The think tank behind Project 2025 is also behind some of Florida's most extreme laws

From bathrooms to banking, records show the architects of Project 2025 worked closely with Ron DeSantis and Florida Republican leaders to turn some far-right ideas into new state laws.

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Ron DeSantis stood beaming, basking in applause from Republican state lawmakers.

The Florida governor, who was about to launch his campaign for president, had just successfully strongarmed his Legislature through one of the most culturally conservative lawmaking sessions in state history.

The result was a right-wing triumph: Despite months of angry protests and ugly clashes in the state Capitol, Florida lawmakers had passed a long list of long-sought ultra-conservative policies — including one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation — that DeSantis would soon begin signing into law and selling on the campaign trail in Iowa.

“I don’t think we’ve seen a six-month stretch that has ever been this productive in the history of our state,” DeSantis said at a May 2023 ceremony to celebrate the end of that year’s session.

But while Ron DeSantis took a bow in public, records show that someone else helped direct the show in private: The Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank in Washington, D.C., and the lead organizer of “Project 2025” — the national policy playbook for Donald Trump to follow if he is re-elected U.S. president this fall.

Records obtained by the investigative reporting organization Documented, and then shared with Seeking Rents, show that officials from the Heritage Foundation worked on many of the most extreme policies that DeSantis and Republican leaders in Tallahassee passed during that unprecedented 2023 session, which ran from March to May of last year.

In some cases, lobbyists at Heritage Action — the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying arm — instructed lawmakers to vote for key bills. In other cases, they helped write the bills themselves.

Heritage’s work in Florida has touched many aspects of daily life in the state — from education and healthcare to finance and real estate. And it serves as a template for what the organization and its Project 2025 allies hope to accomplish nationally in a second Trump administration.

Among the policies that Heritage helped push through Tallahassee:

• A ban on nearly all abortions after just six weeks of pregnancy, which is before most women even realize they are pregnant (Senate Bill 300)

• Taxpayer-funded stipends for families who choose to send their children to private academies or religious schools, or who decide to homeschool (House Bill 1)

• An alien land law that prevents Chinese people from buying or owning property in Florida (Senate Bill 264)

• Sanctions for banks that refuse to lend money to fossil-fuel producers, gun manufacturers, or for-profit prisons (House Bill 3)

• Red tape and the risk of financially ruinous fines for civic groups like the League of Women Voters that help Floridians register to vote (Senate Bill 7050)

• A package of changes designed to make it harder for immigrants to live in Florida — including laws that force hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status, invalidate licenses granted to undocumented people in other states, and criminalize traveling into the state with an an undocumented person, even if that person is a part of your family (Senate Bill 1718)

No corner of life has been safe from the Heritage Foundation’s prying eye. The records obtained by Documented show that Heritage also lobbied Florida lawmakers to pass bills regulating the bathrooms transgender Floridians can use (House Bill 1521) and stopping students from scrolling through TikTok on college Wi-Fi (Senate Bill 258).

Altogether, the records obtained by Documented, along with additional public records from other sources, show that lobbyists for the Heritage Foundation had a hand in at least a dozen pieces of legislation that passed during the Florida Legislature’s 2023 session. The list also included bills that discourage university students from taking sociology courses (Senate Bill 266), prevent families from accessing gender-affirming healthcare for their children (Senate Bill 254), and allow doctors to refuse to provide contraceptive care to women (Senate Bill 1580).  

DeSantis signed each one into law.

It is perhaps not surprising that Florida’s governor — who hopes to run for president again in 2028 — has been so accommodating to the Heritage Foundation and its vision for Florida. DeSantis, who spent six years in the U.S. House of Representatives before becoming governor, has been aligned with the organization ever since he was first elected to Congress in 2012.

“It was then that he developed a close relationship with Heritage, collaborating on education, economic, security, and — yes — cultural issues,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in April 2023, while introducing DeSantis as a featured speaker at Heritage event. “We’re proud to continue working with him as governor.”  

In fact, records show DeSantis has met repeatedly with Heritage leaders over the years, both to discuss policy and deliver speeches. At one June 2021 gathering inside the think tank’s Washington headquarters, a schedule obtained in a public-records request shows that DeSantis planned to meet with at least three of Project 2025’s authors.

A former chief of staff for DeSantis in Congress now works as a research fellow at Heritage. Records show he has frequently served as a liaison between the think tank and the DeSantis administration.

And in 2022, when DeSantis signed the first of two Florida abortion bans into law, records show his staff invited nearly two dozen guests affiliated with Heritage to the signing ceremony.

As DeSantis has worked hand-in-hand with the Heritage Foundation, he has also tapped into the organization’s vast donor network.

For example, a review of Heritage’s tax filings by the Center for Media and Democracy found that one of the organization’s largest donors is The Concord Fund — a dark-money nonprofit affiliated with Leonard Leo, the conservative legal scholar who helped orchestrate the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The Concord Fund also gave $500,000 to a fundraising committee controlled by DeSantis in October 2022 — a few months before DeSantis and lawmakers convened for the 2023 session.

But the records also show just how deeply Heritage has become embedded in policymaking across Florida state government.

For instance, in mid-2022, DeSantis and GOP leaders in Tallahassee began what has become a two-year-long crusade against the use of societal considerations in investing decisions — like whether a fund should reduce its holdings in companies or projects that generate excessive greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to global climate change. It’s an approach often referred to by the shorthand acronym “ESG,” which encompasses environmental issues, social issues, and corporate governance.

Records show that Florida’s Republican leadership was pushed to take up the issue by Andy Puzder, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former fast-food executive who has been a national leader in the anti-ESG movement.

Specifically, in December 2021, Puzder sent proposed ESG legislation to senior staffers in the DeSantis administration and then met personally with them to discuss it.

But that same month, Puzder also had an hour-long phone call to discuss ESG legislation with Paul Renner, a Republican from near Jacksonville who was about to become speaker of the state House. Puzder eventually met with Republican Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, too.

What’s more, records show that a lobbyist at Heritage Action later sent more proposed legislation to Rep. Bob Rommel, a Republican from Naples who ended up sponsoring an anti-ESG bill that became known as House Bill 3 during the 2023 session.

The Heritage lobbyists continued to work on the legislation behind the scenes even as it moved through the process. “Attached is our markup on the bill that addresses three concerns we have,” Karen Jaroch, Heritage’s state director for Florida and the Gulf states, wrote in a March 2023 email to Rommel.

With DeSantis, Renner and Patronis all making the issue a personal priority, House Bill 3 ultimately passed — one of the dozen Heritage-backed bills that became law during that fateful 2023 session.

And as soon as it did, Heritage and other ideologically aligned groups fanned out around the nation, shopping copies of the new Florida law in more GOP-controlled state Legislatures across the country.