pjt 2025 bak

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see paul dans

see unitary pres (roger severino, carrie t shirt?)

uihline $?

bad code semafor

bak 7 23

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an raw 7 24

former President Donald Trump's allies are working to reshape American law into a weapon to be used against their political enemies, wrote Jesse Wegman in a scathing editorial for The New York Times.

Trump's pick of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) underscores this, he wrote, because Vance embodies the far-right's commitment to a key goal of the controversial Project 2025 plan to transform the government into an authoritarian loyalty cult to the GOP.

Vance, wrote Wegman, "predicted ... that the former president, who had been recently disgraced by his insurrectionary attempt to overturn the 2020 election, would nevertheless run again in 2024. Should Mr. Trump win, Mr. Vance said, he had some advice: 'Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.' And if the courts ruled against him? No problem, Mr. Vance said: Just blow them off."

This is already happening, wrote Wegman — and another of Trump's appointees, District Judge Aileen Cannon, is showing how it will work in her move to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, which special counsel Jack Smith is already moving to appeal.

In her decision, Cannon concluded Smith, "Was not validly appointed to his post because no federal law authorizes the appointment of someone from outside the Justice Department to perform that task," wrote Wegman, noting she based this entirely on a non-majority concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas in the case granting Trump a presumption of immunity in a separate case.

ALSO READ:'Keep lying': Late night Trump rant about Harris quickly turns against him

"As a matter of law and fact, this is not merely wrong, it is flagrantly, embarrassingly wrong ... It is not a close or complicated legal question" — indeed, the Supreme Court ruled the law allows this in 1974, and Cannon pretends they didn't.

These sorts of machinations by Vance and Cannon are exactly what to expect the whole government to become should Trump get his way, Wegman concluded ominously.

"This is what a second Trump term would look like," he wrote. "Ambitious judges who may not have been Trump loyalists at first will watch what’s been happening in recent days and get the message about what it takes to advance their careers. In this way, Judge Cannon embodies the future that Mr. Vance described in 2021. She is part of a legal elite raised on Trumpism that will use their perches in the judiciary and legal world to enforce a one-sided version of law that is about power and outcomes over any liberal principle."

In other words, he said, this is a reality where "the rule of law is for suckers or, worse, only for specific people. Our people."

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mma 6 24

project 2025 partners use right-wing media to sow distrust in American elections

Several Project 2025 partners were involved in attempts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory and have already cast doubt on the 2024 election

WRITTEN BY AUDREY MCCABE

PUBLISHED 06/04/24

As Project 2025 maps out its conservative agenda for the next GOP presidential administration, several of its partner organizations have employed figures involved in efforts to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss — and others have already begun sowing distrust in American elections ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Led by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 lays out staffing and policy priorities for Trump’s potential return to the White House. The project has over 100 partners, ranging from extreme anti-LGBTQ groups to prominent conservative think tanks, many of which have employed individuals directly involved in attempts to overturn the 2020 election, including figures who served as Trump’s “fake electors”; urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the electoral count; and pushed disputed legal theories to keep Trump in power. Right-wing media have platformed these individuals, championing their schemes and validating their election lies.

Other partners have turned their sights to the 2024 election, spreading doubts about its legitimacy months before it occurs under the guise of concerns about “election integrity.” Despite lacking evidence of systematic issues across American elections, some of these Project 2025 partner organizations baselessly suggest to their supporters that the 2024 election is being “rigged” as part of “a concerted effort by Democrats,” setting the stage for Trump and his media allies to once again contest the legitimacy of November’s results.

• ## Right-wing media have platformed Project 2025 partner employees who attempted to overturn the 2020 election

• American Family Association

• • The American Family Association hosts a daily radio show with Jenna Ellis, a former Trump lawyer who pleaded guilty to a felony charge over her involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Ellis “amplified former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud as part of what she called a legal ‘elite strike force team’” and wrote legal memos for Trump and his counsel containing “widely disputed legal theories” in an attempt to keep him in power. American Family Association, [1/2/23; The New York Times, 10/24/23; Politico, 12/10/21]

Center for Renewing America

• • Center for Renewing America’s senior fellow Jeffrey Clark attempted to capitalize on his position in 2020 as a senior Justice Department official to “use federal law enforcement power to undo then-President Donald Trump’s defeat.” Trump’s federal indictment for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results appears to identify Clark as an unindicted co-conspirator, portraying him as a “linchpin of plans to bypass the acting attorney general and use the imprimatur of the Justice Department to spread ‘knowingly false claims of election fraud’ and deceitfully substitute legitimate electors with sham alternates supporting Trump.” The Washington Post, [7/3/23]
  • During his tenure at Fox News, prime-time star Tucker Carlson defended Clark after his home was searched as part of the January 6 probe, claiming, “There’s no suggestion he committed any crime of anything, that he did anything wrong.”Bannon has also shown his support for Clark by suggesting that he serve as Trump’s next attorney general and invited him on the show to advocate for deploying the military against protesters. (According to The Washington Post, Clark “is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025.”) Media Matters, [7/1/22, 11/9/23; The Washington Post, 11/5/23]

The Claremont Institute

• • The Claremont Institute has emerged as “a driving force in the conservative movement’s crusade to use bogus fraud claims about the 2020 election to rewrite voting laws and remake the election system in time for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election.” Claremont has also promoted stolen election narratives, with its online magazine claiming in a November 5, 2020, editorial titled “The Fight is Now” that Democrats “have all but declared themselves the winners of the 2020 election before the votes are counted,” concluding that “the President and his supporters must publicly rally and protest what any reasonable person would judge looks illegitimate.” Rolling Stone, [1/12/22; The American Mind, 11/5/20]
  • Claremont Institute board member John Eastman was one of the chief architects of Trump’s legal efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.While working as one of Trump’s election lawyers, Eastman attempted “to solicit GOP state legislatures to send ‘alternate’ electors to Congress” and pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to delay certifying the election, drafting a memo for Trump’s legal team that has been described as “a blueprint for a coup.” Politico, [3/27/24; The New York Times, 10/2/21]
  • Right-wing media championed Eastman’s fake elector scheme as it unfolded and frequently welcomed him as a guest on shows. Various figures and outlets defended Eastman’s actions again in 2023 and called for retaliation after a California judge “recommended in March that Eastman be disbarred for his election subversion efforts.” Media Matters, [9/21/21, 6/27/23, 3/29/24; CNN, 5/2/24]

Conservative Partnership Institute

• • In 2021, CPI hired Cleta Mitchell, “a Trump adviser and election attorney” who “played a central role in the effort to stop the certification of the election in Georgia and beyond.”The Intercept wrote that Mitchell “was one of the principal players on the infamous call in which Trump implored Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find the 11,780 votes he needed to claim victory.” She later “helped the former president covertly send $1 million to finance the farcical Arizona audit in 2021.” The Intercept, [9/13/23]
  • Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo gave Mitchell a platform to push election misinformation on her show in the days after the 2020 election.Mitchell questioned the integrity of Dominion Voting Systems’ software and claimed that “we cannot have a situation where people don’t have confidence in the outcome and the tabulation of the votes.” Dominion later won a record $787.5 million settlement from Fox over the network airing “spurious claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential race.” Fox Business, Mornings with Maria Martiromo, [11/10/20; NPR, 4/18/23]
  • In April, Bannon hosted Mitchell on War Room to defend against a New York Times report on her efforts targeting voter rolls across the country. Mitchell claimed, “We want a lawful election. If we have a lawful election, we have a chance to win. They want to cheat. We have to stop them.” Bannon replied, “If we have a lawful election, Trump wins in a landslide. They have to steal it, they know that.” Media Matters, [3/5/24]
  • CPI also employs former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who galvanized the effort to overturn the results in 2020 using “outlandish election conspiracy theories.”Meadows, now a senior partner at CPI, spent Trump’s final weeks in the White House asking the Justice Department “to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor,” including “a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States.” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported that “filling its ranks with people who undermined democracy has been a financial boon to the group. In each of the two years since, it has brought in at least twice as much money as it did in its first four years of its existence combined.” The New York Times, [6/5/21; CREW, 11/17/23]
  • In April 2022, unearthed text messages revealed that Meadows was working with several Fox hosts, who were “integral to Trump’s plot to illegally hold onto power after losing the election.” Notably, Bartiromo provided Meadows the questions she’d be asking in advance of an interview with Trump, telling the White House chief of staff that “the public wants to know he will fight this” and people “want to hear a path to victory.” Media Matters, [4/29/22]

