What is Project 2025? What to know about the plan mentioned during the debate

WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump faced off Tuesday in what is the only scheduled debate between candidates this fall. 

Early in the night, Harris connected Trump to Project 2025, a proposed playbook for the next Republican administration. The plan, which consists of nearly 1,000 pages, was crafted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. 

The plan lays out how Trump in his second term might do everything from firing tens of thousands of federal workers to abolishing government departments to imposing new restrictions on abortion and diversity initiatives.

Here's what to know about Project 2025: 

What is Project 2025? 

Project 2025 outlines a dramatic expansion of presidential power and a plan to fire as many as 50,000 government workers to replace them with presidential loyalists. It calls for the U.S. Education Department to be shuttered, and the Homeland Security Department dismantled, with its various parts absorbed by other federal offices.

Who created Project 2025?

Some of the people involved in Project 2025 are former senior administration officials with deep GOP ties. The project’s former director, Paul Dans, served as chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under Trump.

Trump’s former White House budget chief, Russell Vought, was a key architect of the plan and was also appointed to the Republican National Committee’s platform writing committee.

John McEntee, a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration, was a senior adviser. McEntee told the conservative news site The Daily Wire earlier this year that Project 2025’s team would integrate a lot of its work with the campaign after the summer when Trump would announce his transition team.

What does Trump say about Project 2025?

The former president has consistently distanced himself from the plan while the Harris campaign has made the deeply conservative proposals a centerpiece of their attacks against Trump.

“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposefully. I’m not going to read it,” he said on Tuesday."

Trump's running mate pick drew even closer ties to Project 2025.  Heritage’s President Kevin Roberts has said he’s good friends with JD Vance and that the Heritage Foundation had been privately rooting for him to be the VP pick.

Vance penned the foreword to Roberts’ own new book, which was set to be out in September but has now been postponed as Project 2025 hits turmoil. Roberts is holding off the release of his potentially fiery new book until after the November presidential election.