type: timeline_event By 2023, prominent Council for National Policy members held leadership positions in organizations affiliated with Project 2025, Heritage Foundation's comprehensive plan for a second Trump administration, demonstrating how CNP's coordination network extended into the blueprint for executive branch capture.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism identified three networks as most influential in conservative politics: Project 2025 organizations (spearheaded by Heritage Foundation), America First Policy Institute, and the Council for National Policy - with significant overlap between them through shared leadership.
Several prominent CNP members were listed as contributors to Project 2025, including Edwin Meese III (Heritage Foundation Fellow Emeritus, former CNP president, Reagan's Attorney General), William L. Walton (Heritage Foundation Trustee and immediate past President of CNP), and Cleta Mitchell (Conservative Partnership Institute Senior Legal Fellow, CNP board member who coordinated January 6 election denial).
This leadership overlap explained how Project 2025 achieved coordination among 100 different organizations described as "unparalleled in the history of the conservative movement." The coordination was achieved through CNP's infrastructure - the same network that had coordinated Tea Party mobilization, COVID-19 anti-lockdown protests, and January 6.
CNP member organizations playing prominent roles in Project 2025 included Heritage Foundation (spearheading the effort), Family Research Council (led by CNP member Tony Perkins), Alliance Defending Freedom, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Turning Point USA (led by CNP member Charlie Kirk), Claremont Institute, and Conservative Partnership Institute.
William L. Walton's dual role as CNP's immediate past president and Heritage Foundation trustee exemplified the interlocking leadership structure. Walton also served on the boards of American Conservative Union and American Enterprise Institute, demonstrating how CNP members held leadership positions across multiple conservative institutions that could then be coordinated through CNP meetings.
Project 2025 represented CNP's coordination model applied to executive branch planning: CNP members led organizations that contributed to different sections of the 920-page policy manual, ensuring the plan reflected coordinated strategy across think tanks, legal organizations, religious right groups, and grassroots mobilization networks.
The seamless integration of CNP leadership into Project 2025 demonstrated that the plan wasn't just Heritage Foundation's work - it was the product of the entire conservative coordination network that had been meeting three times yearly since 1981 to align strategy across institutional boundaries.
This explained Project 2025's comprehensiveness: it reflected four decades of conservative institutional coordination, with CNP serving as the mechanism that aligned Heritage policy, Federalist Society judicial strategy, ALEC legislation, religious right social priorities, and billionaire donor funding into a unified governing blueprint.