By Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump caught his own administration off guard last week by suggesting that the nation’s primary disaster response agency might simply “go away.”

Though Trump had routinely lambasted the Federal Emergency Management Agency throughout his third White House bid, he had stopped short of calling for its elimination. Now, an executive order bearing his signature has put that possibility in motion.

The idea, however, wasn’t new. The contours of it circulated nearly two years ago through Project 2025, a sweeping plan to overhaul the government that Trump as a candidate forcefully disavowed.

Many of Trump’s early actions appear closely aligned with Project 2025’s plans.

A CNN analysis of the 53 executive orders and actions from Trump’s first week in office found that more than two-thirds – 36 – evoke proposals outlined in “Mandate for Leadership,” Project 2025’s 922-page blueprint for the next Republican president. The overlap includes early steps taken by Trump to execute some of his most-touted pledges: cracking down on illegal immigration; dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and rolling back environmental restrictions on oil and gas exploration.

But the framework offered in “Mandate for Leadership” also foreshadowed some of Trump’s more provocative and less expected early actions.

It calls for “quickly and aggressively” punishing countries that refuse deported migrants – as Trump did Sunday when Colombia blocked two US military planes carrying deportees. It advises the president to “immediately revoke the security clearance” of top national security officials accused by conservatives of political bias, a move Trump executed within hours of taking office. And Trump’s directive to curb foreign aid from countries “not fully aligned” with his global aims appeases Project 2025’s concern that these programs are “disconnected from the strategy and practice of U.S. foreign policy.”

“This is exactly the work we set out to do,” Paul Dans, who oversaw Project 2025 at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told CNN in an interview Wednesday. “It’s still in the early first stages of bearing fruit, but we wanted to make sure the president was ready to hit the ground running on day one. The rapidity and the depth of what they’ve rolled out this quickly is a testament to the work done in Project 2025 and other presidential transition projects.”

The fraction of executive actions that so far do not touch on Project 2025 priorities include some of Trump’s narrower fixations, like declassifying records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, requiring federal workers to return to the office and demanding the flag fly at full staff during presidential inaugurations.

In a statement to CNN, the White House picked up where Trump’s campaign left off downplaying any connection between the Republican leader and the conservative playbook. The president, his spokesman Harrison Fields said, “had nothing to do with Project 2025.”

“In his first few days in office, President Trump has delivered on the promises that earned him a resounding mandate from the American people – securing the border, restoring common sense, driving down inflation, and unleashing American energy,” Fields said.

The Heritage Foundation declined to comment.

From ‘lay the groundwork’ to ‘I haven’t read it’

Think tanks and advocacy organizations from both sides of the aisle typically prepare for incoming administrations with ready-made policy proposals. But Project 2025 was significant for its breadth and coordination across the conservative movement.

The Heritage Foundation has found success influencing Republican administrations “through the back channels where a lot of Washington work happens” going back to President Ronald Reagan, said Heath Brown, a City University of New York professor who’s written multiple books on presidential transitions.

The organization once boasted that Trump during his first year as president had implemented 64 percent of the 334 policies recommended in the 2016 version of “Mandate for Leadership.” As Trump prepared for a third White House bid, he set the stage for Heritage’s seminal work to inform his next administration’s priorities once again.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said during an April 2022 keynote address to the organization first unearthed by the Washington Post.

At least 140 former Trump administration officials and dozens of ardent allies ultimately wrote and contributed to “Mandate for Leadership.” More than 100 friendly organizations endorsed it.

But by mid-2024, with Democrats seizing on Project 2025’s more controversial proposals, Trump furiously sought to distance himself from what would become a deeply unpopular manifesto.

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said in the opening moments of his September debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. “That’s out there. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it.”

Since his November victory, though, Trump has filled key government posts with people who helped put Project 2025 together. Both Tom Homan, who is serving as White House border czar, and Trump’s new CIA Director John Ratcliffe contributed to “Mandate for Leadership.” Brendan Carr, named chairman of the Federal Communications Commission by Trump, wrote an entire chapter for Project 2025 on the agency he now leads.

