desires — into a consistent ideology and policy program. (“Mandate for Leadership,” for example, suggests that NATO allies worried about Russia should count on Washington mainly for its nuclear deterrent and should field any conventional forces themselves, whereas this month Trump suggested that he would “encourage” Russia to attack NATO allies if they didn’t “pay their bills.”) The difficulty with Trumpism is Trump himself, who renders any coherent ism impossible.
“Mandate for Leadership” is a game effort, nonetheless. Its ability to obscure drastic change with drab prose is impressive. Its notions of an executive less encumbered by laws or oversight is of a piece with Trump’s views on the immunity and impunity that the president should enjoy. The document’s willingness to empower the administrative state when doing so suits ideological or policy preferences is remarkable, especially given its rhetoric to the contrary. At one point, in a chapter on the Commerce Department, a former Trump administration official offers some italicized advice: “When authoritarian governments explain what they plan to do, believe them unless hard evidence demonstrates otherwise.” He is discussing Russia and China, though the warning could apply more broadly.
Fifty years ago, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published “The Imperial Presidency,” a study of the growing war-making abilities of the presidency and the parallel erosion of Congress’s constitutionally mandated power to declare war. Written during the Watergate scandal, the book also explored the ways in which the Nixon administration had arrogated to itself powers in the domestic arena, the abuses of which later led to the president’s resignation.
“Mandate for Leadership” also purports to lament the decline of congressional prerogatives and constitutional order. But at times the veil slips. In the final chapter, a former Trump administration Justice Department official admits that “until there is a return to a constitutional structure that the founding fathers would have recognized and a massive shrinking of the administrative state, conservatives cannot unilaterally disarm and fail to use the power of government to further a conservative agenda.”
That is the self-issued mandate of “Mandate for Leadership.” It is a call to arms, with the administrative state as its weapon of choice. In the foreword, Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president, writes that the administrative state isn’t going anywhere until Congress seizes power back from the federal bureaucracy. “But in the meantime,” he adds, “there are many executive tools a courageous conservative president can use to handcuff the bureaucracy, push Congress to return to its constitutional responsibility, restore power over Washington to the American people, bring the administrative state to heel.”
The problem with wielding the administrative state as a tool, even against itself, is that it grows comfortable in your hands. Why loosen that grip? In Washington, “the meantime” can last a long time.
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