Cheerleaders for Donald Trump have gleefully raised the prospect of the extremist Project 2025 policy blueprint being implemented by the new administration as they taunted Democrats after the Republicans’ victory over Kamala Harris.

Project 2025 is an initiative coordinated by the rightwing Heritage Foundation and presented to the American public in the form of the Mandate, a 900-plus page policy plan. Proposals for a second Trump administration include political purges of the federal government and attacks on minority rights and environmental protections among many other hard-right policy ideas.

“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda,” said Matt Walsh, a popular podcaster, commentator and author, on X, adding: “Lol”.

Benny Johnson, an internet provocateur and proven plagiarist, chimed in: “It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time.”

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist, recently imprisoned for contempt of Congress and soon to face fraud charges in New York, used his War Room podcast to display a copy of the Mandate for Leadership, a Project 2025 publication.

On Friday, the Guardian reported on a forthcoming book, introduced by JD Vance, the Ohio senator and vice-president-elect, in which Kevin Roberts, the Heritage president, advocates “burning” institutions including the FBI and the Department of Education, as part of a campaign against “those who seek to abolish the existing order in the name of emancipation, freedom, and progress”.

Democrats seized on Project 2025 and its links to Trump as a campaign issue. Such attacks proved effective. Roberts’s book was delayed until after the election, and Paul Dans, the former Trump White House official and head of Project 2025 stood down, while Trump was compelled to lie about not knowing about the initiative or working with Roberts, despite plentiful evidence to the contrary.

Now, as Trump prepares to return to power, Project 2025 has returned to the public agenda. Its links to Trump world are legion.

Authors of chapters in the Mandate for Leadership seen as contenders for jobs in the new administration include Chris Miller, who was acting defense secretary during the January 6 Capitol attack; Ken Cuccinelli, formerly acting deputy secretary of homeland security; Russell Vought, Trump’s chair of the Office of Management and Budget; Peter Navarro, a trade adviser who, like Bannon, went to prison for contempt of Congress related to investigations of Trump’s election subversion; and Roger Severino, formerly a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Arguing that progressive panic over Project 2025 is overstated, some observers and analysts point out that the Heritage Foundation has been producing such plans for new Republican administrations since 1981, without much chance of full implementation.

Sources also say that the more radical plans in the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, such as political purges of federal departments or the outright abolition of the education department, would be sure to become entangled in protracted legal battles.

Furthermore, sources say the true engine of planning for Trump’s second term is not the Heritage Foundation, but the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a nonprofit founded by Stephen Miller, a Trump adviser, speechwriter and anti-immigrant hawk widely expected to assume a senior post in the new administration.

AFPI’s work on the Trump transition is being run by its president, Brooke Rollins, acting director of the Domestic Policy Council in the first Trump administration, and Linda McMahon, AFPI board chair and formerly both chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment and chief of the Small Business Administration under Trump.

McMahon is an official Trump transition co-chair, with Howard Lutnick, chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald.

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Other AFPI members who served under Trump include Larry Kudlow, a TV host turned economic adviser, and Chad Wolf, acting secretary for Homeland Security between 2019 and 2021.

Still, key players in Project 2025 continue to celebrate their win.

In a statement greeting Trump’s election victory, Roberts, of the Heritage Foundation, said: “We look forward to this historic term, during which President Trump has an opportunity to make America great, healthy, safe, and prosperous once again.

“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state.”

The “deep state” conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats, intelligence operatives and progressives exists to thwart Trump. Bannon is among its chief propagators. Nonetheless, he has said it is “for nut cases”.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

• A masculinity researcher on the Democrats’ ‘fatal miscalculation’

• Election deniers use Trump victory to sow more doubt over 2020 result

• What a second Trump presidency means for big US tech firms

• Who could be in Trump’s new administration