Preamble
Project 2025 proved that a detailed blueprint, executed with discipline, can transform the federal government in a single term. The question worth asking now is whether the left is watching and taking notes.
Project 2025 was not a surprise to the people who built it. It was the product of years of patient institutional work by the Heritage Foundation and more than 100 partner organizations. The left watched that blueprint get executed in real time, and the question that every honest political observer must now ask is this: what would a mirror image of that effort look like if progressive organizations applied the same discipline, the same four-year window, and the same willingness to treat government as an engineering problem rather than a governing one?
The Architecture of Ambition
To understand what a progressive blueprint could look like, it helps to understand exactly what Project 2025 actually was. At its core, it rested on four pillars: a comprehensive policy document called the Mandate for Leadership, a database of pre-screened ideological loyalists ready to fill 50,000 federal positions, a training academy to prepare those appointees before Day One, and a 180-day agency-by-agency action plan to be executed immediately upon taking office.¹ The genius of the design was not any single policy. It was the integration of personnel, training, and timing into a single operational system.
A progressive equivalent, which researchers and political strategists have begun calling Project 2028, would mirror that architecture precisely, but in the opposite ideological direction. The organizing coalition would likely draw from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, the Democratic Socialists of America, and major unions including the AFL-CIO and the SEIU. Figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose allies are already laying quiet groundwork for a potential 2028 presidential run, would serve as the ideological architects, filling the roles that Kevin Roberts and Paul Dans played for Heritage.²
What the Blueprint Would Actually Say
The policy agenda in a hypothetical Project 2028 document would not be moderate Democratic platform material. It would represent the maximalist left’s vision, matching Project 2025’s radicalism proposal by proposal. Where Project 2025 sought to dismantle the administrative state, Project 2028 would seek to massively expand it. Where Project 2025 replaced career civil servants with conservative loyalists, Project 2028 would replace political appointees with progressive advocates, union organizers, and climate scientists screened for ideological alignment. The spoils system, it turns out, has no party affiliation.
On healthcare, the centerpiece would be Medicare for All, a single-payer system eliminating private health insurance entirely. The Congressional Budget Office and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have estimated the cost at approximately 32 trillion dollars over ten years, a figure that would require either a 32 percent payroll tax or a near-doubling of all income tax rates.³ On taxes, the blueprint calls for a 70 percent top marginal rate on income above 10 million dollars, a 2 percent annual wealth tax on fortunes above 50 million dollars, and a corporate tax rate of 35 percent.⁴ On the environment, it proposes a full Green New Deal: 100 percent clean energy by 2035, a Civilian Climate Corps of one million workers, and the nationalization of fossil fuel infrastructure, estimated at up to 16 trillion dollars in new federal spending.⁵
The labor chapter would mandate worker representation on the boards of all companies with more than 100 employees, raise the federal minimum wage to 25 dollars per hour, reduce the standard workweek to 32 hours without a pay cut, and extend full union rights to gig and independent workers.⁶ On immigration, it would abolish ICE entirely, decriminalize unauthorized border crossings, and grant immediate legal status to all undocumented residents. On housing, it would declare shelter a constitutional right and commit the federal government to constructing 10 million units of public housing over a decade, funded by the wealth tax.⁷
The Mirror That Nobody Wants to Look At
The symmetry between these two visions is, on close examination, more instructive than the differences. Both Project 2025 and its hypothetical progressive mirror share a common structural approach: identify enemies embedded in the existing system, replace them with loyalists, and use the full power of the executive branch to reshape government in the image of the movement’s values before the other side can organize a response. The Heritage Foundation called this approach the ‘administrative state transformation.’ Progressive strategists, when they are being candid, call it the same thing in different words.
Both blueprints also share a common weakness. Project 2025’s authors acknowledged that the most aggressive proposals would require congressional action, and Congress has proven nearly incapable of providing it, passing just 64 bills in all of 2025. The progressive agenda faces even steeper arithmetic. Adding Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free college, universal public housing, and a federal jobs guarantee together produces a spending commitment that would dwarf any peacetime program in American history, at a moment when the national debt already exceeds the size of the entire economy.³ Ambition, it turns out, is not the same as arithmetic.
Is It Already Being Built?