Hillsdale College

• • Robert E. Norton II, general counsel for conservative Christian Hillsdale College, reportedly hosted a meeting in November 2020 with lawyer Ian Northon and several other individuals involved in Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.The New York Times wrote that “the pre-Thanksgiving gathering at Norton’s house presaged broader efforts to thwart the will of Michigan voters, as well as the entanglement of Hillsdale’s administration in the events leading up to Jan. 6.” Norton and Northon, “a Hillsdale alumnus and private lawyer who did work for the college,” later became “involved in a plan to deploy fake Trump electors in Michigan.” The New York Times, [1/8/24]
  • In December 2020, Northon appeared on Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight to push a debunked legal theory and claim that state legislatures should appoint their own slate of pro-Trump electors. Northon claimed that state legislatures “need to send a second slate of electors to make sure that there’s accuracy and integrity in the election.” Fox Business, *Lou Dobbs Tonight*, [12/23/20]

Tea Party Patriots

• • Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin “worked extensively on the legal and political effort to reverse Trump’s defeat” and was in communication with Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.As noted by Talking Points Memo, “Martin attended and spoke at Stop The Steal events in the leadup to Jan. 6. She was also billed as a speaker for ‘Stop The Steal’ activist Ali Alexander’s ‘Wild Protest,’ which was set to take place at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” but “that event was cut short amid the chaos.” Additionally, Martin’s “work in the ‘Stop The Steal’ movement helped connect the political, legal, and activist elements of the push to keep Trump in power.” Talking Points Memo, [5/9/24; NBC News, 5/8/24]
  • In January, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk hosted Martin on his show to brag about training election-denying activists to “monitor elections.”She appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Roomthe next day and claimed: “When it comes to securing the election, we’re in a much better position right now in 2020 — I mean in 2024 than we were in 2020, way better. In 2022, we trained 20,000 people who went on to be part of the 80,000 people that the RNC placed as poll watchers. That is massive.” Media Matters, [1/30/24]

Turning Point USA

• • Two men with “deep ties” to right-wing activist group Turning Point USA were among the 11 indicted in Arizona for their role as “fake electors” in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. One of the fake electors, Tyler Bowyer, previously worked as the national field director and chief operating officer of TPUSA and remains the COO of Turning Point Action, the organization’s 501(c)(4) branch. The other fake elector is state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a TPUSA affiliate and contractor. MSNBC, [4/26/24]
  • Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk criticized the indictment on X, writing, “Democrats and their media flacks are attempting to criminalize a concept they themselves invented and have utilized with impunity.” On his show, Kirk also called the indictment “the death of the rule of law” and suggested that the Arizona attorney general’s office targeted Bowyer with a “legal Tomahawk missile” to interfere with the 2024 election. Twitter/X, [4/25/24; Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 4/25/24]

• ## Other Project 2025 partners have used their own media platforms to cast doubt on the 2024 election

• AMAC Action

• • AMAC Action represents the Association of Mature American Citizens, a group that labels itself “the conservative alternative to the AARP” and publishes articles priming members to believe that the 2024 election will be stolen.The group published an article in March titled “Will The Election Be Rigged?” which claims, “Citizens have reason to be concerned given the significant changes to election practices, including universal mail-in voting, widespread ballot harvesting, and a concerted effort by Democrats to allow illegal aliens to vote in the upcoming election.” Another article titled “Election Fraud Is Real And Needs To Be Fixed Before 2024” claims, “Cheating should not determine the outcome in the highly consequential 2024 national election.” PolitiFact, [12/2/12; AMAC Action, 3/29/24, 11/7/23]

The Heartland Institute

• • The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has published election fraud surveys described as “mind-bogglingly ridiculous” by The Washington Post, claimed that one of its most recent polls shows that “nearly 45 million ballots may be fraudulently cast if they are not prevented.” According to Heartland, “28% of all voters say they would engage in at least one kind of illegal voting practice in order to help their preferred candidate–either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump—win the 2024 election.” The Washington Post, [12/12/23; The Heartland Institute, 4/16/24]

The Heritage Foundation

• • The Heritage Foundation has planted seeds of doubt about the reliability of the upcoming election.The Project 2025 leader has published articles in the last year titled “Will Elections Finally Be Secure and Honest in 2024?” and “One Illegal Vote Can Change the Outcome of an Election.” The Heritage Foundation, [1/5/24, 7/13/23]
  • Despite a lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts refuses to acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election.In an interview published this January, Roberts told The New York Times, “Can I say definitively that he won? No.” The New York Times, [1/21/24]

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4 24 chris hayes mckay coppin, plus another big study? atl?

rww 5 24

Project 2025, a scheme led by the Heritage Foundation to “take the reins of government” after former President Donald Trump or another MAGA Republican becomes president, is backed by more than 100 right-wing organizations. The project’s harmful agenda and destructive operational plans have generated significant critical media coverage, to which Heritage has responded with snarky commentary that confirms the organization’s identity as a propaganda arm for the MAGA movement.

Project 2025 is a detailed policy agenda and action plan meant to advance two different long-term goals. One is a libertarian-leaning effort to gut federal agencies from within and limit their ability to regulate corporate behavior and protect the climate. The other is an openly authoritarian plan to empower the president to dismantle checks and balances, impose his will on the executive branch, use federal agencies to punish his critics and enemies, and deploy the power of the government to enforce the religious right’s “traditional” views on abortion, family, sexuality, and gender.

The scope and intent of Project 2025 is alarming, and journalists and progressive activists have been sounding the alarm about its consequences for democracy, people and the planet.

In response, Heritage has critical news coverage and published an electronic pamphlet titled “5 Reasons Leftists HATE Project 2025,” which declares, “Radical leftists are terrified…and they should be.”

The Heritage flyer is less of a substantive engagement with Project 2025 critics and more of a Trumpish exercise in name-calling and inflammatory MAGA-movement rhetoric meant to demonize opponents.

For example, a section promising that Project 2025 will “restore the American family” begins with these claims: “The radical left hates families, because when people have strong families, they don’t worship big government and succumb to leftist ideologies like gender ideology. The Left wants to eliminate the family and replace it with the state.” Among the policies Heritage says will somehow restore families: imposing work requirements for food stamps, censoring teaching about race and gender, promoting privatization of public education, outlawing pornography, and banning abortion.

Another section of the pamphlet boasts that Project 2025 will “dismantle the deep state”—code for purging professional civil servants, weakening regulation of corporate behavior, and eliminating institutional checks on the president’s power. Heritage says Project 2025 will eliminate “woke propaganda at every level of government” and shut “wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices.” If you get past the “wasteful bureaucracy” rhetoric and wade into Project 2025’s detailed agenda, you find out that means defunding, dismantling, and redirecting agencies that provide vital services and protect Americans and their communities, like the Environmental Protection Agency.

When it comes to immigration, the Heritage pamphlet equates the Biden administration with “the radical left,” which Heritage claims “rejects the idea of borders and national sovereignty.” While that claim shouldn’t be taken seriously, Project 2025’s plans for aggressive detentions and massive deportations should be.

Heritage also brags that Project 2025 will “reject climate hysteria.” Its pamphlet contains no recognition of the well-documented harms already caused by climate change and its potentially catastrophic future effects. Heritage dismisses the very idea of a “climate crisis” as simply “a tool for scaring Americans into giving up their freedom.” Like Trump’s “drill, drill, drill” ideology, Project 2025 focuses on maximizing fossil fuel production, abandoning sustainable development goals, and otherwise undermining or reversing federal government actions to protect the climate and regulate pollution.

The fifth reason Heritage says that “leftists” hate Project 2025 is that it promises to “stop socialism in its tracks.” For MAGA movement leaders, the actual meaning of words or the truth of statements doesn’t seem as important as their potential propaganda value. Just as Heritage Foundation’s MAGA-minded president Kevin Roberts and Trump aides like Stephen Miller smear opponents as “communists,” Project 2025 lumps progressives together with both communists and fascists: “Leftists today are driven by the same rotten socialist ideas that nearly destroyed much of the world during the 20th century. The promise of socialism—Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses—is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people.”

Given what we know about Trump’s admiration for authoritarian strongmen, his equating brutality with strength, and his willingness to undermine the Constitution for his own benefit, the Heritage Foundation’s hopes for Project 2025 read as a clear threat: “The next conservative president will enter office with a simple choice: greatness or failure,” declares the Heritage Foundation, adding that “Project 2025 will ensure the next president has the tools needed to succeed at this daunting task.”

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:==

paul dans

mma 3 24

boyden gray mofo liar berry

jonathan-berry

Project 2025, a comprehensive transition plan organized by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation to guide the next GOP presidential administration, is the conservative movement’s most robust policy and staffing proposal for a potential second Trump White House — and its extreme agenda represents a threat to democracy, civil rights, the climate, and more.

