After months of infighting and a 2024 election loss that left the party grasping for direction, Democrats are now attempting something they once treated as a scandal when Republicans did it: assembling a sweeping policy blueprint designed to hand their next presidential nominee a ready-made governing agenda on day one. They call it "Project 2029," and if the name sounds familiar, that is entirely the point.
The initiative, first reported by the New York Post, is modeled explicitly on the Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025, the same document Democrats spent the entire 2024 campaign warning would usher in authoritarian rule. Now they want one of their own.
The irony is hard to miss. For the better part of two years, Democratic candidates, operatives, and media allies turned "Project 2025" into a four-alarm talking point, casting the conservative policy roadmap as something between a threat to democracy and a dystopian screenplay. Kamala Harris's presidential campaign invoked it constantly. Liberal commentators treated it as proof that the right had a secret plan to dismantle the federal government.
And now? Democrats have decided that having a detailed governing plan before you win the White House is actually a pretty good idea.
Project 2029's executive founder, Chad Maisel, and an unnamed spokesperson have been talking to Capitol Hill leaders, think tanks, private-sector figures, and what organizers describe as "potential presidential hopefuls" over the past year. So far, the group has published three policy proposals on its website, with promises to roll out more over the next twelve months.
The first proposal, titled "Kids over Clicks," recommends banning children under 16 from accessing what the group calls "addictive apps," requiring default privacy protections, regulating AI chatbots used by minors, banning cellphones during the school day, and ending surveillance advertising aimed at teenagers.
A second targets what organizers label the "annoyance economy", robocalls, spam texts, junk fees, and customer-service hurdles that Maisel estimates cost American families "at least $165 billion" worth of time and money every year, a figure he attributes to a Groundwork Collaborative report. The proposal calls for tougher enforcement against scam calls, simpler online insurance claims, and new regulations to make dealing with companies "less frustrating."
The third proposal would dramatically expand child care assistance, guaranteeing either free child care or a monthly $1,000 cash benefit for families that choose to have a parent or caregiver stay home with children.
Notice what is missing. There is no proposal on border security. Nothing on crime. Nothing on energy costs. Nothing on the national debt. Nothing on the issues that actually drove the 2024 election result. Instead, the opening salvo of this supposedly bold new vision for the Democratic Party is a plan to fight robocalls and ban TikTok for teenagers.
The Project 2029 spokesperson told the Post that the effort is about more than just opposing the current administration. "Opposition and resistance to bad ideas is important, but it's not enough," the spokesperson said. "You have to have an alternative, and Americans are looking for a governing vision when it comes to big challenges."
That is a reasonable premise. The problem is whether the proposals match the ambition of the rhetoric. Even some on the left seem skeptical. Political strategist Max Burns, writing in Newsweek, offered a blunt assessment:
"Like the Democratic Party itself, Project 2029 is so reluctant to stake an ideological claim that it ends up not really standing for anything."
Burns also characterized Project 2025, by contrast, as "an undeniably and unapologetically far-right document", meaning, whatever you think of its contents, it at least had the courage of its convictions. His critique of Project 2029 is that it lacks that same clarity.
That diagnosis fits a broader pattern. Democrats have spent months struggling to settle on a coherent strategy for the post-2024 era. The party remains divided heading into the 2026 midterms, with factions pulling in different directions on economics, cultural issues, and how aggressively to confront the Trump administration.
Project 2029 organizers seem aware of the problem. Their spokesperson framed the mission in deliberately broad terms: "We're really focused on what are the issues that are confronting Americans, and looking for bold ideas to tackle them." The word "bold" is doing a lot of heavy lifting when the signature proposals involve junk-fee crackdowns and app restrictions.
The decision to brand this effort as a mirror image of Project 2025 is a deliberate strategic choice, and a revealing one. Project 2025, assembled by more than 100 organizations before Trump's return to office, was a comprehensive governing document covering virtually every federal agency. The Center for Progressive Reform reported that as of February, 53 percent of its policy agenda had been initiated by the administration.
