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Nothing could have prepared Americans for what the first 50-ish days of the second Trump administration have been like. Even some Cabinet members and Republican members of Congress seem caught off guard. But if you took time to look closely at Project 2025, the effort from the conservative Heritage Foundation to prepare for a new Republican administration, you’re probably a little less shocked than other people.

I’m not the first to point out that many of the actions the White House and other departments have taken since the inauguration are pulled directly from Project 2025. Even though Donald Trump vociferously denied any connection to the work during the campaign, that was always transparent bunk. For example, Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, led the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump White House, was the policy director for the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform, and is now leading OMB again.

There are some useful resources online that seek to track which Project 2025 goals have already been achieved, but for all that Trump has done so far, some of Project 2025’s most radical ideas for transforming the power of the president have yet to unfold. What is still in store?

The authors of Project 2025 believe that far too much of the executive branch is not functionally under the control of the president. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Vought told The New York Times in 2023. One example is what are called “independent regulatory agencies”—entitites such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The laws that authorize these agencies give the president the power to appoint leaders, but not generally to remove them or direct policy. That’s different from, for example, a Cabinet department such as State and Treasury, whose secretaries can be fired at will.

“The Trump team came in determined to expand the scope of presidential power,” Don Kettl, the former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told me in an email. “Their goal is to stretch the limits of Article II of the Constitution, by using the beginning of the article—that executive power is located in the president of the U.S.—and the take-care clause, to assert that the president has power over all things executive. Congress might pass a law, but once the law is passed, they believe the president ought to have complete control over how it’s implemented.”

Many of the moves that Trump has taken so far appear to be of dubious legality. This week, Vought’s OMB issued a memo laying out plans for mass layoffs of federal employees subject to civil-service protections. Such a reduction in force almost certainly violates civil-service protections and bargaining agreements. Similarly, last week, the administration issued a little-noticed but potentially very important executive order asserting unprecedented power over independent regulatory agencies, cutting against decades of precedent and understanding of existing laws.

These are only the latest examples of the Trump administration’s apparent defiance of Congress’s intent. As Jonathan Rauch noted this week, Trump has fired inspectors general without giving the legally required 30-day notice, even though he could have easily just followed the law. The president also tried to fire Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which protects whistleblowers; Dellinger promptly sued, and his firing is currently temporarily blocked by courts. Last week, the administration asserted a right to fire administrative-law judges, who oversee hearings inside executive-branch agencies, even though the law says they can be removed only for cause.

The statutes that govern these matters are not especially ambiguous: Congress intended for these bodies to have some independence. Trump’s aides don’t disagree; they just think that the laws are an unconstitutional infringement on the powers of the executive branch. “There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such—SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup—but that is not something that the Constitution understands,” Vought told Tucker Carlson in November. Unfortunately for Trump, the Supreme Court has disagreed. In a 1935 case called Humphrey’s Executor, the justices unanimously slapped down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission.

As Trump takes so many steps, some observers have expressed concern that Trump intends to just ignore courts. This isn’t a crazy fear. Trump has shown that he has no personal respect for the rule of law, and many of his aides—including Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance—have floated the idea of defying judicial rulings. But I think the more likely interpretation (at least for now) is that many of these law-defying, or at least law-bending, actions are ways of getting cases before the Supreme Court in the hopes of eliciting favorable decisions.

“The Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor upholding agency independence seems ripe for revisiting—and perhaps sooner than later,” the law professor Adam Candeub writes in “Mandate for Leadership,” the main document produced by Project 2025. (He’s since been appointed general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission.) Elsewhere in “Mandate,” Gene Hamilton, who helped design the family-separation policy in Trump’s first term, writes that a conservative administration should seek “the overruling of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States … The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey’s Executor violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

How the Court would handle such a case is anyone’s guess. Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have already said they’d overturn Humphrey’s Executor; Republicans have long pushed for the “unitary executive theory,” which seeks an expansion of the president’s power over the executive branch; and the justices have shown a willingness to bend precedents to help Trump in the past.

The impact of striking down Humphrey’s Executor would be enormous. Agency independence is designed to provide regulatory predictability and consistency and to avoid political interference, but Project 2025 proposes systematically politicizing independent agencies, seeking to use federal power to attack climate-focused investing, compel private corporations’ business decisions, and more. This is especially dangerous with a president who has already begun following through on his campaign promises to use the government to punish his critics, but it would be destabilizing under other circumstances. Any future Democratic president would at least try to return things to the status quo ante, which would mean a wild seesaw in regulation every four or eight years.

Alternatively, the Supreme Court might blanch before such a shift of power from Congress to the executive branch. In 2024’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision, it struck down Chevron deference, which accorded executive-branch agencies broad discretion in interpreting laws, saying that Congress needed to make those decisions. If Trump’s test cases fail, what comes next?

“I always abide by the courts, always abide by them,” Trump said earlier this month. Yesterday, his nominees for top Justice Department roles told senators that they believed the administration could at times ignore judicial orders. We may soon find out which of them is telling the truth.

Related:

What will happen if the Trump administration defies a court order? There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Inside the collapse at the NIH Grad school is in trouble. What Trump is really after in the Middle East Radio Atlantic: The Five Eyes have noticed.

