Project 2025: a blueprint for CCP-style governance of America
Documenting the many similarities between Team Trump’s plan to impose Party control over US institutions and the CCP model
Project 2025 is a blueprint for dramatically reshaping the federal government, to be implemented if Donald Trump retakes the presidency in January 2025. The effort is organized by the Heritage Foundation, whose president Kevin Roberts has explicitly said its goal is “institutionalizing Trumpism."
"We need to reintroduce political control over this bureaucracy and that's the importance of Project 2025." -- Paul Dans, Director, Project 2025
“China's parliament on Monday revised a law to effectively grant the Communist Party more executive control over China's cabinet. Legal experts say [it] continues a trend of transferring more power from the state into the Party's hands, leaving the government to faithfully implement Party directives.” – Reuters, March 11, 2024
At the core of Project 2025 is a plan to centralize power in the person who simultaneously holds the positions of President and Party Leader, empowering him to exert partisan control over the reins of government and use state power to impress the Party’s economic, cultural and social positions on society. In its essence, Project 2025 would impose a mode of governance on the United States similar to what the Communist Party of China (CCP) imposes on the People’s Republic of China.
As Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer has noted in his excellent analysis of Project 2025, there is a duality within the initiative. One aspect talks of dismantling the administrative state and eliminating federal agencies; the other promises to harness the power of government to go after the Party’s enemies and impose its cultural strictures. This apparent contradiction can be understood and resolved by looking at the CCP model. In China, the formal institutions of government are relatively weak, merely vessels through which the Party exercises power. This power structure is the aim of Project 2025.
This is not a specious comparison. I demonstrate why:
1. Centralizing power under the Leader
Project 2025: seeks to increase the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that currently operates with some measure of independence from political interference by the White House, such as the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission. The plan is based on an interpretation of the unitary executive theory, consistent with Trump’s claim that Article II of the U.S. Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.”
CCP: Xi Jinping has “systematically centralized decision-making power across all policy areas, preserving and enhancing the CCP’s capacity to dominate policymaking and expanding his own authority to drive China’s policy agenda,” per the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Review Commission.
2. Installing Party loyalists in government positions
Project 2025 seeks to replace tens of thousands of non-partisan federal civil service workers with political appointees loyal to the Trump agenda, breaking a century and a half-old structure designed to shield the workforce from patronage and politicization. It is consistent with Schedule F, a plan proposed by Trump late in his term that would make it easier to fire non-partisan workers and install ideologues in federal jobs. Project 2025 maintains a personnel database with a questionnaire to screen potential recruits for their adherence to Trump’s ideology.
CCP: Loyalty to the Party is required to hold a government job. A feature of Xi Jinping’s rule has been to use the rubric of “anti-corruption” to rid the Party of anyone who slightly diverges from strict obedience to Xi and eliminate political rivals. This loyalty-above-all effort has turned “the entire Communist Party “into the Xi faction,” according to analyst and scholar Steve Tsang.
3. Removing independence of the judiciary and law enforcement
Project 2025 seeks to revoke the FBI’s traditional prosecutorial independence and put it under direct control of political appointees at the Department of Justice, enabling Trump’s expressed desire to use the FBI and DOJ to go after senators, judges, political opponents and even non-governmental organizations he doesn’t like.
CCP: China’s courts have never had genuine judicial independence, and their deference to the Party has been reinforced under Xi Jinping, who urged judicial and law enforcement authorities to safeguard national security and demanded their continued loyalty to the CCP. In Hong Kong, where courts and prosecutors once acted independently under rule of law, the judiciary has been made subservient to the wishes and directives of the CCP and central authorities in Beijing.
4. School for ideological training
Project 2025 operates a Presidential Administration Academy that trains enthusiasts in Party loyalty and governance. It offers certificates in “Conservative Governance 101” and the “Administrative State and the Regulatory Process.”
CCP operates a Central Party School that trains enthusiasts in Party loyalty and governance. It offers courses that teach ideology and help bureaucrats capable of day-to-day governance.
5. Rejecting pluralism, promoting assimilationism
Project 2025 seeks to “eliminate racial classifications” and implement a government-wide proscription on activities that collect data, craft policies and assess policy outcomes based on race, collectively denigrating all efforts to understand or address racism by attaching buzzwords “Critical Race Theory” and “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” This policy would serve to lock in structural discrimination against non-White groups and perpetuate a hierarchy with White people on top.
CCP: Xi Jinping has also moved to eliminate racial classifications by imposing an assimilationist model on China’s many ethnic minorities, aimed at eroding their language and identity, with a goal of “ethnic fusion” that “connotes the adoption of Han customs, institutions, and language by other ethnic groups.” This policy serves to lock in structural discrimination against non-Han ethnic groups and perpetuate a hierarchy with Han Chinese on top.
6. Anti-immigrant crackdown
Project 2025 prioritizes the arrest, detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants to safeguard the “concept of the nation-state from the American ethos.”
CCP: The Chinese embassy in Washington said that, “The Chinese government firmly opposes all forms of illegal immigration. In recent years, Chinese law enforcement departments have cracked down hard on crimes that harm the tranquility of national border.”
7. Putting undesired ethnic persons in camps
Project 2025: One of the key architects of Project 2025 is Stephen Miller, the immigration hardliner who advised President Trump. Both Trump and Miller have advocated putting suspected illegal migrants in large internment camps.
CCP: Beginning in 2017, Chinese authorities rounded up and put up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim Turkic minorities in mass internment camps. (According to former aid John Bolton, Trump told Xi that putting Muslims in the camps “was exactly the right thing to do.”)
