This is a common theme in Republican administrations dating back to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. What you do is you break the government, make it very hard for the government to function, and then you loudly announce that the government can’t do anything.
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front matter
and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and veterans from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country from the brink of disaster.
The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work. But as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement. As such, the authors express consensus recommendations already forged, especially along four broad fronts that will decide America’s future:
2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
What makes these four pieces of the conservative promise so valuable to the next President is that they cut through superficial distractions and focus on the moral and foundational challenges America faces in this moment of history. This was one of the secrets of conservatives’ success in the Reagan Era, one our generation should emulate.
As in the late 1970s, Americans today experience the failures of political and cultural elites in countless ways: in the job market and in the grocery store checkout lines, on the streets and in our schools, in the media and within our institutions. But in truth, these daily dysfunctions are not innumerable problems, but innumerable manifestations of a few core crises.
In 1979, the threats we faced were the Soviet Union, the socialism of 1970s liberals, and the predatory deviancy of cultural elites. Reagan defeated these beasts by ignoring their tentacles and striking instead at their hearts.
His approach to the Cold War? “We win and they lose.”
His economic agenda? The human dignity of work and its many rewards.
His platform in the culture wars? The “community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.”
This book—and Project 2025 as a whole—will arm the next conservative President with the same kind of strategic clarity, but for a new age.