Russ Vought, chosen as director of the Office of Management and Budget, authored a section on presidential power that appeared to preview the freeze on federal spending put in place this week by Trump’s young government.

The president, Vought wrote for Project 2025, “should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”

Dans, who stepped down from his position in July amid intensifying criticism of Project 2025 from Trump, said the first week of Trump’s new term has been “gratifying” to watch. He called the Democratic Party’s “obsession” with Project 2025 – the subject of tens of millions of dollars in negative ads during the presidential race – an “epic electoral fail.”

Democrats, though, continue to attack Trump over his ties to the conservative blueprint. Since the election, the Democratic National Committee has sent more than 50 press releases that included the term “Project 2025.”

Beyond political alignment

Some of the synergy between Trump’s early movements and Project 2025 reflect the expected harmony of a new Republican administration and a supportive right-wing group. Indeed, a considerable share of the manifesto’s voluminous policy plans are anchored in two consistent themes: unravel Joe Biden’s presidency wherever possible and return to the policies of Trump’s first term.

In Trump’s first executive order after taking office, he revoked 67 of Biden’s executive orders – including at least 15 singled out in “Mandate for Leadership.”

Meanwhile, reinstating his first-term border policies – such as blocking federal grants to cities that don’t comply with immigration enforcement – satisfied some of Project 2025’s own immigration prescriptions.

But Trump also moved to restrict temporary protected status for those fleeing humanitarian emergencies, paused disbursements to non-profits assisting undocumented immigrants and mobilized the military to assist in border enforcement – all policies pushed by Project 2025.

“This is not a continuation of the first Trump administration. It is substantially more aggressive, and he’s doing a lot of the things we complained he didn’t do in the first term,” said Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security under Trump who authored the Project 2025 section on his former agency.

The “general aggressiveness is certainly consistent” with what Cuccinelli wrote in Project 2025, he added, pointing especially to the deployment of the military and Trump’s use of Department of Justice officers to assist in deportation.

As for FEMA, Cuccinelli in “Mandate for Leadership” urged the new administration to “shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities.” The language is recognizable in the proposal Trump floated recently while touring North Carolina flood damage: “We’re going to recommend that FEMA go away and we pay directly, we pay a percentage, to the state, and the state should fix it.”

In his ensuing executive order, Trump launched a commission to review changes to FEMA, including whether the agency should be reformed to function only as a “support agency” to the states.

Michael Coen, a former FEMA chief of staff during the Obama and Biden administrations, said that while he had seen the Project 2025 proposal for the agency, it surprised him to hear Trump vocalize it.

“I never imagined it would be something that he would openly talk about,” Coen said. “It does seem like there are people in the president’s ear that are pushing what is in Project 2025 as far as their plan for FEMA.”

Cuccinelli acknowledged he also hadn’t expected Trump to embrace his proposal on FEMA. In his first term, Trump relished his power awarding emergency relief to disaster-stricken areas.

“President Trump does love to show up and write checks, but I give him a lot of credit,” Cuccinelli said. “He clearly recognizes that FEMA as a concept is failing.”

Coen expects Republican governors and local officials will push back against this worldview.

“States across the country have come to rely on the federal government,” Coen said. “It’s hard to budget for if you’re going to get a 500-year rain event that’s going to wash away a town, and wash away your critical infrastructure.”

Promises made, Project 2025 kept

Trump previewed many of his opening movements as president more than a year ago in a series of policy proposals published on a campaign website called “Agenda47,” such as ending subsidies for electric vehicles, limiting refugee programs and restoring a first-term directive allowing him to remove federal workers deemed insufficiently loyal. Those ideas were separately backed by Project 2025’s authors.

Trump’s campaign website made clear he intended to reopen Alaska to drilling – which he did on his first day as president. Project 2025 endorsed not only the move, but also the urgency.

