How The Powell Memorandum Became The Basis For Project 2025

Donald Trump has made a career of talking out of both sides of his mouth. One one hand, he says he has never heard of Project 2025. On the other, he cites many of it provisions with approval at his sparsely attended political rallies. The bald truth is the Trump campaign in 2016 never expected to win. It was a branding exercise that had no transition team in place and no plans to govern. At more than 900 pages long, Project 2025, on the other hand, is a detailed road map designed to ensure the next Trump administration — if there is one — will not repeat the mistakes of 2016. The plan traces it roots directly to a memorandum written by Lewis Powell in 1971.

Project 2205 calls for firing many federal employees and replacing them with political operatives loyal to Trump. It also takes a sledgehammer to the EPA and other federal agencies, like the Department of Energy, Department of Education, and Justice Department. The Inflation Reduction Act, with its emphasis on promoting clean energy and manufacturing in America, will be dismantled. The same fate awaits the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But most important of all are provisions that will shield the business community from government oversight and increase the wealth of the wealthiest Americans. Put together by more than 140 people with direct ties to Trump, it will ban abortion and reproductive health services for women. Texas today is seeking a court order to ferret out women who have left the state to seek abortions in other jurisdictions so they can be charged as criminals. Project 2025 will make that a national policy.

The Powell Memorandum

David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, founded The Lever, an award winning outlet dedicated to holding power accountable. In Master Plan, an investigative podcast series by The Lever, Sirota reveals how extremists and tycoons orchestrated a system of legalized corruption in America. The first season traces the untold history from the 1970s to today, showing how a small group of operatives and oligarchs used vast wealth to manipulate key US government policies for personal gain at the expense of everyone else — a plan that is coming to fruition in the 2024 election and is known as Project 2025.

In Episode Three, Sirota describes a memorandum written by Lewis Powell, a prominent corporate lawyer who was one of the architects of the legal tactics used by the tobacco industry to resist efforts by the government to hold companies responsible for the trail of heart disease and lung cancer that afflicted many cigarette smokers. That memo, written for the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971, helped get Powell a seat on the US Supreme Court.

This opposition to mainstream medical science grew out of a belief that nothing should stand in the way of corporate profit, certainly not any concern for the health of individuals or collective concern for environmental costs. Part of the spark for the Powell Memo was Powell’s anger that consumer advocate Ralph Nader was becoming a popular hero, subject to glowing profiles even in pro-business journals such as Fortune.

His pro-capitalist attitude went hand in hand with rabid anti-communism and a willingness to attack any radical movement as subversive. During his years as a corporate lawyer, Powell was a close confidant of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and an informant for the FBI. The Powell Memorandum compared the Black Panther Party and New Left groups to Nazis. It was written at a time when corporate America felt under siege by the rising demands of new social movements. It helped galvanize the counterrevolutionary reaction to progressive politics and offered the business community an approach to politics that Powell had already seen work in Philip Morris’s campaign against medical science — the flexing of lobbying power by anti-science advocates funded by Big Tobacco and a two-fisted opposition to any attempt to limit corporate spending in politics. The line to the infamous Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court runs straight back to the Powell Memorandum, according to The Nation, which says it was the Project 2025 of the Nixon era — a detailed program for establishing and entrenching right-wing power over the federal government and American society.

The Powell Memorandum And Conservative Thought

Master Plan Episode Three details how the Powell Memorandum became the foundation for the conservative counter-revolution. You may have heard people say conservatives are still mad about the ’60s — Woodstock, draft card and bra burning, the Summer of Love, and the “if it feels good, do it” mentality. Powell took all that anger and funneled it into political action. The echoes of his memo can be heard today in the rants by JD Vance claiming women who have not had children should not be allowed to vote and the ravings of Elon Musk who expressed approval on his social media site of a tweet by “Autism Capital” suggesting that “women and low T men” are not able to think freely because they “can’t defend themselves physically.” The only people who can think freely are “high T alpha males and aneurotypical people … this is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think,” according to The Guardian.

In a separate article, The Guardian says Project 2025 touts itself as “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025” and claims that is not an overstatement. The 922-page manifesto is a plug-and-play agenda of detailed policies designed to immediately empower the conservative movement, billionaires, and Republican donors the moment Trump is sworn in for a second term.

Highlights include plans to kill off climate regulations; eviscerate pollution laws; terminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that protects Americans from Wall Street scams; raise taxes on the middle class to finance billionaire and corporate tax cuts; empower the White House to replace civil servants with ideological loyalists; and limit the government’s authority to enforce campaign finance laws designed to deter pay-to-play corruption.

Project 2025

Project 2025 was built with the involvement of at least 140 former Trump administration officials. It is endorsed by a constellation of oligarch-funded conservative groups and it is published by the powerful Heritage Foundation, which Trump himself lauded as “a great group” that is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” This connection to the Heritage Foundation isn’t incidental. It tells us that conservatives see a Trump presidency as the final stage of their grand half-century-long scheme to destroy the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society.

Heritage was originally launched in the early 1970s with seed funding from the beer magnate Joseph Coors. He told a historian that his political activism at the time was specifically “stirred” by the Powell Memorandum in which the author expressed fears that the federal government was becoming far too responsive to popular demands for the regulation of business. “It is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system — at all levels and at every opportunity — be far more aggressive than in the past,” Powell wrote. Soon after he was anointed to the Supreme Court, he wrote the majority opinion in a landmark ruling that gave corporations new rights to spend money to influence elections. “There should be not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it,” he wrote.

The Takeaway

People sometimes wonder how America got to where it is today, with millions worshiping a man who grabs women by the pussy and cheats on his third wife while she is pregnant. The answer is that the leaders promoted by conservatives are all cartoon characters, empty suits, failed actors, and draft dodgers who are the face of conservatism while powerful forces pull the levers of power behind the scenes. Some wonder why the big polluters like the fossil fuel companies always come up winners. It is because the ethos spawned by Lewis Powell in 1971 has become the modus operandi for American politics. The people are caught in a “heads they win, tails we lose” conundrum from which there appears to be no escape.

Trump Part Two will be an amalgam of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies in which corporations attain the status of super citizens with powers far behind those of ordinary citizens. The echoes of the Powell Memorandum still reverberate today and have brought us to the brink of fascism. It is specious to say any administration will be unaffected by corporate power — the rules of the game are tilted strongly in favor of corporations. The Powell Memorandum has seen to that. Now it is time to throw Lewis Powell’s ideas into the dustbin of history and support a government that puts people first. If some are to be more equal than others, let them be real people, not fictitious entities.