Democrats tried to fight back against Project 2025. But as they’ve watched many of the ideas it contained come to fruition under President Donald Trump, some of them want a blueprint for a future administration of their own.
And they want it ready to go if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028.
A group of Democrats is building a governing agenda that it has dubbed “Project 2029.” Its advisers have begun drafting policies the authors hope could be followed by the Democratic candidates expected to launch a campaign for president ahead of the 2028 election.
“The point of Project 2029 is not to move the party to the center or move the party to the left, it is to solve problems at the scale that is required,” Chad Maisel, the Project 2029 executive director, told NOTUS in an interview.
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“We’re going to have many, many people running for president over the next year and a half or so,” Maisel said. “This is really about anchoring that debate, shaping that debate on these big issues in particular.”
Democrats have long said they don’t want the upcoming elections to be focused on an anti-Trump message. Instead, they want it to be a fight with Republicans over cost of living, an affordability argument they say they are sure they can win.
The authors of Project 2029 believe that enacting their policy proposals will require a mix of executive action and congressional action, but the project is focused on pairing these big ideas with an achievable plan to get them done.
With perhaps dozens of Democratic candidates expected to launch campaigns ahead of 2028, crafting such a playbook could create risks for the party. If some of the candidates break from the policies outlined, it could show voters that the field lacks a unified message and create openings for attack — from the right and the left.
Republicans’ Project 2025 — Russell Vought, who is now Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, was the chief architect of the plan — was a major sticking point of the 2024 election. Democrats campaigned heavily against it, using it as a rallying cry to bring attention to the sweep of the initiatives that conservatives wanted to accomplish if Trump returned to office.
Maisel drew a sharp distinction between his group’s effort and its conservative predecessor.
“Project 2025 was a deeply sinister effort, very much shrouded in secrecy, and it was really focused on tearing down government and advancing a pretty far-right agenda,” he said. “We are not that.”
One of the Project 2029 policies is a child care proposal that would offer either free, publicly funded child care or a $1,000-a-month “care credit” for families who opt out of the public option.
Tara McGuinness, who founded the New Practice Lab, a research and design lab focused on family economic security, helped write the policy. She said the design is meant to move past what she described as a stale debate, which is part of what Project 2029 is meant to address in the proposals it’s putting forward.
“For too long we’ve been stuck in an argument about universal child care versus parents going it alone that’s really out of step with where American parents are,” she said, adding that the group’s internal research found parents want both lower costs and more time with their children, rather than having to choose between them.
Elliot Haspel, a child and family policy expert and a senior fellow at the think tank Capita who has written extensively about child care frameworks, said that type of proposal is probably the most likely to offer many options to working parents who come from different types of households.
“Only recently have we seen Democrats start to talk more about the idea of, ‘We need to support families that have stay-home parents, we need to fully support families that want to use a grandparent or want to use a neighbor to provide child care,’” Haspel said. “This isn’t just about these sort of licensed formal programs.”
This is just one of many proposals to come, Maisel said.
The group plans to roll out dozens of proposals over the next year, on issues including housing, health care, energy costs, tackling corruption, border policy “and everything in between,” meant to give the next Democratic president a ready-made agenda and to shape the party’s 2028 primary debate well before it begins in earnest, Maisel said.
Project 2029 has already previewed several other proposals, including plans to break up regional utility monopolies, rein in what it calls the “annoyance economy” of hidden fees and customer-service hassles, and restrict harmful social media and artificial intelligence features aimed at children.
“If you are a mom dealing with child care, or you are a renter dealing with skyrocketing rent, you don’t care if the solution that is being offered is an anti-monopolist response or an abundance-oriented response, a centrist response, or a far-left response,” Maisel said. “You just want to hear solutions that solve the problem you’re facing.”
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Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Russell Vought’s role with Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation. He was a lead author on the report and helped launch Heritage Action.
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