8. Enforcing traditional gender roles
Project 2025’s stated Promise #1 is to “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children” and “even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.” It advocates that the government "maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” attacks what it calls "radical gender ideology," and rejects family forms other than “from a heterosexual, intact marriage” as corrosive.
CCP: Xi Jinping declared that women must establish a "new trend of family" and "actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing.” The Party promotes “traditional” roles for men and women in families, and instructed women to focus on getting married and having babies, offering financial incentives to do so.
9. Rejecting marriage equality
Project 2025 rejects same-sex marriage and the Constitutionally-protected right to marriage equality.
CCP: PRC law does not recognize same-sex marriage. A parliament spokesman said that "limiting marriage to a relationship between a man and a woman will remain China's legal position."
10. Anti-LGBTQ rights
Project 2025 uses vituperative language to mock the notion of LGBTQ rights, with particular animus toward transgender persons, under an agenda that would remove anti-discrimination legal protections and health care to LGBTQ people.
CCP offers what Project 2025 aims for: the PRC does not recognize the concept of LGBTQ in its law. In recent years, the CCP has “continued a crackdown on LGBTQ persons” as the Party emphasizes traditional gender roles.
11. Government control of bodily autonomy - regulating reproduction
Project 2025 advocates wide use of governmental power to regulate women’s bodies, going way beyond the Dobbs decision by encouraging the President to “deploy existing federal powers to protect innocent life,” banning abortion medication and health services in states where abortion remains legal, and blocking women from traveling to states where abortion is legal.
CCP officials once used the coercive power of government to prevent women from having children. They are now using coercive state power to push families to have more children through “forced procreation” measures.
12. Using the military for domestic law enforcement
Project 2025 proposes deploying the military for domestic law enforcement purposes, generally prohibited for a century and a half as inimical to democracy. Trump advisors plan to invoke an exception to the ban in order to round up immigrants and put them in camps.
CCP: Distinction between foreign and domestic roles of security forces is blurred. The core mission of the People’s Liberation Army, which is under Party not government control, is the defense of the Party and its interests. The PLA operates its own domestic paramilitary force (People’s Armed Police).
13. More death penalty
Project 2025 promotes use of the death penalty for applicable crimes and seeks to “do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.”
CCP: China is the leading executioner of prisoners in the world. New CCP guidelines suggest imposing the death penalty on those who advocate for Taiwan “separatism.”
14. Civil liberties – banning pornography
Project 2025 says “[p]ornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
CCP: Under PRC law, pornography is outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it can be imprisoned.
15. Overriding local autonomy to impose Party control
Project 2025 calls on the federal government to exert its power over the District of Columbia, in contravention of the autonomy granted to the people of D.C. by Congress, and in disregard of the wishes of the nearly 700,000 people who live in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump has frequently threatened to exert his will on D.C.; at a recent campaign rally in Florida, Trump said his Administration would “take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, D.C.
CCP: In the last five years, the Party has used its power to swiftly and thoroughly end the autonomy of the people of Hong Kong that the Chinese government had promised them in a treaty with the United Kingdom, in disregard of the wishes of the millions of Hong Kongers who protested the roll-back of democratic governance.
16. “Rule By Law”
Project 2025 would accelerate “Rule By Law” in the United States. This term refers to a system in which the law exists as a mechanism to carry out the Party’s interests and to control the behavior of citizens. The Project seeks to remove the independence of federal agencies and law enforcement, install Party favorites in previously non-partisan federal jobs and increase the power of a President who said that Article II of the U.S. Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want” and has promised to use these powers to go after political opponents. Under Rule By Law, the meaning and effect of law is malleable, subject to changing interpretation by judges depending on the political interests of the Party. Recent examples include the Supreme Court’s reversal to a right to privacy on abortion, and judges giving the Party Leader immunity from prosecution and capriciously shutting down an ongoing prosecution of him.
CCP: Analysts describe China as a “Rule By Law” system where the law exists as a mechanism to carry out the Party’s interests and to control the behavior of citizens. The meaning and effect of law is malleable, subject to changing interpretation by judges depending on the political interests of the Party, something the Supreme People’s Court just recommitted to do.
By contrast, “Rule of Law” requires equality before the law and constrains the behavior of political leaders by demanding they subject themselves to the authority of the law.
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OK. You may be wondering, “How can you say that? The Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership is full of criticism of the Chinese Communist Party!” This is accurate. But I ask you to ignore the labels and look at the behavior. And read the report. The function of the references to the CCP and Marxism, etc., are just rhetorical buzzwords; they serve no analytical purpose. Kevin Roberts’ claim in the Forward that Communism and Fascism are both manifestations of socialism tells us there is not a lot of intellectual rigor invested here.
We are in an age of authoritarian expansionism. This trend is not confined to select countries (which is what Project 2025 wants you think) but is accelerated by authoritarian movements within countries (of which Project 2025’s vision is a part), as I wrote about here. While China remains “Communist” in name, the label is no longer sufficient to understand or describe governance in today’s hyper-capitalist China. Analytically, I find that the CCP is a conservative party given the many similarities with far-right parties around the world. And in Viktor Orbán, Authoritarian Matchmaker I wrote about the ideological affinity between authoritarians Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
But don’t believe me that Trump sees the CCP as a model. Listen to Donald Trump himself. Just a few days ago, He said “[Xi’s] a brilliant man. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. He makes guys like Biden look like babies.”
This is first in a series on Project 2025. Part 2, The anti-Chinese racism of Project 2025, looks at its claims there is something essential within Chinese people that makes them naturally aggressive and unable to form a ‘normal’ nation, which is racism.