Key Point: “Project 2025 has numerous ties to Mr. Trump and his campaign, a New York Times analysis has found. […] And the analysis of the Project 2025 playbook and its 307 authors and contributors revealed that well over half of them had been in Mr. Trump’s administration or on his campaign or transition teams.”

New York Times: The Many Links Between Project 2025 and Trump’s World

By: Elena Shao and Ashley Wu

• Project 2025 has numerous ties to Mr. Trump and his campaign, a New York Times analysis has found.

• The people behind Project 2025 are no strangers to the former president. The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin D. Roberts, and a co-founder, Edwin J. Feulner, have each personally met with Mr. Trump. And the analysis of the Project 2025 playbook and its 307 authors and contributors revealed that well over half of them had been in Mr. Trump’s administration or on his campaign or transition teams.

• Large portions of the “Mandate for Leadership,” the driving document behind Project 2025, were written by longtime Trump loyalists who were advisers to Mr. Trump during his first term.

• Eighteen of the 40 authors and editors who worked on the document served in the first Trump administration.

• The president of the Heritage Foundation told The New York Times in an interview in January that he views the foundation’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

• Another is the group’s efforts to compile a database of thousands of vetted conservatives to staff a new conservative administration. That team is led by John McEntee and James Bacon, who helped during Mr. Trump’s first term to purge the federal government of people deemed disloyal to him.

• The Heritage Foundation president, Kevin D. Roberts, wrote the foreword to the Project 2025 document. Photo evidence shows he took a private flight with Mr. Trump in April of 2022 from Palm Beach, Fla., to a Heritage Foundation conference. There, Mr. Trump gave a keynote address, where he said of Mr. Roberts: “I know what he did and where he came from, and he’s going to be outstanding.”

• Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, wrote the foreword to Mr. Roberts’s forthcoming book, “Dawn’s Early Light.”

• All of the five other authors in this [Defense] section have connections to the first Trump administration, including Kiron K. Skinner, who wrote the chapter on the State Department. She led policy planning in that department and was also a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team in 2016.

• Gene Hamilton wrote the chapter on the Justice Department. Mr. Hamilton, a lawyer who served in the Trump administration, calls for sweeping changes to the Justice Department that would ultimately erode its independence from White House political control.

• Seven authors of the section on the economy took on roles in Mr. Trump’s administration or on his 2016 campaign or transition teams. They include prominent advisers such as Stephen Moore and Peter Navarro, who spoke in support of Mr. Trump at the Republican National Convention this year.

• Both Project 2025 and Mr. Trump have proposed tax policies that would largely benefit corporations and wealthier Americans. Mr. Trump has said he would lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent from 21 percent.

The Project 2025 blueprint’s authors also want to reduce the corporate tax rate, but they go further, with a proposal to collapse the tax code into just two brackets — 15 percent and 30 percent — while eliminating deductions, credits and exclusions. An analysis by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, found that this plan would raise taxes by thousands of dollars for individual middle-class households each year.