Project 2025 focuses on packing the next GOP administration with extreme loyalists to former President Donald Trump.

The plan aims to reinstate Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order that makes federal employees fireable at-will, stripping tens of thousands of employees of civil service protections. Both Trump and others in the conservative movement have said they will clear out the federal government if he is reelected. The project has even set up online trainings and loyalty tests to narrow down potential hires to those who will commit to follow Trump without question. As Project 2025 senior adviser John McEntee has said, “The number one thing you're looking for is people that are aligned with the agenda.”

The Heritage Foundation’s nearly 900-page policy book, titled Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise, describes Project 2025’s priorities and how they would be implemented, broken down by departments in the federal bureaucracy and organized around “four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.” Written primarily by former Trump officials and conservative commentators connected to The Heritage Foundation, these proposals would severely inhibit the federal government’s protections around reproductive rights, LGBTQ and civil rights, climate change efforts, and immigration.

The initiative is backed by a coalition of over 100 organizations and individuals, at least two-thirds of which receive funding from the Koch network or conservative philanthropist Leonard Leo. The project is also heavily promoted by MAGA-connected media figures such as Steve Bannon, who has called it the “blueprint” for Trump's second term on his War Room podcast.

The Trump campaign has attempted to distance itself from efforts to promote or speculate about “future presidential staffing or policy announcements.” However, Project 2025 is significantly more developed than the Trump campaign’s analog initiative, called Agenda47. And given that the Heritage plan has the backing of virtually the entire conservative movement and links to numerous former Trump officials and advisers, it appears all but inevitable that Trump and his allies will rely on the policies and personnel assembled by Project 2025 if he is reelected in November.

This resource outlines the specific policy and personnel priorities of Project 2025 for the next Republican administration

Issues:

• ## Personnel and staffing

• Project 2025’s goals for staffing the next GOP presidency reflect Trump’s idea to gut civil service staff and replace them with potentially tens of thousands of MAGA loyalists. The New York Times describes this plot for a second Trump administration as an “expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government” that would reshape “the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.”

• • One of the key elements of Project 2025’s administrative goals is to reinstate the executive order known as Schedule F.This would reclassify thousands of federal employees as “at-will” workers and give the administration the ability to fire employees who don’t agree with or follow the extremist policies suggested by Project 2025. PBS, [8/29/23]

• • Project 2025 has created a training “academy” for potential employees of the next administration, which “provides aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.” The goal of the training, which currently consists of four online courses on subjects such as “Conservative Governance 101” and “The Administrative State & The Regulatory Process,” is “to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration.” Project 2025 Presidential Administration Academy, accessed [3/18/24]

• • Project 2025 makes it clear the Department of Justice is not independent from the executive branch and implies the agency will be used to take legal retribution against whoever Trump decides to investigate. The Nation, [2/8/24]

• • Project 2025 Director Paul Dans recently appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room and encouraged viewers of the far-right broadcast to send in their resumes and participate in Project 2025’s trainings in an effort to recruit extreme loyalists to the next GOP administration. Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [2/29/24]

• ## Christian nationalism

...gressivism,” adding that “they will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.” Project 2025 is partnered with the Center for Renewing America, the primary Christian nationalist political organization in the U.S., led by former Trump official and Heritage alumnus Russ Vought.}:}:

• • Vought’s Center for Renewing America, headed by one of Project 2025’s top advisers, reportedly listed “Christian nationalism” as one of the major priorities of a second Trump term. The CRA is listed among Project 2025’s advisory board member organizations. Politico, [2/20/24; Project 2025 Advisory Board, accessed 3/18/24]

• • In discussing plans for the “well-being of the American family,” Project 2025 claims that centralized government “subverts” families by working to “replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones,” utilizing the biblical language of natural versus the unnatural. Roberts’ foreword for Project 2025 attacking the “noxious tenets” of “gender ideology” similarly argues, “These theories poison our children, who are being taught … to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.” Salon, [3/1/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

• • In the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, former Trump HHS official Roger Severino advocates for a future conservative executive to “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” while arguing that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” Severino specifically objects to “nonreligious definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act,” claiming that “all other family forms” apart from “heterosexual, intact marriage … involve higher levels of instability.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; MSNBC, 9/8/23]

• • Former Trump official Jonathan Berry’s chapter on the Department of Labor states that “the Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family” and claims that Biden’s administration is “hostile to people of faith.” MSNBC, [9/8/23]

• ## Reproductive rights

• Project 2025 aims for the next conservative administration to attack reproductive rights from several angles, including by removing the term “abortion” from all federal laws and regulations, reversing abortion pill approval, punishing providers by withdrawing federal health funding, and restricting clinics that provide contraception and STD testing. Project 2025 has collaborated with extremist anti-abortion groups such as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Students for Life of America, and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

• • Project 2025 suggests the next conservative administration strike any mention of abortion from government laws, policies, and regulations. In the foreword of the Project 2025 policy book, Heritage President Kevin Roberts writes that a pro-life administration starts by removing the terms “abortion, reproductive health, [and] reproductive rights,” among others, “out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Project 2025 suggests the next conservative administration reinstate the Comstock Act to ban and track and limit “mail-order abortions.”The New Republic report explains that right-wing groups see the Comstock Act “as a way to ban abortion nationally because it outlaws the use of the mail for the purposes of sending or receiving any object that could be used for an abortion.” The New Republic, [2/8/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

• • Project 2025 would have the next GOP administration restructure Medicaid to avoid providing reproductive health care and penalize providers who do. The policy book instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to “issue guidance reemphasizing that states are free to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans” and “propose rulemaking to interpret the Medicaid statute to disqualify providers of elective abortion.” It also recommends withdrawing Medicaid funding from “states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate in violation of the Weldon Amendment,” which “declares that no HHS funding may go to a state or local government that discriminates against pro-life health entities or insurers.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Project 2025 also suggests restoring Trump-era “religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate” through the Affordable Care Act that would allow employers to deny coverage. The policy book also proposes requiring education on “fertility awareness-based” methods of contraception and family planning and suggests eliminating condoms from Health Resources & Service Administration guidelines because they are not a “women’s” preventative service. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed 3/19/24]

• • The policy book directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to eliminate any programs or projects that are deemed pro-abortion. In a report detailing Project 2025’s proposed crackdown on reproductive and LGBTQ rights, The New Republic writes that Heritage recommends the next conservative administration direct the CDC to “eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation.” This includes ensuring the CDC “is not promoting abortion as health care” and instead pivots to “a research agenda that supports pro-life policies and explores the harms, both mental and physical, that abortion has wrought on women and girls.” The New Republic, [2/8/24]

• • Heritage directs the administration to roll back Biden-era policies that allowed abortion access “in some circumstances at VA hospitals.”In its chapter on the Department of Defense, the book recommends reversing policies that allow “the use of public monies … to facilitate abortion for servicemembers.” Politico, [1/29/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

• • Project 2025 intends to undo Title X protections for reproductive health care, which currently provide low-cost contraception, STD screenings, and prenatal care to low-income people. Though Title X funding has “never been used for abortion services,” restrictions sought by Project 2025 would prohibit “comprehensive counseling” on all of a pregnant person’s options. The policy book also calls on Congress to pass “the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act, which would prohibit family planning grants from going to entities that perform abortions or provide funding to other entities that perform abortions. This would help to protect the integrity of the Title X program even under an abortion-friendly Administration.” Politico, [1/29/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

• • The policy book subtly promotes anti-surrogacy positions, writing that “all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Project 2025 aims to reinstate an expanded, Trump-era version of a longtime Republican presidential policy barring nongovernmental organizations receiving U.S. aid from providing abortion services or advocating for legal abortion. The Mexico City policy was rescinded by the Biden administration in 2021. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; KFF, 1/28/21]

• • The policy book would reverse a Biden administration policy that requires hospitals to offer abortions in medical emergencies regardless of state bans.Politico, [1/29/24]

• • Project 2025 aims to end all fetal cell research and “ensure that abortion and embryo-destructive related research … become both fully obsolete and ethically unthinkable.”The Hill, [2/26/24; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

• ## Department of Justice and federal law enforcement

• In the eyes of pro-Trump Republicans and their right-wing media allies, the Department of Justice and the FBI have long been corrupted by left-wing ideology and the bureaucratic “deep state.” Now, Project 2025 seeks to radically reshape federal law enforcement for the benefit of a conservative strongman; its chapter by former Trump DOJ official Gene Hamilton states that “anything other than a top-to-bottom overhaul will only further erode the trust of significant portions of the American people and harm the very fabric that holds together our constitutional republic.” These views reflect the various conservative legal organizations that have partnered with Project 2025, such as former Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal (where Hamilton currently works as vice president and general counsel), Carrie Severino’s Judicial Crisis Network, and the American Center for Law and Justice.

