Project 2025 is a proposed presidential transition project and consists of a series of detailed policy proposals put together by hundreds of high-profile conservatives. Those proposals are laid out in a roughly 900-page book entitled “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.” Project 2025 was written by at least 144 people who worked for Trump’s first administration or his campaign.
Project 2025 was spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation and included an advisory board consisting of more than 100 conservative groups. It is led by two former Trump administration officials, Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management and serves as director of the project, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to Trump and who was the project’s associate director.
Project 2025’s policy proposals are dramatic and sweeping and include a wide range of topics from foreign affairs, to public education, to health care, to law enforcement and to immigration. Project 2025 proposes enforcing laws that make it illegal to mail abortion pills over state lines, criminalizing pornography and eliminating the Department of Education. The project also advocates a sweeping elimination of environmental regulations and a crackdown on programs to boost diversity in the workplace, which the project argues are broadly illegal.
Conservatives have spent years envisioning how to concentrate power in Presidency and impose a decidedly ultra rightward shift across the United States Government and society itself. The project calls for a broad expansion in presidential power by boosting the number of political appointees and increasing the president’s authority over the Justice Department and the military. That last proposal has alarmed many law enforcement officials, who say it will undermine the department’s ability to conduct investigations without political interference.
Participants in Project 2025 assembled lists of thousands of conservatives that could be slotted into politically appointed positions throughout the government in the opening days of a second Trump administration. Behind the scenes, the project’s affiliates have drafted executive orders and agency regulations that could be used to quickly implement the policies that the project is advocating once Trump takes office. In essence, the goal is to create a form of American Fascism.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-project-2025-how-is-it-connected-trump-2024-11-26/
TRUMP DISAVOWELS PROJECT 2025
As the blueprint for a hard-right turn in America became a liability during the 2024 campaign, so much so that Trump pulled an about-face. He denied knowing anything about the “ridiculous and abysmal” plans written in part by his first-term aides and allies. During the last 6 months of the 2024 Presidential Campaign, Trump and his campaign repeatedly tried to distance Trump from Project 2025 claiming he had nothing to do with it. In a July 5 post to his social media platform Trump wrote:
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Trump’s initial pushback to the initiative came after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a podcast interview that the nation is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
In further attempts to distance himself from project 2025, Trump said this:
“They’ve been told officially, legally, in every way, that we have nothing to do with Project 25. They know it, but they bring it up anyway. They bring up every single thing that you can bring up. Every one of them was false.”
Trumps campaign said they would ban people involved in Project 2025 from his administration, which is now turning out to be just another lie.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-project-2025-how-is-it-connected-trump-2024-11-26/
DAMAGING INTERVIEW CONNECTING TRUMP TO PROJECT 2025
On July 24, the week after the Republican convention, Russell Vought, now Trump’s designate to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was interviewed at the presidential suite of the Rosewood hotel in DC, by two men posing as relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. The men Vought was talking to worked for the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting and were secretly recording him the entire time. The Centre had clandestinely placed several hidden cameras and microphones posing as relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.
Sitting on a couch in the hotel suite, Vought seemed relaxed and comfortable discussing a wide range of topics, from the history of the conservative movement to European politics to his relationship with Trump. Vought said he was unfazed by Trump’s repeated denials of any connection with Project 2025, dismissing such public statements as politics. Vought said this:
“I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious distancing himself from a brand. … It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”
Vought said he had personally talked to Trump in recent months and received at least one personal “assignment” from him after he left office. He noted that the former president has “been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it … he’s very supportive of what we do.”
Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. He claimed that Trump has “blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”
While on video Vought discussed his plans to “take control of … bureaucracies” and said he wanted to “be the person who crushes the deep state.” Vought said this:
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. … And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country”. Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like. … And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”
TRUMP APPOINTS PROJECT 2025 MAIN ARCHITECTS AND AUTHORS
On November 22 news outlets reported President elect Donald Trump had completed assembling his Cabinet and senior staff for his second term in the White House before taking office on January 20, 2025. Trump nominated Cabinet Secretaries for government agencies and other top administration jobs that require United States Senate Advise and Consent confirmation mandated by the US Constitution.
Trump nominated several architects and authors of Project 2025 who will have a key role in his administration. Following are Project 2025’s authors and contributors that Trump has nominated:
RUSSELL VOUGHT
Russell Vought is a repeat from the first Trump Administration. Vought is one of Project 2025’s top architects. He will lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the agency that develops the president’s proposed budget and executes the president’s agenda. Vought started the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit that describes itself as the “tip of the America First spear.” Vought also served as the policy director of the Republican National Convention committee that rewrote the Republican Party’s official platform this year, a sign of how central he is to Republicans’ policy goals.