The honest answer is: not yet at the scale of Project 2025, but the early infrastructure is visible. Centrist Democrats have noticed. Third Way, the center-left think tank, launched what Axios described as a quiet ‘Stop AOC’ effort in early 2026, explicitly aimed at preventing the progressive wing from controlling the 2028 presidential primary.² The New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall published a hypothetical ‘Project 2028’ for Democrats in February 2026, but his version was notably centrist and market-oriented, a deliberate counter-narrative to the maximalist version that progressive organizers are discussing in less public settings.⁸
The internal Democratic debate over whether to nominate a figure like Ocasio-Cortez or a centrist like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reflects the same fault line that produced the conservative-versus-MAGA split on the right before 2024. The mainstream of the Democratic Party is nowhere near the maximalist vision described in a hypothetical Project 2028 document. But the mainstream of the Republican Party was nowhere near Project 2025 in 2022 either. Movements have a way of moving faster than their critics expect.
Why the Center Cannot Afford to Ignore This
The lesson of Project 2025 is not that the right is more dangerous than the left. The lesson is that detailed, organized, patient political movements with a four-year window and a clear operational plan can transform the federal government before most citizens understand what is happening. That lesson is now available to anyone willing to learn it, on any point of the political spectrum.
The 45 percent of Americans who identify as political independents, the largest share in Gallup’s recorded history, are the people most directly affected when ideological extremes capture the machinery of government.⁹ They are not represented in either blueprint. They are the governed, not the governing. And in a political environment where both parties increasingly reward their most committed and least compromising members, the center does not win by standing still and hoping both sides exhaust themselves.
The Lesson That Cuts Both Ways
The blueprint that transformed the federal government in 15 months was written years before anyone took it seriously. The people who built it were patient, organized, and completely transparent about their intentions. That is precisely why it worked. The progressive movement has now watched every step of that process in real time, and the question is no longer whether they are drawing lessons from it. The question is whether anyone in the center is paying attention before the next blueprint is finished.
That is the structural warning embedded in the Project 2025 story, and it applies with equal force in both directions. The conservative movement used a detailed plan and a four-year window to reshape the architecture of American government. The progressive movement is watching, learning, and in some quarters, already drawing plans. The antidote is not a counter-blueprint from either direction. It is the kind of steady, accountable, moderate governance that treats the country’s institutions as something worth protecting rather than something worth capturing.
That ground does not defend itself. We are 45 percent of this country, politically homeless, unrepresented by either blueprint, governed by movements we never chose. Democracy does not protect itself; it demands the engaged, practical, and principled voices of the moderate center to stand together and insist that our government works. This is our moment to unite around what we share: facts over fury, solutions over spectacle, and institutions that serve the many, not the extreme few.
Sources
1. Project 2025’s four pillars: Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership (2023). project2025.org. CNN analysis of first-week executive actions. morolawyers.com/post/project-2025-implementation-under-president-trump-status-as-of-march-1-2025
2. AOC allies laying 2028 groundwork: Axios, March 2, 2026. axios.com/2026/03/02/aocs-allies-lay-groundwork-for-2028-presidential-bid. Centrist Democrats’ ‘Stop AOC’ effort: Axios, March 1, 2026. axios.com/2026/03/01/centrist-democrats-liberals-aoc
3. Medicare for All cost estimate: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; Congressional Budget Office analysis. crfb.org. Manhattan Institute: manhattan.institute/article/the-progressives-empty-policy-agenda
4. Progressive tax proposals: Senator Elizabeth Warren, wealth tax legislation. sanders.senate.gov/issues. Warren seeks progressive stamp: Axios, January 11, 2026. axios.com/2026/01/11/warren-democrats-2028-makeover
5. Green New Deal cost estimate: Congressional Progressive Caucus Deal for All. progressives.house.gov/deal-for-all. Green New Deal framework: AOC official platform. ocasiocortez.com/issues
6. Labor chapter: Workplace Democracy Act. Senator Bernie Sanders issues platform. sanders.senate.gov/issues. Political positions of Bernie Sanders: Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Bernie_Sanders
7. Housing as a human right: AOC campaign issues. ocasiocortez.com/issues. Project 2025 subject-by-subject breakdown: Rep. Lofgren. lofgren.house.gov/sites/Stop-Project-2025-Task-Force
8. Thomas Edsall, ‘Project 2028’: New York Times, February 3, 2026. nytimes.com/2026/02/03/opinion/project-2028-democratic-party-platform. Democrats divided over 2028 candidate: The Hill. thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5732030-democrats-2028-centrist-progressive-debate
9. 45% of Americans identify as independents: Gallup, 2025. news.gallup.com/poll/new-high-45-identify-as-political-independents