Project 2025 Represents ‘Forgotten Americans,’ Reduces Washington’s Influence, Roberts Says

The real purpose of The Heritage Foundation’s policy and personnel plan for the next conservative president is to speak on behalf of forgotten Americans, Heritage President Kevin Roberts said Monday at the leading think tank’s Policy Fest at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

“You might say that the real purpose of this huge, broad-scale effort, unprecedented in the history of the conservative movement,” Roberts said of Project 2025, “isn’t so much about policy per se as it is to remind people elites in Washington, New York, the Left Coast, [and] Brussels that the time has come to stop forgetting about forgotten Americans.”

Organized by The Heritage Foundation beginning in spring 2022 and including contributions from over 100 other conservative organizations, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, known as Project 2025, aims to equip an incoming conservative president with policies to rein in the size and power of the U.S. government’s bureaucracy.

Roberts spoke at Heritage’s Policy Fest on the first day of the Republican National Convention, which will run Monday through Thursday, when Donald Trump is scheduled to accept the party’s nomination for president a third time just days after an attempt on his life.

Project 2025 is “a representation of what a majority of Americans feel and believe,” Roberts said, a plan “to restore self-governance to the American people, so that they can, according to their choice, their customs, their habits, build their families, live in their communities, go about their lives and their businesses and their jobs—as we like to say, living the good life.”

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign launched a website dedicated to attacking Project 2025 and has posted what Roberts and others call baseless claims about the policy initiative, including falsely asserting that Project 2025 seeks to “terminate the Constitution.”

“The reason progressive Democrats hate these ideas so much is because they are a threat to their power,” Roberts said.

If implemented, Project 2025 will make Washington, D.C., “a heck of a lot less important in our lives so that we can go about our own lives,” Roberts said.

The Heritage president also honored Corey Comperatore, the former fire chief who was shot and killed in Butler, Pennsylvania, during the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday evening.

“I would dare say, not having met Corey, but feeling like I know him, that he personifies what this movement is about,” Roberts said. “A man who went to church every Sunday, a man who literally gave his life protecting his family, a man who was doing something that any of us from the far left to the far right should think we should be able to do at any point in this country and not be threatened with violence, and that is to attend the political rally of our choice.”