Vought plays a prominent role for Project 2025. Not only did he author a chapter on “Executive Office of the President” for the project’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”, but his Center for Renewing America is also a member of Project 2025’s advisory board. According to press reports, Vought “was also deeply involved in drafting Project 2025’s playbook for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.” He has crafted plans for Trump to deploy the military in response to civil unrest and assert more control over the Justice Department.
Vought wrote the Project 2025 Chapter laying out priorities for the Executive Office of the President, which includes OMB. In it, he outlines ways to centralize executive power and in the federal bureaucracy which he says “all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.” He characterizes the OMB director as a vessel for the president’s policy agenda, rather than as “the ambassador of the institutional interests of OMB and the wider bureaucracy.”
Vought helped draft executive orders that would undermine civil service protections and make it easier for Trump to fire thousands of federal employees. Vought was the chief architect of Schedule F, a misguided plan to reclassify federal employees as at-will employees who could be fired for any reason. He served as OMB director during Trump’s first administration, during which OMB reclassified 88% of its employees as Schedule F. But the reclassification was not fully implemented at OMB or other agencies, and President Biden repealed Trump’s Schedule F directive after he took office. Vought recently said in an interview, “There certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist.”
The strategy of further concentrating federal authority in the presidency permeates Project 2025’s and Trump’s campaign proposals. Vought’s vision is shocking when paired with Trump’s proposals to dramatically expand the president’s control over federal workers and government purse strings. These are ideas intertwined with Trump’s tapping mega-billionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Trump in his first term sought to remake the federal civil service by reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers, who have job protection through changes in administration, as political appointees, making them easier to fire and replace with loyalists. Currently, only about 4,000 of the federal government’s roughly 2 million workers are political appointees. President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s changes. Trump can now reinstate them.
Meanwhile, Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s sweeping “efficiency” mandates from Trump could turn on an old, defunct constitutional theory that the president and not Congress is the real gatekeeper of federal spending. In his “Agenda 47,” Trump endorsed so-called “impoundment,” which holds that when lawmakers pass appropriations bills, they simply set a spending ceiling, but not a floor. The president, the theory holds, can simply decide not to spend money on anything he deems unnecessary.
Vought did not venture into impoundment in his Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote, “The President should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”
Trump’s choice of Vought immediately sparked backlash. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat and outgoing Senate Appropriations chairwoman, said this:
“Russ Vought is a far-right ideologue who has tried to break the law to give President Trump unilateral authority he does not possess to override the spending decisions of Congress (and) who has and will again fight to give Trump the ability to summarily fire tens of thousands of civil servants.”
Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, leading Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said Vought wants to “dismantle the expert federal workforce” to the detriment of Americans who depend on everything from veterans’ health care to Social Security benefits.
“Pain itself is the agenda,” they said.
The Office of Management and Budget Director requires Senate confirmation, prepares a president’s proposed budget and is generally responsible for implementing the administration’s agenda across agencies. The job is influential but Vought made clear as author of a Project 2025 chapter on presidential authority that he wants the post to wield more direct power. Vought wrote
“The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind. [The OMB] is a President’s air-traffic control system [ and should be] involved in all aspects of the White House policy process [ becoming] powerful enough to override implementing agencies’ bureaucracies.”
Trump did not go into such details when naming Vought but implicitly endorsed aggressive action. Vought, the president-elect said, “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State” , Trump’s catch-all for federal bureaucracy, and would help “restore fiscal sanity.”
In June, speaking on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Vought relished the potential tension: “We’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation.”
STEPHEN MILLER
Stephen Miller is Trump’s pick to serve as White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and the President’s Homeland Security Adviser. Miller is a longtime member of Trumps inner circle and a staunch defender and advocate of all that is Trump and the MAGA movement. Miller founded as an ideological counter to the American Civil Liberties Union. “America First Legal” was listed as an advisory group to Project 2025 until Miller asked that the name be removed because of negative attention.
Miller will be taking on a much expanded role in Trump’s second term. While he is not listed as a contributor to Project 2025, America First Legal is listed on the Project 2025 Advisory Board up and until the group asked to be removed. Miller was also featured in videos produced by the Heritage Foundation promoting Project 2025.
