Project 2025 Reshaped America. Now Its Architects Are Coming for Britain, and Farage Is Helping Them. - Reform Watch

Nigel Farage is not simply an admirer of Donald Trump. He is embedded in the network of organisations, advisers, and donors that produced Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint that has been used to reshape American government since January 2025, and which Trump spent his entire election campaign pretending he had never heard of. The connections between Farage, Reform UK, and that network are specific, documented, and deserve far more public attention than they have received. Farage has spoken at National Conservatism Conferences alongside Russell Vought, a key architect of the Mandate for Leadership document at the heart of Project 2025, and alongside Steve Bannon, who has publicly boasted about advising Farage directly. The NatCon 5 conference in Washington in September 2025 listed Farage as a featured speaker on the same programme as Vought, Bannon, Tulsi Gabbard, and Tom Homan. More than one fifth of speakers at relevant NatCon events have held roles in Project 2025-contributing organisations. The connections extend into Reform's own advisory structure. Alan Mendoza, Reform's chief foreign policy adviser, leads the Centre for a Better Britain, a think tank that has explicitly described itself as drawing its blueprint from the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. James Orr, Reform's head of policy, has publicly admired the Heritage Foundation and sits at the intersection of multiple networks funded by Delo and connected to the American hard right. Suella Braverman, who defected to Reform in January 2026, accepted a Heritage-funded trip worth over £9,000. A pro-Trump lobbyist embedded in Project 2025 circles has funded and advised Reform while actively promoting a Project 2029 initiative, explicitly designed to export the American agenda to Britain. ## What Project 2025 actually is Project 2025 was published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has been central to right-wing policy in America since the Reagan era. Its central document exceeds 900 pages and proposes replacing career civil servants with political loyalists, abolishing the Department of Education, restricting reproductive rights, eliminating diversity programmes across the federal government, and concentrating executive power in ways that would make it significantly harder to hold those in power to account. Over 140 of its contributors served in Trump's first administration. Trump spent his entire 2024 campaign stating he had nothing to do with it. "I know nothing about Project 2025," he said. "I have no idea who is behind it." His campaign managers issued memos asserting it had nothing to do with their operation and should not be associated with him in any way. Before the election, polls consistently showed majority opposition. A Navigator Research poll in October 2024 found 52% of Americans opposed the project against 13% in support. An NBC News poll found 57% of registered voters viewed it negatively. A University of Massachusetts survey found 68% opposed replacing career officials with political appointees, 72% opposed restricting contraception access, and 64% opposed eliminating the Department of Education. They were ignored. ## What Has Been Implemented Within a year of taking office, independent trackers found Trump had implemented over fifty per cent of Project 2025's recommendations. The Centre for Progressive Reform documented 283 of 532 domestic administrative recommendations either initiated or completed. Nearly 220,000 federal jobs were cut, representing approximately ten per cent of the federal workforce. DEI programmes were eliminated across government by executive order. Reproductive health restrictions were advanced at federal level, including defunding Planned Parenthood and pausing CDC abortion data reporting. The Department of Education was placed on a path toward abolition. Gender policy recognition was limited to male and female. Immigration enforcement was dramatically expanded. These were not incremental policy changes. They were structural, and they were accelerated deliberately through executive authority to bypass legislative scrutiny. ## The Ideology Behind It The worldview animating Project 2025 and the NatCon network that Farage inhabits is worth understanding in plain terms. At a National Conservatism Conference promoted in association with the Heritage Foundation, a speaker named Scott Yenor stated that every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, medicine, or the law. He said that young women pursuing careers rather than motherhood represented something that needed to change. He said that if every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that is not a failure. These remarks were made in public, on a platform Farage has shared with the people who drafted the plan now being implemented in Washington. The Heritage Foundation itself has channelled over $120 million through billionaire-linked donors and anonymous giving vehicles since 2020. Donor-advised funds sponsored by Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and Vanguard have routed at least $171 million to Project 2025 participant organisations. These structures are designed to obscure the identity of original donors while providing tax advantages. The same mechanisms are being used to build parallel infrastructure in Britain. ## Why This Matters Trump denied Project 2025 and then implemented it. The American public opposed it and were ignored. The organisations behind it are now explicitly working to replicate the model in Britain through think tanks, advisers, political donations, and a party leader who has spent a decade building relationships at the heart of this network.