The Heritage Foundation has already launched a project to lay the foundations for a successful second Trump administration in 2022, Spencer Chretien, Director of the Heritage Foundation's 2025 Presidential Transition Project said during the latest panel discussion, as part of the "We Win, They Lose" series of events organized by by the Center for Fundamental Rights regarding this year's US presidential race.
The project has a number of pillars. The first is a document of some nine hundred (!) pages called Mandate for Leadership. It is written by the Foundation's staff and the experts who work with them, including former Republican administration officials and those who served in the first Trump administration. It contains policy proposals and specific ideas for the Republican administration for the various government agencies.
More than a hundred partner organizations were involved in the preparation of the document.
The Heritage Foundation has a decades-long track record of producing similar compilations, the expert explained. The first was produced in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was preparing to take office after his election at a time when the United States was facing an energy crisis, a migration crisis, and an economy in the doldrums – just as it is today. At the time, the Heritage Foundation convened more than 400 people from conservative circles to provide specific recommendations for each state agency. At the first meeting of the Reagan cabinet, every cabinet member had the Heritage Foundation's hundreds of pages on his desk, and the incoming president made it mandatory for all of them to read it. – "That's the blueprint for what we're going to do in the federal government," Reagan told his cabinet members.
The Foundation has also produced similar documents later, but these were far less voluminous than the first - until now.
A summary of policy proposals was also prepared for former US President Donald Trump's first term, and Trump implemented roughly two-thirds of them, Mr Chretien pointed out.
The current document is not at all classified. Not only was it shared with all Republican candidates during the primaries, but it was also made available online for free to all.
The second pillar of the project is a "telephone directory" of people who can help the president to implement his program. "Traditionally, the US president appoints three or four thousand people who work in the federal government and their job is to push the president's progra through the bureaucracy, the so-called deep state," the expert explained.