Miller is the chief architect of Trump’s immigration ideas, including his promise to initiate the largest deportation force in U.S. history. As deputy policy chief, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, Miller would remain in Trump’s West Wing inner circle. Miller said this at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27:
“America is for Americans and Americans only.”
KAROLINE LEAVITT
Leavitt is Trumps’ pick for White House Press Secretary. She is his 2024 campaign’s national press secretary and served in the White House during his first term. Leavitt is listed as one of Project 2025’s instructors who train conservatives on conservative governance best practices. The course she’s teaching is called The Art of Professionalism. She was featured in the Heritage Foundation’s videos promoting Project 2025. She tried to distance Trump’s campaign from Project 2025 even though she’s a Project 2025 instructor as well as his campaign’s national press secretary.
BRENDAN CARR
Brendan Carr has been nominated to chair the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an agency that regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, and satellite. Carr is the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission having been appointed by Trump in 2017. Carr authored a chapter “Federal Communications Commission” for Project 2025. Carr has proposed reigning in big tech and media companies that he claims have improperly “censored” conservatives’ views by limiting the reach of misinformation and lies.
Carr outlined his plan to challenge “Big Teck” in his FCC chapter of Project 2025. In his section, he called for the FCC to issue and interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to eliminate “expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute.” Section 230 protects platforms, such as Facebook or You Tube, from liability over content posted by their users. Carr also lays out proposals to expand broadband connectivity access, address TikTok’s “serious and unacceptable risk” and support emerging satellite technologies among other goals.
Carr wrote that the FCC chairman “is empowered with significant authority that is not shared” with other FCC members. He called for the FCC to address “threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market,” specifically “Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” Carr has called for more stringent transparency rules for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube and “empower consumers to choose their own content filters and fact checkers, if any.”
Carr will require Seante confirmation.
TOM HOMAN
Tom Homan is listed as an overall contributor of Project 2025. Trump appointed Homan as “Border Czar” who will oversee the southern and northern U.S. borders and all maritime and aviation security. Homan served as the acting heading of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first administration. He retired in 2018 after the White House failed to move his nomination toward Senate confirmation. This time, Homan will bypass the process completely because his “border czar” role does not require Senate confirmation.
Homan, as acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director during Trump’s first presidency, played a key role in what became known as Trump’s “family separation policy.” Previewing Trump 2.0 earlier this year, Homan said: “No one’s off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.” Project 2025 includes a litany of detailed proposals for various U.S. immigration statutes, executive branch rules and agreements with other countries. Examples include reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients and asylum seekers.
Homan is already flexing his anticipated power before he is even sworn in. On November 26 Homan vowed to instill harsh consequences on sanctuary city leaders who are threatening to block immigration authorities from carrying out their planned mass deportation telling them plain and simple: “Don’t test us.” Homan said this during a visit to the border in Eagle Pass, Texas:
“Let me be clear, there is going to be a mass deportation because we just finished a mass illegal immigration crisis on the border. … If we don’t do it, what is the option? Let them stay? Cause if you let them stay, you’ll never fix the border. You’re gonna send a message to the rest of the world: enter the country illegally, which is a crime, ignore a court order … we’re telling the whole world it’s OK to enter this country illegally, you’ve never got to go home.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston was asked by a local Denver television station to respond to Homan’s vows to arrest local leaders and politicians who stood in the way of deportation efforts. Mayor Johnston told ABC News reports he was willing to go to jail to stop possible mass deportation efforts under the incoming Trump administration. Johnson said he was “not afraid of that” in a TV interview but said “I think the goal is we want to be able to negotiate with reasonable people how to solve hard problems. ”
During an interview on Fox News, Homan said this:
“But look, me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing — he’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail because there’s a statute. It’s Title 8 United States Code 1324 (iii). And what it says is it’s a felony if you knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien from immigration authorities. It’s also a felony to impede a federal law enforcement officer. ”
Johnson said in a separate interview, that he would send Denver police to the city line to confront federal agents, an action he likened to Tiananmen Square. He later withdrew the comments. In a separate Fox News interview, Homan said the incoming administration would respond to blocking tactics by withholding federal funding from non-compliant cities and states. Homan said “That’s going to happen, I guarantee you”
JOHN RATCLIFF
John Ratcliff is Trump’s pick to lead the CIA and previously was one of Trump’s directors of national intelligence. He is a Project 2025 contributor. The document’s chapter on U.S. intelligence was written by Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe’s chief of staff in the first Trump administration. Reflecting Ratcliffe’s and Trump’s approach, Carmack declared the intelligence establishment too cautious. Ratcliffe, like the chapter attributed to Carmack, is hawkish toward China. Throughout the Project 2025 document, Beijing is framed as a U.S. adversary that cannot be trusted. Ratcliffe will require Senate confirmation.
