But now, nearly 100 days into Trump’s term, the country is getting a sense of where Trump’s own platform intersects with the controversial document, and where he’s chosen new policies paths entirely.

Trump has signed 129 executive orders since January, some of which seem to be lifted wholesale from Heritage’s mandate. That list includes dissolution of federal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, purging the government of transgender-friendly policies, regressing Biden’s clean energy agenda, prioritizing school choice options while simultaneously dismantling the Department of Education, and actively shrinking the federal government’s budget and workforce, installing loyal, prevetted political appointees in their stead.

Trump’s mandate to shrink the government in particular drew high praise from Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage’s advocacy wing.

He told the Washington Examiner that he’d give Trump’s first 100 days an “A+” and the media has been misreporting on the Department of Government Efficiency’s alleged “cloak and dagger” war on federal waste and bloat.

“I come back to what is real and less about what’s reported in the media,” he suggested. “I don’t think that anything like that was actually occurring. And if it was, it was dictated by the executive order, which required every agency to have a DOGE official on staff and implement the DOGE efforts. I think this administration has had the right focus, initially going after programs like USAID, where there is massive fraud and abuse and waste of taxpayer dollars. I think the American people are now more educated on how their tax dollars have been spent over the previous decades than they ever have been.”

“These are basic things that the American people have been clamoring for for decades, and I think that they’re welcoming of all of it,” Walker asserted. 

Inside the White House, Project 2025 remains a sensitive issue, with multiple senior administration officials telling the Washington Examiner they wanted “nothing” to do with this story.

One senior White House official chided Democrats for the Project 2025 campaign attack lines, suggesting that if Trump was indeed working off of the Heritage Foundation’s playbook, they’d be more effective in opposing his “shock and awe” agenda.

“Their blueprint was project 2025, so based on that, then they would have had all the tools needed to combat it,” that person said. “So if they’re struggling to combat what the president is doing right now, maybe it wasn’t Project 2025 after all. What we are actually doing in practice goes to show you that we didn’t pull this from a book. This was conservative policy at a level of sophistication that no think tank could have generated.”

Walker didn’t seem disheartened that the conservative think tank wasn’t getting any credit for steering the president’s agenda. 

“This is about the president. First and foremost, he won the election. He had winning arguments for the American people, and they elected him both in the popular vote, in the Electoral College,” he stated, noting that Heritage has been publishing its general election cycle policy recommendations, formally known as the “Mandate for Leadership,” since the 1980s.

“We are over the moon that this administration and many others have taken up policies that are contained within those policy suggestions. At the end of the day, that’s our job. We are a think tank. It is our job to spend time contemplating, researching, and putting out policy solutions to the greatest ills that Americans face every day, and we’re very pleased that this administration has seen value, and it has taken up a number of the policy suggestions in the book,” Walker continued.

Still, Trump has either only flirted with implementing some policies outlined by Project 2025, taking symbolic action or flouting the policy book’s recommendation entirely.

Project 2025 specifically calls for substantive reforms to Section 230, echoing “free speech” advocates in the conservative movement. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order titled, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship, but the text of that order makes no mention of Section 230 reforms and the specific liability protections U.S. code provides to tech companies.

Both Project 2025 and Trump’s 2024 campaign called for significant reforms to the tax code, yet there was significant daylight between their proposals. Project 2025 stressed simplifying the tax code and splitting households into two brackets pegged to the Social Security wage base, which in 2024 was $168,000. Households earning less than that number would face a 15% tax, while households earning more than $168,000 per year would pay 30% taxes.

Trump, on the other hand, proposed extending the expiring individual provisions in 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and outright eliminating taxes on some sources of income, including tips and Social Security benefits themselves. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick floated during an interview with CBS in March that the president was considering the elimination of all taxes for households earning under $150,000 a year. Furthermore, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Washington Examiner that Trump is in fact considering raising the corporate tax rate, which the TCJA lowered from 35% to 21%, and income taxes for America’s highest earners in order to pay for his new proposed tax cuts.

Abortion was one of the most polarizing issues of the 2024 election, and Democrats frequently pointed to Project 2025’s proposals to limit reproductive rights from the federal level in hopes of motivating turnout against Trump.

Project 2025, mirroring Republicans at both the state and federal level, pushed the presidency to take a number of specific actions to restrict abortion access, including banning and criminalizing abortion medications, use “conscience laws” to restrict federal funds designated for states taking measures to expand abortion access, and require states to report on abortion data.

Trump, on the other hand, vowed not to pursue national abortion limitations on the campaign trail, suggesting that 2022’s Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade was correct and that abortion rights should be determined by the states.

So far, Trump hasn’t touched federal abortion regulations, but Andrew Bates believes it’s just a matter of time before that changes.

“With the rate at which he’s breaking promises? I think it’s smartest to plan for the worst,” Bates, a former Biden White House deputy press secretary and the principal at Wolfpack Strategies, explained.

“I think the common denominators here are lies, corruption, and selling out hard-working families,” he continued. “It was always a lie that he was not going to implement Project 2025, and I think the American people are reacting to it viscerally.”

Bates did concede that the rapid implementation of Trump’s agenda, whether it directly aligns with Project 2025 or not, is throwing Democrats, who are still searching for a national leader to rally behind, a political lifeline.

“I think that there are a lot of good, honest people who voted for him not because they supported every last piece of his agenda, or they liked his brand, but because they took him at his word when he said things like, ‘I will lower prices on Day One. I will end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours,’” he concluded.  “They’re seeing with their own eyes that he does not respect them, and he’s acting against their interests now that he got what he wanted from them. I think Democrats are using that betrayal, and they are focusing on the ways Trump is hurting middle-class families so he can give tax benefits to himself and to other billionaires, and you’re seeing people react. So I think it’s both. I think he has been creating liabilities for himself by double-crossing people and Democrats are staying focused on what the American people are most concerned about.”

Despite the breakneck pace with which Trump is trying to address his array of campaign promises, there is one area in particular where conservatives think he hasn’t done enough: wholesale slashing of federal regulations.

Walker told the Washington Examiner that Trump has a limited runway, in relation to the 2026 midterm elections and possibly waning post-election enthusiasm from voters, to deregulate the government.

“Whether it relates to energy policy, agricultural policy, building and construction policy, permitting, you name it, this administration would do very well to change the regulatory environment in the country,” he claimed. “Regulation has become so far afield from the sort of vision on making us healthier, safer, etc. It has constrained and confined the American economy in more ways than I can describe.”

A senior White House aide argued against Walker’s suggestion and pointed to an executive order Trump signed in February that requires the administration to undo 10 federal regulations for every one added to the U.S. code.

TRUMP TAKES STEP MAKING IT EASIER TO FIRE THOUSANDS OF CAREER GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES

“That’s historic. Never been done,” that person said. “We’re starting at shower heads, but by the 100 days, we’ll probably be at other major appliances. We’re taking the shackles off the energy infrastructure. No one can deny that, and on top of that, we’re doing something with government efficiency where we’re taking off the burdens of waste, fraud, and abuse. We’re making government more efficient. We’re looking at deregulation every single day.”