Project
2025 Is Here
Candidate Trump tried distancing
himself from a right-wing blueprint that President Trump’s administration is
already implementing.
February 3, 2025
It turns
out that the bogeyman of the last presidential election cycle, Project 2025,
was no figment of our imagination, but an all-too-real plan for governing. We
all remember Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the right-wing
blueprint on the campaign trail and on the debate stage. “I have nothing to do
with Project 2025—I haven’t read it,” he said during his one and only face-off
with Kamala Harris. “I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m
not going to read it.” And yet CNN found that out of
the 53 Trump executive actions and orders it analyzed, 36 “evoke proposals
outlined” in Project 2025, on issues such as immigration, energy, and
diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
Let’s recap how we got here. In the summer of 2024,
Democrats seized upon Project 2025, a plan spearheaded by the
Heritage Foundation. The initiative included a website on which aspiring
administration officials could apply for inclusion in a database used for
presidential hiring. The plan wasn’t a secret; the 922-page “Mandate for Leadership”
had been published in April 2023 on Heritage’s site and boasted supporters
across the right-wing spectrum. “We are a coalition of more than 110
conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations for the
next conservative president,” a Project 2025 spokesperson told Newsweek.
Project 2025 looked very much like the agenda for a second
Trump term, as I wrote at the time, even if then
candidate Trump was keeping it at arm’s length. That’s understandable given how
unpopular this right-wing road map was during the presidential race—even among
Republicans. “About 33% of Republicans say they…view the plan negatively,” NBC
News found in a
September poll, “with just 7% saying they have positive views of the plan.” The
Project 2025 wish list included rolling back LGBTQ+ protections, curbing abortion
rights, and banning pornography,
as well as greatly increasing presidential power.
The secret sauce in this very unsecret plan is money, like
taking control of the federal budget and doling the money out, completely
circumventing Congress’s power of the purse. In July of 2023, The New
York Times reported how Trump
was looking to “revive the practice of ‘impounding’ funds, refusing to spend
money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like—a tactic
that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.” The Impoundment Control
Act of 1974 was designed to prevent presidents from using congressionally
approved funds as a kind of carrot and stick, as Trump tried to do in holding up Ukraine funding
during his first term, leading to his first impeachment.
Last week Trump’s Office of Management and Budget issued a
memorandum calling on government agencies to
“temporarily pause, to the extent permitted by law, grant, loan or federal
financial assistance programs that are implicated by the President’s Executive
Orders.” The move was unprecedented and, according to legal experts, unconstitutional—or,
as OMB chief pick Russ Vought might
put it, “post-constitutional.”
Trump’s federal spending freeze—which was “previewed” in Project 2025, according to
the Associated Press—went over like a lead balloon. A judge temporarily blocked part
of the Trump plan, and the administration rescinded the OMB memo. But White
House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained on X that the move was “NOT a
rescission of the federal funding freeze,” adding that Trump’s executive orders
“on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously
implemented.”
The whole mess smacked of Trump 1.0—hugely disruptive and
confusing, while accomplishing little beyond rattling people in
government (and reinvigorating Democrats). A second judge, on
Friday, issued an order temporarily requiring the
federal government to not “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate”
funding promised to a number of states.
Meanwhile, Trumpworld continues to have the federal
workforce in its sights. The Trump administration sent employees an email with
the subject line “Fork in the Road”—mimicking a subject line
once used by unelected billionaire Elon Musk in a note to Twitter employees—urging them to either get on board with
the new administration or take a buyout. This all fits in with the Project 2025
goal of shrinking the nonpartisan federal workforce and replacing those
employees with political supporters, the types of people who will bend the
federal government to Trump’s will.
Trump may have gotten ahead of himself with such a radical
funding freeze out of the gate, especially as his leadership isn’t yet in
place. Vought, a Project 2025 architect and the author of the second chapter of
the “Mandate for Leadership,” has yet to be confirmed by the Senate; same with
Trump’s FBI director pick, Kash Patel, who has mused about
making the agency’s headquarters “a museum of the deep state.” Sure, an
OMB memo was pulled back, but that looks like a tactical retreat in a war on
federal employees that’s only just begun.