Links to quoted or relied upon news sources are here:
https://www.afge.org/article/new-trump-administration-packed-with-project-2025-architects/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-project-2025-how-is-it-connected-trump-2024-11-26/
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/26/trump-picks-project-2025-russ-vought
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-cabinet-filling-project-2025-005256417.html
ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY
When it comes to all of Trump’s executive appointments, the single most important qualification is absolute and unquestioned loyalty to Trump. What is also clear is that Project 2025 is indeed the conservative blue print do centralize more power than ever in the Presidency with no checks and balances by congress nor the courts.
It was the economy and inflation that swept Trump to a decisive victory. Exit polls showed that the voting public were extremely disgruntled if not downright hostile with the direction the country is going, with inflation out of control. Voters were far more were concerned about making a decent living, angered over grocery and gas prices, as opposed to any threat Trump posed to democracy. Voters simply believed they were better off when Trump was President the first time believing all his lies. Voters chose to forget the 4 years of total chaos Trump brought upon the county and his failure to deal with the pandemic that killed millions worldwide and in the United States and that had a strangle hold on the country and that destroyed the economy.
In the end, voters simply ignored Trumps flawed character, the multimillion dollar civil judgements against him for sexual assault and slander, his criminal conduct in the private sector and while in office, his fraud in securing millions in loans in New York, the multiple state criminal convictions and pending federal criminal charges, his two impeachments, his misogyny and racism, his threat to democracy, his attempt to overthrow the government with all his lies that the election was rigged and stolen from him, his attacks on woman’s rights and civil rights, his partiality to racists groups such as the Proud Boys, his promotion of racist policies and his cult following of Christian fundamentalist who totally ignored his immorality, multiple marriages and affairs and praised him as the second coming.
Trump will be our President come January 20 and there will be a peaceful transfer of power, unlike 4 years ago when Trump promoted an insurrection. The country will get the President it has elected. Voters will get a clown car of a cabinet filled with people who have no business being appointed and whose goal is to destroy the very agencies they will head. The reality is that with his executive appointments he is following the conservative Project 2025 agenda, topic by topic, page by page. (See postscript below on Project 2025).
There may be a peaceful transition of power, but come January 20, four years of total chaos will commence. Trump has already said he can only serve another term but hinted that may change if people really want to change that. With Trumps announced appointments, it his clear he intends to gut the Department of Justice, the military leadership, our health care system and dismantle government to carry out his personal vendetta.
Trump and his Republican Party will overreach declaring they have a mandate to do whatever they damn well want with no guard rails. Trumps selections for cabinet positions also indicate there will be no checks and balances from congress in that some Senate Republicans are already indicating a willingness to forego their “advise and consent” of appointments an allow for “recess appointments”. There will be no intervention from the Trump appointed Supreme Court of right-wing conservative disciples who have given him immunity from prosecution making him above the law.
As the saying goes elections have consequences. But that includes unintended consequences. Trumps agenda will go way beyond what people thought they were voting for. It’s not at all likely voters will be any better off financially than they are now in two years under a Trump second presidency let alone the 4 years to come. His imposition of tariffs and the effects of mass deportation on the agricultural work force will have an impact as will corporate greed and refusal to reduce consumer prices. It may be the “economy stupid” but in reality a President can do little to bring down the cost of goods and services which is subject to the laws of market supply and demand, and corporate profits and sure greed.
It’s only a matter of time before the general public turns on Trump as they did 4 years ago once they realize they have been had once again. Stupid is as stupid does. The public turned on Republican President George W. Bush after he was elected by a popular vote and the Republicans lost congress. It will happen again. Voters have now voted for the return of chaos. Based on Trump’s agenda, and his cabinet appointments, chaos is exactly what we will get with millions getting hurt in the process. This is what happens when the big lies replace reality and personal finances outweigh preservation of our democracy.
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POSTSCRIPT
The CBS national news agency published on line a remarkable report written by its staff reporters Melissa Quinn and Jacob Rosen entitled “What Is Project 2025; What To Know About The Conservative Blue Print For A Second Trump Administration”. It is clear that Project 2025 is Trump’s conservative blue for a second term reflecting an American Fascist Agenda to give Trump unfettered presidential power. The link to read the entire 920 page Project 2025 is here: