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Carlos Lozada

By Carlos Lozada

Opinion Columnist, a co-host of “Matter of Opinion” and the author of “The Washington Book.”

Every new administration that wins power away from the opposing party contends that whatever its predecessors did was terrible and that victory constitutes a popular mandate to fix or get rid of it all. Elections have consequences, politicians love to remind us, and a big one entails trying to change everything, right away.

It is possible to read “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — an 887-page document proposing to remake the executive branch, department by department, agency by agency, office by office — as one more go-round in this Washington tradition. With contributions by dozens of conservative thinkers and activists under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the book announces itself as part of a “unified effort to be ready for the next conservative administration to govern at 12:00 noon, Jan. 20, 2025.” There is much work ahead, it states, “just to undo the significant damage that will have been done during the Biden years.”

The book has not been blessed by Donald Trump or his campaign, and the authors emphasize that they want to help the next conservative president, “whoever he or she may be.” But with so many former Trump officials among its contributors, so much praise for him throughout its pages (he is mentioned some 300 times, compared with once for Nikki Haley) and such clear affinity between Trump’s impulses and the document’s proposals, it is easy to imagine “Mandate for Leadership” wielding influence in a second Trump term. It is an off-the-shelf governing plan for a leader who took office last time with no clear plan and no real ability to govern. This book attempts to supply him with both.

There is plenty here that one would expect from a contemporary conservative agenda: calls for lower corporate taxes and against abortion rights; criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the “climate fanaticism” of the Biden administration; and plans to militarize the southern border and target the “administrative state,” which is depicted here as a powerful and unmanageable federal bureaucracy bent on left-wing social engineering. Yet what is most striking about the book is not the specific policy agenda it outlines but how far the authors are willing to go in pursuit of that agenda and how reckless their assumptions are about law, power and public service.

“Mandate for Leadership,” which was edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation, is not about anything as simplistic as being dictator for a day but about consolidating authority and eroding accountability for the long haul. It calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds. Though it assures readers that the president and his or her subordinates “must be committed to the Constitution and the rule of law,” it portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance. It elevates the role of religious beliefs in government affairs and regards the powers of Congress and the judiciary with dismissiveness.

And for all the book’s rhetoric about the need to “dismantle the administrative state,” it soon becomes clear that vanquishing the federal bureaucracy is not the document’s animating ambition. There may be plenty worth jettisoning from the executive branch, but “Mandate for Leadership” is about capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.

“Mandate for Leadership” is not the kind of book meant to be read straight through from beginning to end, certainly not by any one person. (Trust me.) Each chapter features one or more authors exploring a particular department or agency in detail, so grasping the entirety of the book’s proposals would require deep expertise in multiple fields — trade negotiations, environmental science, diplomacy, nuclear power, to name a few — and in the intricacies of Washington wonkdom. The book’s prose is dense, packed with bullet points and bureaucratese, and reading about so many obscure offices, page after page, left me sympathetic to its complaints about an elephantine fourth branch of government. The introduction asserts that “one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th president of the United States,” but I wouldn’t count on any future president poring over these pages, highlighter in hand, nodding sagely. “Mandate for Leadership” is not an exercise in persuasion but a statement of purpose.

The mayhem of the Trump presidency’s early days might have occurred partly by design — recall Steve Bannon’s strategy to “flood the zone” with an expletive — but it is not an experience that the authors of this volume wish to repeat. The book’s existence is an implicit admission that the Trump administration’s haphazard approach to governance was a missed opportunity. Executing a conservative president’s agenda “requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it,” the document says on its opening page. The phrasing quickly grows militaristic: The authors wish to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day 1 to deconstruct the administrative state.”

That deconstruction can be blunt. Portions of “Mandate for Leadership” read as though the authors did a Control-F search of the executive branch for any terms they deemed suspect and then deleted the offending programs or offices. The White House’s Gender Policy Council must go, along with its Office of Domestic Climate Policy. The Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is a no-no. The E.P.A. can do without its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be dismantled because it constitutes “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

Sometimes search and destroy gives way to search and replace. At the Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force, which the Biden administration created five months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, must be supplanted by a pro-life task force that ensures that all Health and Human Services divisions “use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.” The document also asserts that the department should be known as the “Department of Life.” There is little interest here in the notion that different states can reach their own conclusions on abortion rights, as Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. Instead, the next president should work with federal lawmakers “to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support.” (The focus on life is somewhat selective; while urging the next president to work on “restoring a culture of life in America,” the document also calls for “finality” in dealing with the dozens of inmates on death row.)

One of the book’s most frequent target is D.E.I. — the diversity,........

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