By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

The Heritage Foundation is beginning to come apart in public, and what is unraveling is not simply a think tank but a long-maintained illusion. More than 60 senior staff members, fellows, and trustees have now resigned from the institution that spent decades presenting itself as the sober custodian of conservative thought.
Board members tied to major donors have stepped down. Veteran policy writers have walked away. What remains is an organization forced, perhaps for the first time, to reckon with the distance between how it spoke about America and what it planned to do to it.
Philosophers have long maintained that power, when it believes itself righteous, often mistakes silence for consent. The Heritage Foundation thrived on that mistake. For years it wrote in careful abstractions, never naming the people its policies would dispossess, never acknowledging the communities that would be bruised by its ideas.
Project 2025 changed that. Nearly 900 pages long, the document spoke plainly. It described how to bend the federal government toward a single will. It explained how to weaken civil rights enforcement, how to hollow out agencies, how to turn immigration into mass detention, and how to place ideology above law. It did not whisper. It declared.
Donald Trump told the country he had nothing to do with it. He said he did not know the authors. He dismissed the warnings as political theater. Those words collapsed the moment he returned to the White House and appointed Russell Vought, one of Project 2025’s principal architects, to run the Office of Management and Budget. The blueprint Trump denied became the machinery through which his presidency now moves.
“A lot of the policies from Day 1 to the last day and in between that the administration has adopted are right out of Project 2025,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said, as his office and others prepared lawsuits not in reaction, but in expectation.
What followed has been neither theoretical nor restrained. In Minneapolis, a federal agent shot and killed a man during an operation, igniting protests in a city that already carries the memory of unchecked force. Immigration hardened into something colder still when the administration suspended visa processing for applicants from 75 countries, closing pathways without warning and without apology. Across the nation, demonstrations rose as Americans confronted a government that now acts as though consent is an obstacle rather than a foundation.
Project 2025 anticipated this atmosphere. Its immigration chapter calls for ending asylum at the border, canceling legal status for millions, compelling local police to serve federal deportation goals, and expanding detention camps through executive authority alone. It treats people as numbers to be managed and rights as technicalities to be brushed aside.
For Black America, this moment is not unfamiliar. Civil rights organizations have warned that Project 2025 threatens voting access, education protections, housing enforcement, and reproductive autonomy. The document rarely names Black communities directly, yet it targets the very systems that protect Black citizenship and political power. The danger lies not in what it says aloud, but in what it dismantles quietly.
Abroad, the same logic has spilled beyond U.S. borders. On January 3, American forces struck Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, transporting them to New York to face federal charges. Governments across Europe and Latin America condemned the action as a breach of international law. The United States escalated further by seizing Venezuelan oil tankers, tightening control over the country’s resources and deepening regional instability.
In the Arctic, Trump renewed his demand for U.S. control of Greenland, declaring anything less unacceptable. Denmark deployed troops. Protests filled streets in Greenland and Copenhagen. A Greenlandic official broke down on live television after a White House meeting failed to soften Washington’s posture. At Davos, Trump’s confrontations with European leaders turned diplomacy into spectacle and strained alliances that had taken generations to build.
This is not chaos without authorship. Analysts tracking implementation estimate that roughly half of Project 2025 has already been executed through executive orders, agency restructuring, and enforcement changes. This was not improvisation. It was preparation made visible.
Now the institution that helped write the script is fracturing. Donors have pulled back. Trustees have resigned. Senior figures have said privately that Heritage no longer distinguishes between conservative governance and extremism. The organization insists the departures are part of a realignment, yet those who left describe something else entirely. They describe an unwillingness to confront hatred. They describe a tolerance for rhetoric that stains everything it touches. They describe an institution that chose influence over responsibility.
“When an institution hesitates to confront harmful ideas and allows lapses in judgment to stand, it forfeits the moral authority on which its influence depends,” former trustee Abby Spencer Moffat said.