Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, this week likened his organization’s Project 2025 manifesto to a sprawling menu at a chain restaurant.

“I like to refer to it as sort of the menu from Cheesecake Factory,” he said of a document that calls for outlawing pornography and withdrawing FDA approval for abortion medications, among its 900 pages of choice offerings. “It’s every possible thing that somebody might want to take on.”

“It is impossible for every individual conservative to agree with everything in the document,” he told reporters at a Heritage event outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

But conservatives increasingly are finding this menu hard to swallow. A growing number of groups that Heritage previously listed as part of the effort’s advisory board are jumping ship, and even some whose staff helped craft Project 2025.

The Intercept’s review of the Project 2025 website identified seven conservative organizations that have been removed from the advisory board member list since Heritage first announced it two years ago. Among these are four newly identified groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an influential think tank.

The Defectors and the Departed

As of publication, the Project 2025 website lists more than 100 organizations as part of the “broad coalition” that helped shape the effort alongside Heritage. This coalition morphed over the last two years, The Intercept found, including by quiet attrition of some prominent members. Some dropped off the website even before the Trump campaign started distancing itself from Project 2025 in early July.

We traced the timeline of vanishing advisers by comparing Heritage press releases, the Project 2025 playbook, data pulled from the website, and archived versions of the advisory board page.

© The Intercept