• • Project 2025 claims that “the DOJ has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies.” Instead, the policy book states that “litigation decisions must be made consistent with the President’s agenda.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Citing the FBI’s handling of “the Russia hoax of 2016, Big Tech collusion, and suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020,” Project 2025 calls for a future GOP administration to immediately review all major FBI investigations “and terminate any that are unlawful or contrary to the national interest.”It also calls for prohibiting “the FBI from engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity,” referencing federal law enforcement’s response to January 6 insurrectionists and far-right domestic actors. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Project 2025 also suggests eliminating the FBI director’s 10-year term limit established by Congress, claiming the position “must remain politically accountable to the President in the same manner as the head of any other federal department or agency.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Complaining that federal law enforcement agencies spend too much time going after parents, Project 2025 calls for a renewal in the department’s focus on violent crime.Hamilton’s chapter claims: “The FBI harasses protesting parents (branded ‘domestic terrorists’ by some partisans) while working diligently to shut down politically disfavored speech on the pretext of its being ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation.’” The false talking point about the DOJ targeting parents was spearheaded by the conservative movement after the National School Boards Association issued a memo detailing “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials” in response to false information about critical race theory and mask requirements. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; Media Matters, 9/27/22]

• • Project 2025 calls for initiating legal action against progressive prosecutors, citing local government officials who supposedly “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.” It adds, “This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).” Heritage and its president, Kevin Roberts, have previously called for “crushing the rogue prosecutor movement.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; The Heritage Foundation, The Kevin Roberts Show, 7/26/23]

• • Project 2025 proposes the next conservative president should “enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable.” The policy book also euphemistically calls for “the next conservative Administration” to “do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.” During the final months of his administration, Trump rushed 13 federal executions in 2020 — “an unprecedented clip” compared to the combined total of three federal executions in the preceding 60 years. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; Rolling Stone, 1/27/23]

• • Project 2025 claims that the Biden administration “has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equity’” and vows to “reverse this trend” by attacking “so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices that have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination.” The Heritage policy book suggests that the DOJ’s “Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]
  • Project 2025 calls to reassign election-related offenses to the Criminal Division of the DOJ rather than the Civil Rights Division, claiming, “Otherwise, voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction will remain federal election offenses that are never appropriately investigated and prosecuted.”This change would allow a second Trump administration to provide more resources for investigations into bogus claims of voter fraud and bolster efforts to overturn future election results. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; Mother Jones, 9/14/24; Media Matters, 3/5/24]

• ## LGBTQ rights

• Project 2025 takes extreme positions against LGBTQ rights, seeking to eliminate federal protections for queer people and pursue research into conversion therapies in order to encourage gender and sexuality conformity. The policy book also lays out plans to criminalize being transgender and prohibit federal programs from supporting queer people through various policies. The project partnered with anti-LGBTQ groups the Family Policy Alliance, the Center for Family and Human Rights, and the Family Research Council.

• • Project 2025 calls for the next secretary of Health and Human Services to “immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism,” which includes removing terms related to gender and sexual identity from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” The Trump administration proposed a similar idea in 2018 that would have resulted in trans people losing protections under anti-discrimination laws. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; The New Republic, 2/8/24]

• • Similarly, the policy book calls for HHS to stop all research related to gender identity unless the purpose is conformity to one's sex assigned at birth. The New Republic explains: “That is, research on gender-nonconforming children and teenagers should be funded by the government, but only for the purpose of studying what will make them conform, such as denying them gender-affirming care and instead trying to change their identities through ‘counseling,’ which is a form of conversion therapy.” The New Republic, [2/8/24]

• • The policy book’s foreword by Kevin Roberts describes “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children” as “pornography” that “should be outlawed,” adding, “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” Roberts also says that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]
  • Roberts’ foreword states that “allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end.”Echoing ongoing right-wing attacks on trans athletes, Roberts also claims, “Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; TIME magazine, 5/16/22]

• • Dame Magazine reports that Project 2025 plans to use the Department of Justice to crack down on states that “do not charge LGBTQ people and their allies with crimes under the pretense that they are breaking federal and state laws against exposing minors to pornography.”Dame Magazine, [8/14/23]

• • Project 2025 also calls for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to repeat “its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination (NCD) regarding ‘gender reassignment surgery’ for Medicare beneficiaries.”The policy book’s HHS chapter continues: “In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Going further, Project 2025 also demands that the next GOP administration “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.”The policy book’s chapter on the Defense Department claims: “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries … for servicemembers should be ended.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• ## Climate change

• Project 2025 would eliminate environmental protections and further delay climate action. In the foreword, Heritage President Kevin Roberts calls environmentalism a “pseudo-religion,” claiming “environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human” because it promotes “population control and economic regression” by “regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.” Project 2025 is supported by climate change-denying organizations The Heartland Institute and the Institute for Energy Research.

• • The Department of Energy chapter in the policy book, written by former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission head Bernard McNamee, calls for “eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition” and reducing funding to different agencies related to renewable energy.McNamee also calls for cutting the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and the Loan Programs Office. The Guardian, [7/27/23; Politico, 7/28/23]

• • An entire chapter dedicated to the Environmental Protection Agency, written by former Trump EPA chief of staff Mandy Gunasekara, calls for shrinking the agency by firing new hires and eliminating the environmental justice department. The policy book supports reviving Trump-era EPA provisions and investigating grants to ensure money is going to organizations that support the administration’s policy agenda. The Guardian, [7/27/23; E&E News, 2/26/24]

• • In a chapter on the U.S. Agency for International Development, Heritage research fellow and Trump’s former chief operating officer of USAID Max Primorac suggests the next administration “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and shut down any offices or departments connected to the Paris Climate Agreement. Project 2025 also suggests eliminating or curtailing funding to dozens of federal programs or offices related to climate change. Heatmap News, [2/15/24]

• • The policy book recommends reopening the Arctic for oil drilling, expanding other drilling projects, and leasing land in western states for coal mining. Heatmap News, [2/15/24]

• ## Immigration

• Project 2025 proposes to severely roll back both legal and unauthorized immigration through a number of untested, novel approaches that extend far beyond the policies of Trump’s first term. The plan would potentially make hundreds of thousands of people vulnerable to deportation through the loss of temporary protected status, and could ensnare their families, those they live with, and other members of their communities. Extreme anti-immigration organization the Center for Immigration Studies has partnered with Project 2025 in supporting these radical immigration policy ideas.

• • Project 2025 aims to severely restrict legal immigration to the United States by dismantling the DREAM Act and restricting the DACA program, limiting temporary work visas from countries not on the current eligibility list, and increasing processing and application fees for migrants. Niskanen Center, [2/20/24]

• • The policy book also suggests restricting T visas, which are temporary visas for certain victims of human trafficking, and U visas, which are given to victims of crimes that occur in the U.S. Niskanen Center, [2/20/24]

• • Project 2025 suggests adding a citizenship question to the national census, something that the Trump administration attempted in 2019 but which was blocked by the Supreme Court.As NPR noted, “The plan also calls for aligning the mission of the government agency in charge of the next tally of the country's residents with ‘conservative principles.’” NPR, [10/28/23]

• • Project 2025 calls on the DOJ to “pursue appropriate steps to assist the Department of Homeland Security in obtaining information about criminal aliens in jurisdictions across the United States, particularly those inside ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions.”Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Project 2025 calls for a massive increase in the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations.ICE deportation officers should prioritize “the civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate, subject only to the civil warrant requirements of the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] where appropriate.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Even people who are simply adjacent to unauthorized immigrants could be punished. Project 2025 would “bar U.S. citizens from qualifying for federal housing subsidies if they live with anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident.” Niskanen Center, [2/20/24]
  • Under Project 2025, “The next Republican administration … would also strip hundreds of thousands of individuals, many of whom have been in the U.S. for decades, of their legal protections by repealing all Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations.” The Niskanen Center writes, “Nearly 700,000 individuals would lose legal protections and work authorization by repealing all active TPS designations.” Niskanen Center, [2/20/24]

• ## Education
  

• Project 2025’s proposal for America’s education system would be one of the most extreme plans yet, calling for eliminating the Department of Education, getting rid of all teachers unions, and tearing down regulations on education spending. Far-right “parental rights” organization Moms for Liberty and the anti-union Institute for Education Reform have partnered with Project 2025 to create these proposals.

• • The first sentence of Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Education simply states: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” Project 2025,*Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Citing “the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955,” Heritage’s Lindsey Burke advocates for American education through school vouchers, claiming, “Ultimately, every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers, which would empower parents to choose a set of education options that meet their child's unique needs.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • Project 2025 seeks to eliminate the National Education Association’s congressional charter, which allows for the existence of teachers unions, calling it “a demonstrably radical special interest group that overwhelmingly supports left-of-center policies and policymakers.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

• • The plan also wants to remove federal oversight for funds under Title 1, “which provides support for low-income districts,” instead handling them as “no-strings-attached” state grants “with no regulation or oversight.”Federal education funding for students with special needs would “also be converted to unregulated block grants.” Bucks County Beacon, [11/20/23]

• • The proposal also aims at eliminating any policies implemented under the Obama administration that support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives or so-called “critical race theory,” arguing that CRT specifically disrupts “the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.”Bucks County Beacon, [11/20/23; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

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during his four years in the White House, former President Donald Trump clashed with a long list of conservative Republicans who served in his administration — including a secretary of state (Rex Tillerson), a national security adviser (John Bolton), a U.S. attorney general (Jeff Sessions) and a White House Chief of Staff (John F. Kelly). Former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr (a Sessions successor) were, for months, regarded as dedicated Trump allies, but in the end, even Pence and Barr became Trump critics.

Trump allies' Project 2025 agenda, according to reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post, seeks to avoid such clashes during a possible second Trump Administration by making sure that only avowed loyalists are hired.

In a report published on December 15, the Wall Street Journal's Alex Leary describes some of the MAGA Republicans and loyalists who are helping Trump with plans for a possible return to the White House in 2025.

"When Donald Trump sat down in the office of his Bedminster, NJ golf club late this summer to flesh out his trade and border policy," Leary reports, "familiar faces were across from him: Robert Lighthizer and Russell Vought, two of the architects of the former president's populist first-term record. Trump's former trade representative and White House budget director, respectively, are part of a cadre of allies helping him shape policy proposals across a range of topics, laying the groundwork for what would be an aggressive and controversial second-term agenda."

Leary continues, "The group — which also includes Stephen Miller, driver of hardline immigration policies, former Housing Secretary Ben Carson and John Ratcliffe, former director of national intelligence, among others — is stocked with veterans of Trump's first term who are closely aligned with his vision of protectionist economic policies and an isolationist approach to foreign policy."

The WSJ reporter stresses that Trump and his allies want to make sure people picked for a second administration would be "on the same page" when it comes to immigration, foreign policy and economic policy.

According to Leary, other "key people" who "Trump and his team are in regular communication with over policy ideas" range from Brandon Judd (president of the National Border Patrol Council), Kevin Hassett (who formerly chaired the Council of Economic Advisers) and former Acting U.S. Attorney General Matt Whittaker (who came after Sessions and before Barr).

READ MORE:Mehdi Hasan slams 'unhinged' MAGA lawyer who'd make 'Trump’s darkest fascist impulses' a reality

Leary notes that Trump's "policy agenda" has "excited core supporters while alarming Democrats and some Republicans."

One of those Republicans is Marc Short, who served in Trump's administration and later became an adviser for Pence's presidential campaign before Pence dropped out of the race.

Short told WSJ, "He's been pretty clear in saying he will use the levers of government to go after his political opponents, which is anathema to conservatives."

READ MORE:Biden impeachment will 'backfire' against GOP and be 'good news' for his reelection: journalist

*Read the Wall Street Journal's full report at this link (subscription required).

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attorney General Stephen Miller? Vice President Tucker Carlson? White House Chief of Staff Steve Bannon? CIA Director Kash Patel? A new report detailing a second Donald Trump presidency’s “loyalty first” potential cabinet nominees is sending shock waves over their extremist positions and in some cases an entirely insufficient level of experience for the job.

“Former President Trump, if elected, would build a Cabinet and White House staff based mainly on two imperatives: pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries, sources who talk often with the leading GOP presidential candidate tell Axios,” the news outlet reported in an exclusive Thursday morning. “If Trump won in 2024, he’d turn to loyalists who share his zeal to punish critics, purge non-believers, and take controversial legal and military action, the sources tell us.”

Some of these possible picks for the very top levels of government hold or have promoted white supremacist, Christian nationalist, authoritarian, or fascistic policies or beliefs.

Axios calls them “full, proud MAGA warriors, anti-GOP establishment zealots, and eager and willing to test the boundaries of executive power to get Trump’s way.”

READ MORE: Jim Comer Decimated by NBC Reporter in ‘Under Two Minutes’

“They want to target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists; deport undocumented immigrants or put them in detainment camps, and unleash the military to target drug cartels in Mexico, or possibly crack down on criminals or protesters at home,” Axios’ Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei report, adding, “They want to scrap rules that limit their ability to purge government workers deemed disloyal.”

“Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas — a former Army infantry officer known for his hard edge, and who wrote a New York Times op-ed in Trump’s first term supporting use of the Insurrection Act against civil disorder — would be considered to head the Pentagon,” according to Axios.

Most of the names mentioned in the Axios report are well-known, and they are being promoted by many surrounding the disgraced criminally-indicted ex-president.

“Donald Trump Jr. has floated [Mike] Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), to be Trump’s interim attorney general — saying it would be a ‘shot across the bow of the swamp,'” Axios reports. “In his public auditions for the job, the bombastic Davis has promised a ‘three-week reign of terror‘ in which he would ‘put kids in cages’ and jail prosecutors and journalists who have gone after Trump — even telling MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan that he has ‘his spot picked out in the D.C. gulag.'”

Meanwhile, Melania Trump is pushing for “booted” Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson to be Trump’s running mate.

Other vice presidential possibilities mentioned include Arkansas governor and former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, U.S. Senator J.D Vance, and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Some close to Trump are promoting themselves for the vice presidential role, including U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL).

Axios also reports that “Johnny McEntee,Trump’s loyalty vetter and enforcer, [who] headed presidential personnel in the first term … might return to that role with even more power. He also could be Trump’s gatekeeper as head of Oval Office operations, or could be Cabinet secretary, riding herd on the White House liaisons to each department.”

READ MORE: Mike Johnson Likens Himself to Moses, Tells Christian Nationalists God Charted His Path to Speaker

“By late 2020, McEntee had explicit lists of top officials to fire and hire in a Trump second term, reaching far down the federal bureaucracy in a mission to truly ‘clean out’ the ‘Deep State.’ That project has continued outside of government with a $22 million presidential transition project led by the Heritage Foundation.”

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Axios’ Jim VandeHei, who co-authored the report, dove even further into how concerning these potential picks are, leading the Biden campaign to post a clip of a small portion of his remarks on social media:

IFrame Content

Vandehei went on to say, “you might like that, then you’re going to be electrified by this group but if you don’t like it, you’re probably going to be horrified by some of the picks. But what’s in common with all of these people is they share at least a willingness to do all the things that Donald Trump would say.”

And he reminded that none of Trump’s previous team that guarded the American people against his worst instincts will be part of a second Trump administration.

“None of those shackles will exist. He’s going to come in with a group of enablers and a group of executors. So whatever you thought about the first term, he’s going to be able to do things at a velocity rate he wasn’t capable of because he didn’t really know how to govern,” Vandehei added. “Now he knows a little bit better, but he’s surrounded by people and there’s these multimillion dollar efforts outside of his own orbit at the Heritage Foundation.”

READ MORE: ‘Denying Career Advancement to White Straight Men’: Stephen Miller’s Law Group Targets Macy’s

“It’s not necessarily about substance,” he said of how the people choosing who becomes part of any next Trump administration would be, “it’s basically an ideological litmus test. Are you willing to believe wholly in Donald Trump, serve loyalty to Donald Trump and then implement his view of what the world should look like? If you can pass that test you might be one of the 50,000 people who get to come into [his] government.”

Meanwhile, critics responding to the Axios report are voicing extreme concern.

“This is about the most dystopian article ever written,” observed The Bulwark’s Tim Miller. “Like asking ChatGPT to write about a fantasy Trump administration cabinet that blends Nazis and celebrities in the style of 2008 Politico playbook.”

Former Biden Commerce Dept. official Caitlin Legacki wrote, “This Axios reporting should be a 5-alarm fire. Terrifying stuff in here and it’s barely making waves.”

U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) warned, “This is what is at stake in 2024 & lurking behind every single thing the extreme MAGA GOP is doing. Don’t lose the plot in their chaos or we will lose our democracy.”

New Jersey Treasury Dept. official Darryl Isherwood summed up what many seemed to be saying: “If this doesn’t scare you, you’re not paying attention.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

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right Wing Watch reported in June 2022 that on the same day the Trump-enhanced right-wing Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade, a coalition of Christian nationalist, voter suppression, anti-LGBTQ-equality, Big Lie-promoting, and Trump-cheerleading groups had publicly launched a project that would “position the movement to take the reins of government” after a Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election.

Since then, the right-wing coalition has expanded, and reporting by national media outlets has fleshed out some frightening specifics of the “Project 2025” plan to conduct an ideological purge of the civil service and turn the entire executive branch into an enforcement arm of the MAGA movement—and if former President Donald Trump is elected, a weapon for personal retribution against his enemies.

The Washington Post reported Nov. 5 that Trump and some former administration officials are scheming with Project 2025 to abandon a rule-of-law principle embraced for decades that the Justice Department’s law enforcement decisions should be free of political pressure from the president.

Russ Vought, a former Trump official who launched a MAGA movement think tank after Trump’s defeat, told the Post, “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”

Even worse, Jeffrey Clark, who tried in the final days of the Trump administration to throw the weight of the Justice Department behind Trump’s false claims about the stolen election, is leading efforts to set the stage for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens—a step that some far-right leaders had urged Trump to take in 2020 to stay in power.

Politico also reported this month on a complementary project called American Moment launched after Trump’s defeat to recruit and vet young ideological warriors who would be prepared to fill lower level administration jobs created by mass firings of civil service employees. American Moment would provide an army of foot soldiers to carry out the battle plans against the “deep state” ordered by the higher-ranking officials that Project 2025 is preparing to put in place. American Moment is officially part of the Project 2025 coalition. Vought is among the MAGA movement leaders helping train American Moment’s operatives, who have served internships with Sens. J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio.

American Moment was launched with more than $300,000 from the Conservative Partnership Institute, which as Politico noted “has become a sort of administration-in-exile for former Trump staffers.” CPI has been an institutional home to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell, who participated in the notorious call on which Trump badgered Georgia’s secretary of states to “find” him the votes he needed to win the state, and was later picked to head up CPI’s “election integrity” project, which has lobbied against federal voting rights legislation.

Recognizing the threat that Trump and his MAGA Republican allies across the country pose to our rights and freedoms, People For the American Way is encouraging supporters to take a pledge to vote against authoritarian MAGA candidates and for progressive candidates in local, state, and federal elections.

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The shocking Republican plan to dismantle the American government

Thom Hartmann

September 01, 2023

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As we learned from last week’s Republican debates, the leading candidates for the GOP nomination all appear to agree on a broad plan to gut American government and replace it with a strongman president and corporate rule.

The modern administrative state, sometimes called the “welfare state” by Republicans, was largely created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Republican Great Depression of the early 1930s. And every day since FDR was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, the GOP has worked feverishly to dismantle his legacy.

Outside of Russia, China, and Hungary, this isn’t true at all for the rest of the developed world.

Nations across the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia imitated FDR’s and LBJ’s America, most going beyond our simple development of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the legalization of unions to further expand opportunity and social mobility for their citizens.

For example, Taiwan has the most efficient and comprehensive single-payer healthcare system in the world; Germany requires half of the members of every large corporation’s board of directors to come from the ranks of organized labor; Luxembourg has the highest national minimum wage in the world at roughly $19.50 an hour (they calculate it monthly).

All of Europe is pledged to reduce greenhouse gasses to get climate change under control, and they require chemical companies to prove their new compounds are safe before introducing them into food or the environment (the “precautionary principle”).

Prisons across the rest of the developed world are committed to rehabilitation and only in America are run for profit; every other developed country carefully regulates the possession of guns; pharmaceuticals are inexpensive — at least half, and sometimes a tenth of their cost here in the US — in every other developed country in the world.

Republicans and the billionaires who fund them reject all of that.

They want to abandon modern ideas like prohibitions on child labor and the age of consent; worker and workplace protections and unions; free, quality public schools and colleges; civil rights and the power of women to make their own healthcare decisions.

They’re dedicated to taking America back to the era before the New Deal and, as Steve Bannon said, “deconstructing the administrative state.”

Over the years, the GOP has used a series of plans to reach their goal of a billionaire- and-corporate-owned-and-run America with working people turned into serfs and children in factories instead of school.

In 1971, it was the Powell Memo, written by Virginia tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell and delivered to the US Chamber of Commerce. It called for a rightwing takeover of America’s schools and colleges; building out a corporate-friendly media infrastructure; packing the courts with pro-corporate, anti-labor conservatives; and the wholesale purchase of Republican politicians at both the state and federal level.

The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and over the next quarter-century he used that position to put many of his own suggestions into law. In addition to decisions gutting the powers of unions and deregulating industry, Powell’s major achievement was authoring the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that struck down hundreds of state and federal anti-corruption laws, explicitly allowing corporations and their senior officers to bribe politicians for the first time in American history.

No other developed country in the world tolerates this; outside of the United States, you only find it in developing countries that have been taken over by corrupt autocrats.

Two years later, when Ronald Reagan cut a traitorous deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages in Iran long enough to destroy Jimmy Carter’s chances in the 1980 election, the Heritage Foundation stepped up with a plan to further gut the rights and powers of working-class people and elevate corporate and billionaire power.

They called it the Mandate for Leadership and, at the time, The Washington Post said it was “an action plan for turning the government toward the right as fast as possible.”

Reagan adopted over half of Heritage’s suggestions and in some cases went even farther, cutting enforcement of our anti-trust laws; ending the Fairness Doctrine; slashing the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent; declaring all-out war on unions; gutting the EPA, Education, and Labor Departments; and selling off federal lands for pennies on the dollar to mining and drilling operations.

Now the partly-billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation has laid out a second-stage plan for the next Republican administration, whether it’s Trump or somebody else, whether it’s next year or in future presidential election cycles.

They call it Project 2025. With it, they intend to finally and fully seize control of and transform America. With it, they will rule.

Ideologues on the right correctly see the Trump administration as having been a bumbling mess. Nobody expected him to win the election, not even Trump himself (he and Roger Stone had already registered the URLs and put together a “Stop the Steal” campaign claiming “election fraud” to distract and kneecap incoming President Hillary Clinton).

Nobody realized how effective Putin’s interventions — his 29 million Facebook ads and message posts targeting a million or so people in six swing states who’d been identified as persuadable by the GOP and passed along to Russian Intelligence via Paul Manafort — would be.

When Trump was declared the winner he didn’t even have a victory speech ready, was totally unprepared to govern, and it took the better part of three years for Trump and his corrupt clown car to get their act together. Most of the time he and his son-in-law were too busy making money out of their connection to the White House. They’ve corruptly taken home billions in the years since 2016.

So this time the rightwing billionaires and their GOP lackeys aren’t taking any chances.

First up, they want to deconstruct the Civil Service, taking much of the federal workforce back to 1882. There’s an amazing backstory here.

Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dates back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office). His favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered with the Trail of Tears — was “The Indian Killer.”

Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by 1883, routine.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.

It also outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.

Donald Trump wanted to functionally end the Civil Service and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself. He did this through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions doing the exact same work.

The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government. As Paul Dans, director of Project 2025’s “Presidential Transition Project” and a former Trump administration official, told the Associated Press:

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives.”

Next up, Project 2025 proposes to kill off federal efforts that may inhibit the profits of the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it’s created who are helping fund both the GOP and Heritage.

As Scott Waldman wrote for Politico:

“Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.

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“If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy, and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it. It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency.”

After ensuring fossil fuel industry profits and the further wilding of our weather, Project 2025 would effectively dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, presumably on behalf of the petrochemical and other polluting industries that are also big GOP donors.

It would either end or downsize the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance, and the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education. Like the process Trump began, it would shatter the EPA into pieces, moving regional offices and cutting its workforce by “terminating the newest hires in low-value programs.”

It would also block states from advancing any agenda that may prevent the further expansion of carbon pollutants that are driving global warming by “ensur[ing] that other states can adopt California’s standards only for traditional/criteria pollutants, not greenhouse gasses.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of Project 2025 and other plans for future Republican presidencies is their consolidation of power in the hands of the president, reflecting the way government is run in Hungary, China, and Russia rather than the checks-and-balances envisioned by our nation’s Founders.

They would outright end the operational independence of the of the Department of Justice and the FBI, turning both into tools (or weapons) the president alone could wield.

The Federal Reserve, with its ability to turn on the monetary spigot to ensure “the good times roll” or turn off the spigot to induce a recession would also become the president’s political plaything.

Ditto for the Federal Communications Commission, which has the power to not only regulate but even shut down over-the-air radio and TV broadcasts that displease it, as well as wielding a largely today-unused power of censorship over cable TV and the internet.

And the Federal Trade Commission, which has the power to grant billion-dollar favors or inflict severe punishments on companies, would lose their independence because they could be used to reward or destroy companies that have earned the favor or ire of the president.

As Russell Vought, president of one of the 65 far-right organizations on the Project 2025 advisory board, told The New York Times:

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

This is all a reflection of what, for several decades, has been called the Unitary Executive Theory. It argues — erroneously — that a strongman president like Putin, Xi, or Orbán is what the Founders and Framers had in mind.

As professors Karl Manheim and Allan Ides of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles famously wrote in 2006:

“In fact, the theory of the unitary executiveis anything but an innocuous or unremarkable description of the presidency. In its stronger versions, it embraces and promotes a notion of consolidated presidential power that essentially isolates the Executive Branch from any type of congressional or judicial oversight.

“And it is much more than an academic theory. Rather it is an operative way of thinking about and applying Executive Branch power that has had and will continue to have real-world consequences for our republic and for the international community. In attempting to understand and appreciate the significance of unitary executive theory, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that it is a product of the late 20th century and not a legacy bequeathed from the founding generation.

“The theory, which in fact is more about power that it is about law, grew out of a somewhat perverse reaction to abuses of presidential power that had come to light during the late sixties and early seventies. Such events as President Johnson’s fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident and President Nixon’s secret war in Cambodia, among many other similar abuses of presidential power, led to efforts to curb what was perceived as an increasingly imperious Executive Branch. …

“The almost immediate response to this reform movement was a redoubling of efforts to consolidate and amplify presidential power. The theory of the unitary executive grew out of this reactionary response.”

Project 2025 and other efforts by the GOP to consolidate power in the Executive branch, as well as their recent successes at packing the courts and buying off Republican members of Congress, should be a clanging five-alarm fire bell for our republic.

This neofascist ideology of “rule by the rich” has been explicitly embraced by both Trump and DeSantis (who, this June, sent a senior advisor, David Dewhirst, to work on Project 2025), and the themes and contents of the plan are also regularly invoked on the campaign trail by Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley.

The merger of billionaire wealth with partisan Republican governance — and their combined efforts to reshape our government in their own corrupt image, the public be damned — threaten the integrity and future of the American experiment.

But it can only come about if we fail to awaken people, mobilize them, and vote.

Step one, then, is to wake people up to what the GOP and its billionaire patrons are planning. Pass it along.

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The frightening blueprint indicates a new Republican Administration in 2025 will:

• Repeal Biden’s premier climate bill (the Inflation Reduction Act) which designates $370 billion to fund the transition to clean energy.
• Close down the Department of Energy Office responsible for promoting green technologies.
• Remove climate change as an issue “worthy of discussion” on the National Security Council.
• Allow drilling inside the Arctic wilderness.
• Declare that the federal government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources” on America’s public lands.

Protecting the climate isn’t of course just a political issue. It’s also a human rights issue. It is terrifying to me that a large faction of Republicans and the fossil fuel industry are willing to dismantle even the modest efforts made by the Biden Administration to protect our environment.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/two-reported-co-conspirators-trumps-alleged-coup-plot-are-organizations

two reported co-conspirators in former President Donald Trump’s scheme to remain in office after his loss in 2020 are high-ranking members of organizations working to staff the next Republican administration.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election lists six unnamed co-conspirators, two of whom have been widely reported to be John Eastman, Senior Fellow at The Claremont Institute, and Jeffrey Clark, Senior Fellow and Director of Litigation at the Center for Renewing America. According to the indictment, Clark suggested deploying the military to suppress political unrest in the event that the coup proved successful. Eastman appears to have been comfortable with that plan as well.

The Claremont Institute and the Center for Renewing America are both coalition members advising on Project 2025,an effort led by right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation to provide the next Republican president with policy papers and vetted personnel on day one of their administration. The Center for Renewing America is run by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and right-wing media regular guest with sweeping plans to gut the federal civil service and weaponize federal law enforcement against his group’s enemies under a future Republican administration. Both organizations are closely aligned with Trump and the far-right wing of the Republican Party.

If Trump is reelected, he is expected to either pardon himself or appoint an attorney general who would dismiss federal charges against him, meaning that two of the figures most closely associated with Trump’s failed coup could help determine how he quashes the case if given the chance.

Under Trump, Clark was a mid-level Department of Justice official who embraced the former president’s false allegations of voter fraud more than his colleagues did. Like CRA boss Russ Vought, Clark regularly appears on Steve Bannon's War Roomshow. After Trump’s loss, Clark proposed sending letters to election officials in key states claiming, without evidence, that the Department of Justice had “identified significant concerns” about the election results and suggesting that they should send “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump,” according to congressional testimony.

According to the indictment, on the morning of January 3, 2021, Clark also accepted an offer from Trump for the position of acting attorney general, a fact not previously known to the public. That afternoon, deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin told Clark “there is no world” in which Trump would not leave office on January 20, 2021, and that if Clark pushed forward with the coup attempt “there would be riots in every major city in the United States.”

“Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark responded, referring to the vague and outdated law that gives the president the authority to deploy the military against civilians. Trump later rescinded the appointment following threats of mass resignations from DOJ.

Eastman is a constitutional lawyer who attempted to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to claim authority to invalidate the certification of the election on January 6, 2021. That role is purely ceremonial, and Eastman faced a disbarment hearing in California this summer related to his bogus legal claims. Axios has reported that, between January 4 and January 7, 2021, Eastman sent 101 emails offering advice to Trump and others in his circle detailing strategies to prevent Congress from certifying the election results. On August 2, Eastman appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where he doubled down on his theory behind the illegal attempt to over turn the 2020 election.

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https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/28/global_heat_climate_crisis_july_2023

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DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, I mean, the short answer is, to limit all of these impacts, we need to reduce carbon emissions very rapidly. And while we have had an incredibly impressive renewable rollout over the last couple of years, all of the graphs are pointing way up. The next decade looks much more promising for renewable energy than most advocates even believed was possible just a few years ago. Nevertheless, they’ve barely dented, if they’ve dented at all, the emissions that we’re producing from fossil fuel generation. So we haven’t actually reduced the share of global power production that comes from fossil fuels from this remarkable renewable rollout. We’re just using those renewables to add to our power capacity.

And that’s really, you know, the change that we need to make. We need to be producing so much renewables now that we can actually draw down fossil fuels, and draw them down relatively rapidly, rather than simply using them to supplement our consumption patterns and power production. And unfortunately, we haven’t really seen a sign of that. At best, it looks like we’re going to be looking at sort of a plateau for emissions over the rest of this decade. And we know from all of the scientific warnings that that’s simply inadequate if we have any hope of meeting some of our more ambitious climate targets.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, David, I want to ask you about what would be the most effective legislation in the United States to deal with climate change. But, Dharna Noor, I wanted to first go to your piece. If you can explain what Project 2025 is and what you found in your investigation?

DHARNA NOOR: Absolutely. So, Project 2025 is, essentially, a group of dozens of right-wing organizations. We’re talking about think tanks, publications and the like. And it was convened by the Heritage Foundation, which is, I think, in the climate world, very well known for promoting climate denial for decades, and for even longer promoting this sort of anti-regulatory stance. So, these groups came together in an attempt, essentially, to advise whoever the next president is, if that person is a Republican, so any Republican who takes office in next year’s presidential election.

This is the second time that the Heritage Foundation has led the creation of a sort of transition plan aimed at a Republican president. In the early ’80s, we saw the Heritage Foundation create one of these plans, that actually went on to have a huge influence on the Reagan administration and was framed as a sort of way of taking on the out-of-control regulatory state.

And in this particular iteration, there’s a lot of focus in their new transition plan on unmaking environmental regulations. I’m happy to talk more about this, but there’s a number of previous Trump appointees who have written, essentially, proposals to undo the many powers of the federal administration, from the EPA to the Department of the Interior, all in an attempt to sort of lessen the federal authority to regulate fossil fuels and, essentially, to boost those polluting industries.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. Polls show now that Biden and Trump, even though he was indicted again yesterday, are neck and neck in the polls for president. You talk about the Department of the Interior part of the plan, in this 2025 plan, being written by William Perry Pendley. You note he controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations. Talk more specifically, and name names.

