Mandate 2025 Cheat Sheet - China

First published January 30, 2025 on LinkedIn

This article provides a summary of key components of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise to help organizations working on issues related to the PRC, navigate this extensive document. It is intended to serve as a quick reference to the policy framework guiding key decision-makers in the new administration. It does NOT offer critique, analysis, or corrections of factual inaccuracies or inconsistencies and does NOT constitute an endorsement of the opinions reflected in Mandate 2025.

What is Mandate 2025

The Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise is a policy handbook published as part of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, designed to equip the next conservative president with a strategic roadmap for implementing a policy agenda. It was drafted in consultation with more than 100 conservative organizations and aims to dismantle the administrative state and eliminate “woke” policies within government institutions. According to Mandate 2025, the top threats facing the United States include:

• The breakdown of the family

• The rise of the PRC

• The Great “Awokening”

• Big Tech abuses

• The erosion of constitutional accountability in Washington

The handbook proposes structural and policy reforms aimed at realigning the federal government with key conservative priorities: marriage, family, work, church, school, and volunteering. Each of its 30 chapters is authored by a different contributor, analyzing a specific federal agency. As a result of the variety of authors there are some inconsistent policy recommendations throughout, which are left to the next conservative president to determine how they should be reconciled.

While Mandate 2025 is not an official document of the current U.S. administration, as I have noted elsewhere, key members of the new administration are closely following elements of its agenda. For organizations—particularly those in the foreign assistance sector—navigating this administration, awareness of the analysis and policy recommendations set out in Mandate 2025 will be critical for adapting to potential shifts in funding priorities, regulatory changes, and broader policy directions.

At 922 pages, Mandate 2025 is an extensive document. Below is an outline of its key issues related to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Top Policy Priority for the New Administration

The PRC is the top policy priority highlighted through Mandate 2025. It is referenced 499 times throughout the document (rising to 596 when including terms like CCP and Beijing), far surpassing any other country. The four other “priority” countries—Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea—are collectively mentioned just one-third as often as China. 

The Department of State (DOS) is tasked with responding “vigorously to the Chinese Threat” (pp. 176), and PRC influence is a core foreign policy concern across the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and the Arctic. However, policy concerns related to China extend beyond foreign policy and national security, affecting trade, commerce, housing, and other domestic economic issues, reflecting the need for a whole-of-government approach. 

Given this breadth, groups specializing in China and those with deep expertise in Chinese policy should play a significant advisory role, ensuring informed decision-making across both domestic and international strategies.

Focus on Foreign Influence

While acknowledging the challenges posed by the government of the PRC should not be blamed on the people of the PRC, Mandate 2025 asserts that China’s institutions and political culture—rooted in Marxist-Leninist ideology—cannot be addressed or changed domestically (pp. 179). The document argues that any significant change in the PRC must be driven by external pressure rather than domestic civil society.

Development & Economic Strategy

While Asia remains the epicenter of Chinese influence operations, Mandate 2025 identifies Africa, Latin America, and the Arctic as key regions where China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) presents strategic challenges. The document highlights concerns such as (pp. 255):

• The weaponization of sovereign debt to expand PRC control over developing nations.

• Security risks from growing PRC presence in Latin America and the Arctic.

• China’s dominance over rare minerals in Africa and threat of the same in the Arctic. 

In response, Mandate 2025 places considerable responsibility on the Department of Defense (DOD), which is tasked with strengthening alliances with key partners such as Australia, South Korea, Japan, and India. Beyond military cooperation, the DOD is expected to counter PRC influence through strategic messaging, exposing China’s human rights abuses, violations of Exclusive Economic Zones, and the weaponization of sovereign debt (pp. 122). USAID is tasked with positioning the U.S. as a preferable development partner through initiatives such as the restoration of the Clear Choice project, an initiative to promote US-led development projects rooted in free-market principles as an alternative to PRC-backed investments. Additionally, it recommends expanding the Digital Strategy promoting U.S-backed 5G networks, to counter PRC efforts to dominate digital infrastructure in key regions (pp. 255-256).

Domestically, Mandate 2025 calls for programs to raise public awareness of Chinese influence in the US education system. expanding the authority of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to tighten restrictions on Chinese investments in strategic U.S. industries (pp. 660 - 669). Additionally, it proposes limiting U.S. pension funds and institutional investments in Chinese companies (pp. 607-608; 779), tightening export licensing restrictions, and expanding the U.S. sanctions list to include a greater number of PRC-linked entities.

Intelligence, Information & Cybersecurity

As part of a whole-of-government approach to addressing the PRC, Mandate 2025 identifies the need to better understand “Chinese motivations” (pp. 217) and calls for a more coordinated intelligence strategy, emphasizing the need for better information sharing, expert recruitment, and cyber defense capabilities. To improve intelligence gathering, the plan advocates for greater centralization across the DOD, Intelligence Community (IC), and DOS, ensuring streamlined operations and reducing bureaucratic silos. A key component of this strategy is fully resourcing and utilizing interagency information-sharing hubs, including the Office of China Coordination ("China House") within the State Department, which aims to bring together both internal and external experts to coordinate U.S.-China policy. Similarly, the China Mission Center within the CIA is highlighted as a critical resource for improving intelligence efforts and ensuring strategic alignment across agencies.

To enhance internal expertise, Mandate 2025 proposes requiring GS-14 and above employees within the IC to possess specialized skills in language, technical fields, or cybersecurity (pp. 210). Additionally, it calls for reforming security clearance vetting to allow cross-agency applicability, facilitating more interagency personnel transfers and short-term project assignments across government agencies.

Mandate 2025 also stresses the need to strengthen U.S. offensive cyber capabilities to counter Chinese espionage, cyberattacks, and digital influence operations. It further recommends restarting the Department of Justice’s China Initiative, a program designed to combat PRC corporate espionage and trade secret theft, reinforcing legal and law enforcement efforts to disrupt Chinese intelligence operations within the United States (pp. 285; 556-557). As well as to fund programs to raise awareness within the US about Chinese influence in the US, in particular through its investments and influence on university campuses. 

Foreign Assistance & USAID Reform

Beyond China-specific concerns, Mandate 2025 recommends sweeping reforms to USAID. The document calls for streamlining procurement processes and shifting funding priorities away from large international NGOs in favor of local, faith-based organizations (pp. 263-265). This aligns with USAID’s "Journey to Self-Reliance" framework introduced in 2017, advocating for a complete restructuring of the Bureau for Democracy, Development, and Innovation to align with conservative policy priorities (pp. 273).