“Alaska is a special case and deserves immediate action,” one section said.

Some of Project 2025’s other priorities have been achieved indirectly through Trump’s actions. For example, a pending plan by the Biden administration for a drinking water limit on toxic PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, was withdrawn under Trump’s day one freeze on new regulations.

A section on the Environmental Protection Agency in “Mandate for Leadership” encouraged the new president to “revisit the designation of PFAS chemicals as ‘hazardous substances.’”

Groups that had pushed for the Biden administration to crack down on PFAS – known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade in the environment – were well aware of the target placed on those regulations by Project 2025, said Melanie Benesh, vice president of governmental affairs at the Environmental Working Group.

There was some reason for optimism, Benesh acknowledged, when Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA administrator, touted his past work tackling PFAS during his confirmation hearing. But that hope dissipated when Trump’s executive order effectively stalled Biden’s planned crackdown.

“It calls into question the incoming administrator’s commitment to taking on PFAS,” Benesh told CNN.

EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said it was “common transition procedure” to hold pending regulations when a new administration comes in.

“President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country in his first term and will continue to do so this term,” Vaseliou said.

Beyond Trump’s first week

As the administration moves forward, the extent to which Trump’s actions run parallel to Project 2025 will remain a central question. Some of Trump’s early executive orders appear to lay the groundwork for future actions advocated by Project 2025.

For example, Trump’s national energy emergency calls for a review of regulations protecting endangered and marine wildlife that may be “obstacles to domestic energy infrastructure.” Project 2025 suggests the new administration move immediately to lift protections on grizzly bears and gray wolves and work with Congress on an overhaul of the Endangered Species Act.

Elsewhere, Trump has taken steps that seem to go beyond what Project 2025 has proposed. Nowhere in the dozens of pages dedicated to a forceful crackdown on immigration do “Mandate for Leadership” authors suggest declaring the US is under invasion and designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups, as Trump did in his executive orders. Similarly, Trump exceeded Project 2025’s calls to restart federal executions with an executive order expanding the potential crimes that could trigger the death penalty.

Still, not all of Project 2025’s plans are necessarily included in the public manifesto. The project’s website acknowledged it intended to deliver the Trump transition a “playbook of actions” for the administration’s first 180 days. Neither Heritage nor the Trump White House would say if that exchange took place. And in a hidden-camera video of Vought released last year, he said his group was drafting hundreds of potential orders, regulations and memos for Trump.

“With immigration in particular, executive orders aren’t necessarily the thing that makes policy change,” said Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group for immigrants. “What’s been notable from the first nine days or so is not just that they had the executive orders ready to go on day one,” but other technical regulations and declarations on hand as well.

“That kind of timeline indicates a certain amount of preparation before getting into office,” she said.

Dans noted Project 2025 also engaged in a nationwide search for Trump loyalists to fill federal agencies with people who would execute his agenda.

“It all comes down to implementation,” Dans said, “And Project 2025 was ultimately about putting in place the people who would come in from outside the swamp and make changes.”

On at least one issue, Trump is already spurning Project 2025: the future of TikTok. Trump in an executive order paused a ban on the Chinese social media app, which Project 2025 described as a national security imperative.

Trump also recently said he was “very unlikely” to limit abortion pill access. Project 2025 not only pushes for the administration to reverse federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, it also proposes excluding the morning-after pill and men’s contraceptives from coverage mandated under the Affordable Care Act.

Trump has, though, moved to restrict federal funding for abortions both domestically and abroad, a stance that also appears in Project 2025’s policy framework. And his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., told a Senate hearing Wednesday that Trump asked him to “study the safety” of mifepristone.

CNN’s review of Trump’s executive actions covered the first week of his new term, from his swearing in until noon on Monday. In the days since, he has remained active, restricting certain treatments for transgender minors, keeping transgender adults out of the military and reinstating servicemembers who were discharged for refusing COVID vaccinations.

Each of those moves had support in Project 2025.

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