That track record is precisely what makes the comparison awkward for Democrats. Project 2025 succeeded, at least by the measure of policy implementation, because it was specific, detailed, and backed by a deep bench of personnel ready to staff an administration. It reflected decades of conservative policy development across a wide coalition.
Project 2029, by contrast, has three proposals, an unnamed spokesperson, and a founder citing a progressive think tank's estimate about robocall costs. The scale difference is not a matter of timing. It is a matter of institutional depth.
Meanwhile, the 2028 Democratic presidential field remains unsettled. A Center Square Voters' Voice Poll referenced by the Post found former Vice President Kamala Harris as the clear favorite among Democratic voters, with California Governor Gavin Newsom, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trailing behind.
That lineup presents its own challenges. Harris already lost a presidential race. Newsom presides over a state that continues to bleed residents and businesses. Buttigieg's tenure at the Department of Transportation was defined more by the Biden administration's economic record than by any transportation breakthroughs. And Ocasio-Cortez represents the progressive wing that Burns's critique suggests Project 2029 is trying to avoid alienating.
The Project 2029 spokesperson told the Post that the goal is to give the next Democratic nominee a "shelf of big ideas they can draw from as they're putting forward their vision." That framing, a shelf to draw from, not a mandate to execute, suggests something closer to a think-tank wish list than a governing commitment.
Compare that to how Project 2025 operated. The Heritage Foundation effort did not offer suggestions. It offered a detailed personnel and policy roadmap, agency by agency, designed to be implemented from the first day of a new administration. The organizations behind it were not hoping a future nominee might browse their proposals. They were building the infrastructure to govern.
Democrats have every right to develop their own policy agenda. In fact, the conservative critique of the modern Democratic Party has long been that it runs on vibes, identity, and opposition rather than a concrete vision for governing. If Project 2029 eventually produces serious, detailed proposals on the economy, national security, immigration, and fiscal policy, it would represent genuine progress for a party that has struggled to articulate what it stands for beyond not being the other side.
But three proposals about children's screen time, customer-service annoyances, and child care subsidies do not constitute a governing agenda. They constitute a focus group's top three complaints. The party that keeps stumbling over its own nomination processes and internal divisions is now asking voters to trust that it has a master plan for running the country.
The organizers say more proposals will come over the next year. That timeline conveniently pushes the hard policy questions, on spending, on taxes, on the border, on energy, past the 2026 midterms and into the early stages of the 2028 primary season, when candidates will be competing for the base rather than persuading the middle.
There is an old line about imitation and flattery, and Project 2029 proves it. Democrats spent years telling voters that a detailed conservative policy blueprint was a threat to the republic. Now they want credit for copying the format.
The difference is that Project 2025 was built by a movement that knew what it believed. More than 100 organizations contributed. The proposals were specific enough that a tracker could measure implementation against promises, and 53 percent of the agenda was already underway within months.
Project 2029 has a website, three proposals, and a spokesperson who speaks in the language of corporate mission statements. "We're really focused on what are the issues that are confronting Americans" is the kind of sentence that sounds like it was written by a committee, because it almost certainly was.
The challenge for Democrats is not branding. It is substance. Voters in 2024 did not reject the Democratic Party because it lacked a catchy project name. They rejected it because they did not trust it on the economy, on the border, and on basic competence. A plan to fight junk fees does not answer those concerns. And a party still scrambling over redistricting strategy and internal procedural fights has a long way to go before it can credibly claim to have a governing vision.
Project 2029 may eventually grow into something serious. Or it may remain what Max Burns suggested it already is: an initiative so afraid of staking a real claim that it ends up standing for nothing in particular.
Either way, the fact that Democrats now consider the conservative playbook worth borrowing tells you everything about which side's approach to governing actually worked.