Today’s News

Donald Trump hosted U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House to discuss issues including trade and Ukraine’s future. The Trump administration notified most USAID staffers this week that they have been placed on leave or fired and announced that 90 percent of the agency’s foreign-aid contracts worldwide will be canceled. Trump announced that 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico will go into effect on March 4, and that China will face an additional 10 percent tariff.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Who counts as a hillbilly—and who gets to decide? Andrew Aoyama examines the complicated history of Appalachia and J. D. Vance’s ties.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

My Mom’s Guide to the Art of Living

By Arthur C. Brooks

My late mother was an artist of some renown in the Pacific Northwest. Over her many-decades career, her paintings evolved from highly representational watercolors into mixed-media abstracts. One constant in her work, however, was excellent technique: If she decided to paint a naked guy holding a guitar, much to the mortification of her adolescent son, that’s exactly what it looked like.

Growing up, I could draw a little myself and enjoyed doing so, but I never had her talent. Once, I asked her how I could improve. I suppose I expected her to say something like “Practice 10,000 hours.” Instead, she told me to look at what I wanted to draw.

Read the full article.

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Gene Hackman redefined the leading man. Jeff Bezos’s hypocritical assertion of power It’s weird that eggs were ever cheap. The public-health brain drain is here. The problem with optimism in a crisis

Culture Break

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: CSA-Printstock / Getty.

Read (or skip). The columnist Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe, argues for religion from a rational perspective. “It won’t make a believer out of me,” George Packer writes.

Debate. Here’s who will win at the 2025 Oscars—and who should win, according to David Sims.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you understandably haven’t read all 922 pages of “Mandate for Leadership,” then allow me to recommend a book—specifically, my own. The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America is out from Random House on April 22. I wrote it as a layperson’s guide to both what Project 2025 wants to do, broken down by subject area, and how the authors propose achieving it. The book is available for preorder now.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

I’m a hard target for Ross Douthat’s evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else.  

Douthat came to religion through his parents’ New England Protestantism, which took a turn during his childhood from the mainline to the charismatic. His own systematic thinking and interest in the workings of worldly power led him to become a conservative Catholic. When The New York Times hired him as a columnist, he asked me for advice, which in itself showed his open-mindedness. I suggested that, as a precocious Harvard-educated blogger for this magazine, he should make sure now and then to get out of the world of precocious bloggers and talk with people unlike him—to report on the rest of the country. Douthat didn’t follow my advice, and he was probably right not to. His own mind, nourished by innate curiosity and wide reading, has become the most interesting site in the landscape of Times opinion. I read him, with admiration and annoyance, religiously.

But Believe suffers from the limitations of Douthat’s brilliance. He has absorbed a good deal of recent literature on cosmology, physics, neuroscience, and supernaturalism, and he devotes most of the book to arguing that scientific knowledge makes the existence of God more rather than less likely. Douthat is speaking to the well-educated contemporary reader who requires a rational case for religion, and among his key words are reasonable, sensible, and empirical. Belief, in Believe, isn’t a leap of faith marked by paradox, contradiction, or wild surmise; it’s a matter of mastering the research and figuring the odds. If brain chemistry hasn’t located the exact site of consciousness, that doesn’t suggest the extent of what human beings know—it’s evidence for the existence of the soul.

Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. I can’t follow him into his Middle Earth kingdom of angels, demons, and elves just because a book he’s read shows that a universe in which life is possible has a one in 10-to-the-120th-power chance of being random. We don’t fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book. “What account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?” he demands—and then goes on to portray nonbelievers as shallow, mentally lazy, and status-obsessed, too concerned with sounding clever at a dinner party to see the obvious Truth:

That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious or culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits?

This move—a dubious assumption that imputes unflattering qualities to the opposition and stacks the deck in Douthat’s favor—is familiar from some of his columns, and it brings Believe closer to his political journalism. Throughout the book Douthat the divine has a reflexive habit of belittling nonbelief in the same way that Douthat the columnist disparages liberalism. He repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

Believe appears at a moment when nonbelief seems to be running out of gas. Douthat’s purpose is to hasten the process. “Already the time of the new atheism is passing,” he writes; “already mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back into the world.” He has been predicting this for some time, and he is almost certainly right. Large numbers of people throughout the West feel that liberal society and the bureaucratic state are failing—not just to provide practical benefits but to offer meaning and community. Secular liberalism is not the same as atheism, but disillusionment with the former seems to be driving modern people into a new period of anti-rationalism and mysticism, with a growing distrust of established science, a leveling off of the percentage of nonbelieving Americans, and a trend toward public figures making high-profile conversions—to Christianity, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the atheist refugee from repressive Islam; to Catholicism, in the case of J. D. Vance and others. Christopher Hitchens is dead and UFO sightings are on the rise.

[Read: Evangelicals made a bad trade]

President Donald Trump himself, whose first 78 years were nearly unmarked by signs of faith, has sworn a newfound religiosity since his near assassination. God saved him to make America great again, he has said several times, so “let’s bring religion back.” Days before Believe was published, Trump announced the creation of a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias, as well as a White House Faith Office, led by Paula White-Cain, Trump’s religious adviser, who has said that opposing him means opposing God. (This kind of theocratic edict has turned a generation of young Iranians against religion.) The president’s more ardent followers regard him as a kind of mythic figure, above history and politics, leading by spiritual power that connects him directly to the people. By this light, faith is inseparable from authoritarianism.

Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.

Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land.