Heritage releases Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the ninth edition of a series it has produced since 1981. It is public, its authorship is credited, and its contributor list includes at least 140 people who worked in the first Trump administration. Nothing about it is secret at any point.

On Truth Social he writes that he knows nothing about Project 2025, has no idea who is behind it, and disagrees with some of what it says. He repeats the disclaimer at the September 2024 debate. In a later interview he refines it: he disagrees with parts of it, not all of it. The campaign’s stated platform is Agenda 47, a separate and shorter document.

Project 2025’s director steps down after the disavowal. Heritage maintains the document is a policy resource for any conservative administration, not a Trump campaign product — a characterization that is accurate as to its formal status.

Russ Vought, who wrote the Mandate chapter on executive power, is nominated and later confirmed as OMB Director. Other contributors are appointed across the FCC, immigration enforcement, intelligence, and the State Department. This is the hardest fact in the dossier: it is a Senate confirmation record, not an inference.

In a 2025 post he references Vought’s Project 2025 role favorably — after having disclaimed knowledge of the project the year before. Both posts are primary documents and both are recorded here.

The Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact count 283 of 532 identified executive-action proposals initiated or completed — 53% — twelve months in. A separate crowdsourced tracker reports roughly 48–50% of 317 catalogued objectives. Multiple independent trackers converge near half.

DOGE is established on inauguration day with Elon Musk as its public face, operating as a special government employee. Its remit is contracts, grants, leases, and headcount across a roughly $7 trillion federal budget. An authorization runs to mid-2026.

The stated goal begins at $2 trillion during the campaign. It is revised to $1 trillion, then in a cabinet meeting Musk projects $150 billion for fiscal 2026 — 7.5% of the original promise. The revisions are public and on the record.

DOGE publishes itemized savings on a public page and on X. Reporters find errors repeatedly: a $1.9 billion Treasury contract cancelled under the prior administration, more than 1,000 contract cancellations quietly removed in one month erasing about $4 billion. DOGE publishes roughly a third of its claimed cuts, making independent checking hard by construction.

His special-government-employee status ends and he returns to his companies, following a public falling-out with the President. DOGE continues without its principal.

The initiative reaches a self-imposed termination date and shuts down; OPM Director Scott Kupor confirms its duties were absorbed by other agencies. Its final six months of numbers were never updated. The administration has said it does not plan a final accounting.

The audit — requested by Senators Blumenthal and Peters, both Democrats, which is worth stating plainly — examined $110 billion of the $215 billion claimed. Findings: about 96% of the $49.2 billion claimed from terminating roughly 16,000 grants could not be verified. Of 13,476 contracts DOGE said it terminated, nearly 2,000 were not, worth about $27.4 billion. Of $61 billion in claimed contract savings, more than half — nearly $35 billion — was either not terminated or could not be corroborated. 108 of 264 lease terminations were already being phased out before DOGE existed. A $1.7 billion Defense Health Agency IT contract covering 700+ military treatment facilities was never terminated or reduced: "Thus, no savings were achieved." DOGE did not consistently apply its own stated methodology.

Arrest priorities widen beyond people with criminal convictions. Detention capacity expands rapidly, including into converted warehouses and onto military installations such as Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss.

Southern border apprehensions fall to 85,218 over twelve months, against the final twelve months of the prior administration — a 92% decline. This is the administration’s central claimed achievement and it is verified by CBP data.

ICE reports 33 deaths in custody during 2025 — the highest annual total in more than twenty years. The detained population exceeds 60,000, with about 86% held in privately operated facilities.

Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, a Cuban national paroled into the US in 1996 with a criminal record ICE described as spanning 1997 to 2015, dies at Camp East Montana after being placed in segregation. ICE’s statement describes medical distress. The El Paso County Medical Examiner rules the death a homicide — asphyxia from neck and torso compression. Six people die in ICE custody that month across four states; two more are killed in shootings involving ICE agents in public.

A federal judge rules ICE must improve conditions in California detention facilities — adequate health-care staffing, access to specialists, timely care and medication. Separately, federal appeals courts reject the administration’s reinterpretation of mandatory-detention law.

ICE publishes no enforcement data between April and July 11, 2026. When it resumes, the figures show 46,436 of 65,765 people in detention — about 71% — have no criminal conviction. By August 4, at least 24 people have died in custody in 2026, on pace to exceed the 2025 record.

Tariffs tied to fentanyl trafficking are imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — a statute that has never before been used to set tariffs in its 48-year history.

Broad tariffs on nearly all imports follow, under the same authority.

Sitting en banc, the court characterizes the tariffs as "unbounded in scope, amount, and duration" and holds IEEPA does not authorize them.

In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the Court holds that IEEPA "does not give the President authority to impose tariffs." Refund questions are remanded to the lower courts.

All IEEPA tariffs end. A 10% global surcharge is proclaimed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — a statute with its own limits, now itself in litigation. Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs, resting on a separate authority with its own investigation requirement, are unaffected and remain at 50%.