While a national debate ensued this past Fourth of July weekend about President Joe Biden's mental faculties, the president issued a statement that surely didn't help him sound any more rooted in reality. He claimed that his opponent, Donald Trump, has embraced the "extreme Project 2025 agenda," which "should scare every single American." That "agenda," Biden warned, "would give Trump limitless power over our daily lives and let him...gut the checks and balances" in the Constitution.
Biden's media allies dutifully echoed his ravings. Some called Project 2025 "a plan to transform government" and spawn "a dramatic expansion of presidential power." Others said the project is "hellishly authoritarian" and was seemingly inspired by Adolf Hitler. The New York Times asserted that Project 2025 "rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other."
These claims have things completely backwards. Project 2025's proposals would reinforce our system of government, not depart from it. They would strengthen our checks and balances, not weaken them. "Fundamentally transforming the United States of America," as Barack Obama put it, is the stated mission of the Left, not the Right. Far from encouraging the exercise of unchecked power, Project 2025 is an ode to the Constitution.
Project 2025 published a thoughtful book-length policy blueprint called Mandate for Leadership 2025, which a conservative (or any) president would be free to draw from or ignore. Having authored the introductions to all five sections of that book, I'm likely one of only a few people actually familiar with the entire work—and it is nothing like what Biden suggests. As I wrote in the introduction to Section 1, "Above all, the President and those who serve under him or her must be committed to the Constitution and the rule of law."
Indeed, perhaps the most radical thing about Mandate for Leadership is its unwavering commitment to the Constitution as written. Far from trying to "gut" that glorious document, Project 2025 seeks to restore its fraying fibers. It aims to strengthen the separation of powers, as well as federalism—the division of power between the federal government and the states. James Madison, in Federalist 51, said these dual protections provide a "double security...to the rights of the people."
Project 2025, which is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, features a board of advisers that includes Hillsdale College, the National Association of Scholars, and my own group, the American Main Street Initiative—along with more than 100 other conservative organizations. A major thrust of the effort is that the unelected, unaccountable administrative state is out of control. As Heritage president Kevin Roberts writes, Mandate for Leadership lays out "how to restore the American people's constitutional authority over the Administrative State."
Donald Devine, Dennis Kirk, and Paul Dans elaborate on this theme: "The people elect a President who is charged by Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution with seeing that the laws are 'faithfully executed' with his political appointees democratically linked to that legitimizing responsibility." By contrast, "An autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore, career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms." One imagines most Americans would agree.
Moreover, rule by executive agencies undermines checks and balances. Russ Vought writes that "the modern executive branch"—"whether controlled by the bureaucracy or by the President"—"writes federal policy, enforces that policy, and often adjudicates whether that policy was properly drafted and enforced." He calls the result "constitutionally dire" and "in urgent need of repair." This is hardly a call for unchecked executive power—quite the opposite.
In recent decades, the executive branch has routinely skirted the Constitution and federal law to achieve its own ends. This has been particularly egregious in Biden's case. The current administration has spawned an immigration crisis by refusing to enforce federal law, asserted quasi-legislative power to mandate masks and vaccines, brazenly decreed what kinds of cars Americans can buy, and issued a kingly order transferring student-loan debt from borrowers to all taxpayers.
Mandate for Leadership highlights at least five specific ways in which, under a conservative president, our nation could restore key aspects of our constitutional design. First, "the President must enforce the Constitution and laws as written, rather than proclaiming new 'law' unilaterally....Legislatures make the laws in a republic, not executives."
Second, "we must rediscover and adhere to the Founders' wise division of war powers, whereby Congress, the most representative and deliberative branch, decides whether to go to war; and the executive, the most energetic and decisive branch, decides how to carry it out once begun." Our seven-decade experiment in presidentially initiated wars—from Korea to the present day—demonstrates that "we depart from our constitutional design at our peril."
Third, the president and the State Department should "stop skirting the Constitution's treaty-making requirements and stop enforcing 'agreements'" which haven't been ratified by the Senate as the Constitution requires, as if they were treaties.
Fourth, "the Senate has been extraordinarily lax in fulfilling its constitutional obligation to confirm presidential appointees." This results in unconfirmed, "acting" officials carrying out executive-branch responsibilities for months or years on end without Senate sign-off.
Fifth, the Justice Department should "respect the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of speech, rather than trying to police speech on the internet."
Each of these five points involves curbing or checking, rather than expanding, executive power. The fact that Biden and his leftist allies are nevertheless characterizing Project 2025 as paving the way for a presidential power-grab would seem to be a classic case of projection.
The truth is that progressives like "our democracy" a lot more than they like our Constitution. Indeed, their disdain for our founding charter causes them to sound the alarm whenever an effort like Project 2025 shows a genuine commitment to restoring it.
Jeffrey H. Anderson is president of the American Main Street Initiative, a think tank for everyday Americans. He served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
