The Constitution Under Siege: Project 2025 and the New Imperial Presidency
“A republic, if you can keep it.” — Benjamin Franklin
Every generation faces the same test. The Founders warned us that liberty is never a permanent inheritance. It survives only if each generation chooses to defend it. The test before us today is written plainly in Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise, a governing blueprint prepared by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of allied organizations.
This massive volume, often referred to as “Project 2025,” is not simply a policy handbook. It is a plan to remake the federal government by expanding presidential control while narrowing what ordinary citizens can claim as constitutional rights. Read closely, it is less about returning power to the people than consolidating it in the presidency.
We should be honest about what is at stake. If the document’s proposals were fully implemented, they would mark a decisive step toward an imperial presidency — and away from the Bill of Rights.
The Founders’ fear of kings
The men who wrote our Constitution did so with a deep scar in their minds: the memory of monarchy. Many of them had fought a revolution against a king who claimed divine right, dissolved colonial legislatures, and quartered troops among civilians. They saw firsthand how concentrated executive power leads to tyranny.
That fear guided their design. The presidency was created as a limited office, vested with “the executive power” but surrounded by checks — Congress to make the laws, courts to interpret them, and independent bodies to carry out specialized functions. George Washington himself reinforced this restraint by stepping down after two terms, rejecting the chance to become a lifetime ruler.
In Federalist №69, Alexander Hamilton drew a sharp contrast between the American president and the British king. The king could make treaties on his own; the president required the Senate. The king could declare war; the president could not. The king held life tenure; the president served for four years and could be removed. The point was unmistakable: America would have no monarch.
When James Madison warned in Federalist №47 that the “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands” is the definition of tyranny, he was not speaking in the abstract. He was reminding his countrymen why they had fought the Revolution. The Constitution was written to prevent a president from becoming what they had overthrown.
Redefining the First Amendment
The First Amendment has long been the cornerstone of American liberty. Freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly have been treated as near-absolute in their protection from government interference. Project 2025 challenges that settlement.
The document proposes removing terms like sexual orientation, gender identity, and diversity, equity, and inclusion from every federal law, regulation, contract, and grant. The effect would be to strip recognition of these categories as protected expressions of identity. What was once a shield for vulnerable minorities becomes a target for erasure.
Even more striking is its treatment of speech and expression. The plan declares that pornography “has no claim to First Amendment protection.” It goes further, calling for producers and distributors to be imprisoned, educators and librarians who make such material available to be registered as sex offenders, and technology companies that facilitate its spread to be shuttered.
This is not a minor tweak at the edges of obscenity law. It is a call to criminalize a broad range of expression long held — however uncomfortably — under the protection of the First Amendment. The standard becomes not whether expression is lawful but whether it aligns with the government’s chosen moral stance.
Consider the implications. Once we accept that the state may declare an entire category of expression outside constitutional protection, what stops it from adding political dissent, religious heresy, or unpopular science to the banned list? History is filled with regimes that began by outlawing “corruption” or “decadence” and ended by jailing their opponents.
Parental rights and compelled silence
Project 2025 also elevates parental rights in education to a “top-tier” constitutional right, demanding that courts apply strict scrutiny to any government action that might infringe upon them. At first glance, this may sound like a reasonable correction. But embedded within the proposal is a mechanism to veto the teaching of ideas about race, gender, or religion that some parents oppose.
This approach risks transforming classrooms into battlegrounds where the loudest or most litigious parents dictate what can be taught to all children. The First Amendment’s protection of inquiry and expression in schools would shrink. Teachers could be constrained not by professional standards but by the threat of lawsuits over any lesson that challenges a parent’s ideology.
The pattern is clear: speech that aligns with a narrow set of cultural and religious views is privileged, while other forms of expression — especially those affirming LGBTQ rights, reproductive health, or frank discussion of American history — are delegitimized. Rights once guaranteed to all citizens become conditional, subject to the approval of state power.
A presidency unbound
If Project 2025 narrows the rights of citizens, it broadens the power of the presidency. The document insists that “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” not in departments, agencies, or independent commissions. This is a direct assault on nearly a century of constitutional practice.
Since the New Deal era, Congress has created independent regulatory agencies — the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, among others — whose leaders are insulated from at-will removal by the president. This system was upheld in the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. It ensures that certain critical decisions, especially those involving markets and elections, are not subject to daily political pressure.
