The Heritage Foundation sent a fundraising email boasting that the blueprint they wrote for an authoritarian presidency has been more than half completed. The president who enacted it still acts surprised.

"We wanted to make sure the president was ready to hit the ground running on day one. The rapidity and the depth of what they've rolled out this quickly is a testament to the work done in Project 2025."

— Paul Dans, Project 2025 architect, told CNN in January 2025

On Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation did something remarkable for an organization that spent two years telling the country it had nothing to do with the Trump administration.

The conservative think tank sent a fundraising email to its donors. In it, the Heritage Foundation took explicit credit for more than half of the Trump administration's defining domestic policy actions. They said 53 percent of the proposals in their own 900-page book, Project 2025, had been turned into federal policy.

The email called this "a big deal." It then asked for money to finish the rest.

This was not a quiet internal memo. This was a public declaration from the architects of one of the most comprehensive programs of government transformation in modern American history. They are proud of what they have built. They want you to fund the next phase.

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly denied any connection to Project 2025. In July 2024, facing mounting pressure from polls showing voters deeply uncomfortable with the plan, he told reporters he did not know what it was.

"I don't know what the hell it is," Trump said at the time. "They are extreme. I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it."

The denial collapsed within 30 days of his inauguration. Russell Vought, one of Project 2025's chief architects and the man who wrote the section on executive power, was confirmed as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Peter Navarro, who authored the trade chapter, became one of Trump's top trade advisers. Brendan Carr, who wrote about gutting the Federal Communications Commission, now oversees that agency and has been aggressively targeting broadcasters. Tom Homan, the president's border czar, is listed as a contributor.

The people who wrote the manual are the people running the government. The president just stopped pretending they were strangers.

Translation: Trump's campaign denials were a calculated response to poll numbers, not a reflection of reality.

The Heritage Foundation's claim that 53 percent of Project 2025 is now policy matches exactly with what independent trackers found. The Center for Progressive Reform, in partnership with Governing for Impact, maintains a detailed spreadsheet tracking executive action proposals across 20 federal agencies. Their February 2026 update showed 283 of 532 recommended actions had been initiated or completed.

That means both sides of the political aisle have independently arrived at the same number. The left is tracking the implementation. The right is celebrating it. They agree on what has been done.

The actions are extensive. The administration has dismantled the US Agency for International Development. It has stripped civil service protections from thousands of federal workers, making it easier to fire them at will. Federal union contracts are being terminated. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission plans to eliminate employer data reporting on race and gender. The Department of Education is being dismantled. Federal grants for environmental organizations have been halted.

On reproductive rights, the Center for Reproductive Rights found that 85 percent of the Trump administration's reproductive health actions stem directly from Project 2025 recommendations, including a provision prohibiting Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds.

On the LGBTQ front, Project 2025 directed the National Institutes of Health to fund studies on the negative effects of gender-affirming care. One of the first executive orders Trump signed was directing the Department of Health and Human Services to publish a review of literature on gender dysphoria in children.

The Heritage Foundation's bragging was not without its internal contradictions. The organization itself has faced turbulence during Trump's second term. Heritage lost top officials to a new organization formed by former Vice President Mike Pence. The exodus followed Heritage President Kevin Roberts's decision to praise Tucker Carlson's amicable interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

So the Heritage Foundation is simultaneously taking credit for reshaping the federal government, hemorrhaging leadership to rival conservative organizations, and begging its base for donations to fund the second half of their agenda.

They are winning the policy fight and losing the institutional fight. In some ways that makes sense. When your entire purpose is to hand over your work product to someone else, the organization that produced it becomes disposable.

The fundraising email contained a forward-looking declaration that was almost certainly designed to appear in news coverage: "In this special 250th anniversary year, we must work to implement all of Heritage's policy recommendations to ensure another 250 years of American greatness."

The framing was deliberate. They are linking their policy agenda to the nation's semiquincentennial. The message is clear: America's next 250 years should be built on Heritage's blueprint.

This is not an aspiration. This is a claim of ownership over the future of the country.

On the military front, the administration's proposed budget for next fiscal year includes more than a 40 percent increase in defense spending. Vought testified on Capitol Hill that the increase was necessary to fund multiyear defense agreements and a naval fleet expansion to 400 ships, exceeding Project 2025's own target of 355. Iran is mentioned more than 50 times in Project 2025, and the project's Iran section called for maximum sanctions and opposition to the regime. The treasury secretary confirmed this week that the administration is looking at reimposing sanctions on Iran.

Project 2025's authors called China a "totalitarian enemy." Trump is scheduled to visit China next month. Whether that trip advances or contradicts the project's China policy remains unclear.

What makes this moment different from typical partisan policy disputes is the admission itself. Political organizations regularly advocate for policies they want enacted. What Heritage did was different. They produced a detailed, agency-by-agency manual for governing the United States. They handed it to an incoming president through intermediaries. That president enacted more than half of it. And now the people who wrote the manual are asking their donors for money to finish the job.

The transparency is almost accidental. Usually these things happen quietly. A transition team works in the background. Policies emerge without anyone publicly connecting the dots. But Heritage sent the email. The tracker exists. The spreadsheet is public. The math checks out from both sides.

The Heritage Foundation no longer needs to pretend that Project 2025 was just an academic exercise. They have their proof. The government they designed is running. They just needed the world to know they were the ones who turned the key.