Project 2025 calls for overturning Humphrey’s Executor, effectively ending the independence of such agencies. Presidents would gain the power to fire agency heads at will, turning regulators into instruments of presidential will rather than guardians of statutory law.
The authors decry what they call a “sprawling federal bureaucracy” carrying out its own policies. Their solution is not to restore congressional oversight but to vest more control directly in the White House. The vision is of a federal government run top-down by a single elected official, with agencies and civil servants reduced to executors of presidential command.
The dismantling of checks and balances
The Founders wrote a Constitution designed to slow down power. They divided it among three branches, two chambers of Congress, and fifty states. They did not trust any single actor — least of all the president — with unchecked authority.
Project 2025 seeks to reverse that design. Congress, it argues, has delegated too much lawmaking power to agencies. Courts, it implies, have wrongly elevated certain rights over others. Independent regulators are portrayed as rogue actors unaccountable to voters.
The remedy offered is not a rebalancing but a reallocation — shifting powers from agencies and Congress into the presidency, while limiting the scope of judicially recognized rights. It is, in effect, a blueprint for weakening the separation of powers.
This is precisely the danger Madison described. Once executive authority swallows legislative and judicial checks, the president ceases to be a coequal branch. He becomes what the Revolution was fought to prevent: a king in all but name.
Historical echoes
We have seen this pattern before. Richard Nixon dreamed of a presidency unbound by Congress and courts. His abuse of executive power led to his downfall. Ronald Reagan, for all his rhetoric, worked within constitutional boundaries. Even George W. Bush, who pushed executive authority to the edge in the name of the War on Terror, faced pushback from the courts and Congress.
What Project 2025 envisions goes further. It is not a temporary assertion of emergency powers but a permanent redesign of government. By ending the independence of agencies, narrowing rights, and concentrating control in the Oval Office, it would create a system where the president’s will defines both law and liberty.
The citizen diminished
The danger is not abstract. Imagine a world where the president can remove Federal Reserve governors at will, shaping monetary policy to serve electoral cycles. Picture a Justice Department that defines certain speech as criminal and prosecutes educators or librarians as sex offenders. Envision schools where science teachers must avoid discussing evolution or climate change because a handful of parents object.
In such a system, the citizen’s role is diminished. Rights are no longer universal guarantees but privileges extended to those who conform. Agencies meant to check corporate power or protect elections become arms of the ruling party. The president becomes less a coequal branch and more a national ruler.
Systems thinking and unintended consequences
As a systems thinker, I cannot ignore the feedback loops this would create. Empower a president to fire regulators at will, and markets will respond by aligning corporate strategy with political loyalty rather than economic fundamentals. Narrow the scope of protected speech, and social media platforms will over-police content to avoid liability, silencing legitimate debate along with extremism. Elevate parental veto power in education, and schools will retreat from teaching anything controversial, leaving students less prepared for civic life.
These unintended consequences do not strengthen the republic; they hollow it out. What begins as an effort to assert “control” over bureaucracy and culture ends as a system where loyalty, conformity, and fear replace accountability, pluralism, and freedom.
A call to vigilance
The authors of Project 2025 cloak their agenda in the language of liberty — defending families, restoring sovereignty, securing rights. But the substance tells another story: an executive branch swollen with new powers and a Bill of Rights stripped of protections for disfavored groups and ideas.
The Founders built a system designed to frustrate concentrated power. It is slow, often maddeningly so. But its very inefficiency is its safeguard. By scattering authority among branches, levels, and institutions, it preserves liberty against the ambitions of any one person.
We are now asked to consider a different model, one that risks trading liberty for control. The test before us is whether we will recognize the danger before it becomes reality.
Defending the inheritance
Freedom is indeed fragile, as Ronald Reagan reminded us. It is never more than one generation away from extinction. Project 2025 presents itself as a promise to America, but read closely, it is a warning.
If we accept its narrowing of rights and its elevation of the presidency above all other branches, we will not restore the republic to its “original moorings.” We will abandon the very balance of powers and protections that made this experiment in self-government endure for nearly 250 years.
Our duty is to see the pattern clearly, to understand the risks, and to defend the inheritance of constitutional liberty. Not for ourselves alone, but for the generations that will judge whether we stood watch or slept while the Constitution was unmade.
Benjamin Franklin, when asked what form of government the delegates had created, gave a reply that still rings like a warning bell: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