DHARNA NOOR: Absolutely. So, as you mentioned, William Perry Pendley very controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump, controversially because he was actually never confirmed by the Senate. This was the case for a number of Trump appointees. And he also was known, before he had a role in the Trump administration, for writing this book called Sagebrush Rebel, that was really in praise of Ronald Reagan, of Ronald Reagan’s anti-regulatory sort of agenda. It’s, I think, unsurprising to see his name in a sort of proposal that’s aimed at, you know, ending the ability for federal regulations to have any real impact on the environment.

Previous reporting from E&E News, from Scott Waldman there, found that Mandy Gunasekara had written another chapter focused on remaking the EPA, really focused on shrinking its authority both by laying off staff, by cutting budgets, with an especially big focus on sort of cutting environmental programs, like environmental justice programming and public outreach programming.

Another name that was in the proposal was Bernard McNamee, who wrote a chapter on the Department of Energy, again sort of in an attempt to say we should shrink the authority of the Department of Energy. He previously served as an adviser to Ted Cruz. And before that, he led this far-right organization called the Texas Public Policy Institute — or, Texas Public Policy Foundation, rather, that really aims to undo environmental regulation and fight renewable energy at the state level.

And so, we’re really seeing, I think, a who’s who of the far right in this attempt to, you know, not only sort of be in the next president’s ear if they’re a Republican, but also, you know, sort of recommend personnel and say, “Hey, here’s who you should staff up with.”

AMY GOODMAN: What role does billionaire Charles Koch play in this project, Dharna?

DHARNA NOOR: So, the Heritage Foundation, who, again, are the far-right foundation that sort of convened this group, Project 2025, has historically had ties, financial ties, to the Koch brothers, who are, of course, billionaires who made their fortune in fossil fuels and related industries. The Heritage Foundation is also a member of the State Policy Network, which is a sort of coalition of these extreme right-wing groups that have targeted regulation, especially climate-focused regulation, in states for many years. And I think, you know, I would just say, I guess, it’s no surprise that an organization with ties to people who have made such a great fortune in the industries that must be regulated in order to take on the climate crisis, you know, have historically been tied to a group that is trying to push that agenda to the presidential level.

AMY GOODMAN: As we begin to wrap up, I wanted to ask David Wallace-Wells to respond to what Dharna is describing right now, and also talk about what needs exactly to be done. I mean, we’re speaking today, the day after the Supreme Court has just OK’d, cleared the way for construction of the contested Mountain Valley Pipeline to resume, lifting a halt on a section of the project that had been issued by a lower court earlier this month after a challenge by environmental groups.

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https://yyytheguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/27/project-2025-dismantle-us-climate-policy-next-republican-president

‘Project 2025’: plan to dismantle US climate policy for next Republican president

Rightwing groups penned a conservative wish list of proposals for the next conservative Dharna Noor

Thu 27 Jul 2023

An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged.

Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.

[A burned-out car against a background of charred trees and hills

Deadly global heatwaves undeniably result of climate crisis, scientists show

Read more]

Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president. Climate experts and advocates criticized planning that would dismantle US climate policy.

The nearly 1,000-page transition guide was written by more than 350 rightwingers and is full of sweeping recommendations to deconstruct all sectors of the federal government– – including environmental policy.

“Heritage is convening the conservative movement behind the policies to ensure that the next president has the right policy and personnel necessary to dismantle the administrative state and restore self-governance to the American people,” the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in an April statement.

The guide’s chapter on the US Department of Energy proposes eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition, and also calls to slash funding to the agency’s grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable energy deployment, E&E News reported this week.

The plan, which would hugely expand gas infrastructure, was authored by Bernard McNamee, a former official at the agency. McNamee was also a Trump appointee to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He previously led the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation, which fights environmental regulation, and served as a senior adviser to the Republican senator Ted Cruz.

Another chapter focuses on gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and moving it away from its focus on the climate crisis. It proposes cutting the agency’s environmental justice and public engagement functions, while shrinking it as a whole by terminating new hires in “low-value programs”, E&E News reported. The proposal was written Mandy Gunasekara, who was the former chief of staff at the EPA under Trump.

The guide also features a chapter on the Department of the Interior written by William Perry Pendley, who controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations.

[Republicans in Congress continue to show they will stop at nothing to undermine environmental protections

David Shadburn of the League of Conservation Voters]

Before his time in the Trump administration, Pendley headed the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm where he advocated for selling off public lands. He also authored a book, Sagebrush Rebel, praising Reagan’s anti-regulatory policies.

“He did a bunch of terrible things,” said Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity, about Pendley’s time at the Department of the Interior. “He worked to dismantle [the Bureau of Land Management] while he was in it.”

The Heritage Foundation has enjoyed a longstanding influence in GOP politics, even helping Ronald Reagan win the presidency, authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway detail in their 2023 book, The Big Myth. Many of Reagan’s policy proposals were cribbed from the pages of the thinktank’s first Mandate for Leadership, published in 1980, which asserted that the US was in the middle of a “crisis of overregulation”.

“It doesn’t trouble me that any individual or institution would develop advisory plans for politicians. What troubles me is the Heritage Foundation’s long history … of working to undermine environmental protection at the expense of health and wellbeing of the American people, at the expense of life on Earth,” said Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard.

[Protesters in October 2021 demanding that the Biden administration to do more to curb climate change and ban fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, House GOP members are also continuing to attack federal climate funding in their spending bill proposals, putting governmental functions at risk.

Earlier this month, the Clean Budget Coalition– – composed of more than 250 advocacy groups – warned that Republican representatives were slipping restrictions on climate spending into the government’s annual spending bills, bills that must be passed before current funding expires on 30 September to avoid a government shutdown. This week, the coalition found that House Republicans had added additional “poison pills” to spending bills, including ones that target environmental funding.

The spending bills are currently in the House appropriations committee, which is chaired by the Texas Republican Kay Granger, who is a top recipient of campaign funding from the oil and gas industry, the Lever reported this week. They will go to a full vote in the House, and then the finalized proposals will move into negotiations with the Senate. If Biden vetoes them, a government shutdown could be on the way.

“Republicans in Congress continue to show they will stop at nothing to undermine environmental protections and attack anything that would help addressing the climate crisis,” said David Shadburn, a senior government affairs advocate at the League of Conservation Voters.

Some of the provisions would hamstring the EPA’s powers, blocking the agency from enforcing new pollution limits on power plants and tailpipe emissions or from implementing controls on mercury and other toxic air pollution, and effectively shuttering a critical program for deploying carbon-free energy.

“House appropriations Republicans are abusing the appropriations process to impose a cycle of environmental injustice,” said Deanna Noël, climate campaigns director for the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen.

Other “poison pills” would prohibit listing the dunes sagebrush lizard under the Endangered Species Act, remove protections for the greater Yellowstone ecosystem’s population of grizzly bears, and bar the Department of the Interior from creating a working group to help restore bison populations. Still others would require the energy secretary to sell 1m barrels of refined petroleum from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and block the implementation of a rule forcing federal defense contractors to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and create emission reductions plans.

These disgraceful poison pill riders are nothing short of corporate giveaways to the corrupt fossil fuel industry

Deanna Noël of Public Citizen

Every GOP representative can submit proposals to the House appropriations committee, and since no member is required to sign off on specific proposals, it is not clear who exactly is responsible for each “poison pill”. But as the Lever reported, many Republican representatives who have effectively championed the provisions are recipients of funding from polluting industries.

For instance, a proposal to halt climate-related fisheries research funding was written by a subcommittee led by Representative Hal Rogers of Kentucky, whose top campaign contributors include mining and fossil fuel interests. Another proposal would bar funding for the UN’s Green Climate Fund; it was buried in a bill being overseen by major energy funding recipient Representative Mario Díaz-Balart of Florida, the Lever reported.

“These disgraceful poison pill riders are nothing short of corporate giveaways to the corrupt fossil fuel industry,” said Noël.

The proposals come as waters off the Florida coast reach levels of heat more commonly found in hot tubs, and as much of the nation continues to swelter under triple-digit temperatures.

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Think tanks often act as an administration-in-waiting for presidents — a place to stash future appointees, generate policy plans, and flag promising young staffers. This year their role on the right is taking on outsized importance, however, as the 2024 Republican field has made overhauling the bureaucracy with more reliable allies one of their top stated goals.

That’s where the Heritage Foundation, alongside 50-plus conservative organizations in partner roles, hopes to come in. In April, the conservative nonprofit unveiled the start of a new $22 million project intended to staff the next Republican presidential administration from day one — a “private LinkedIn for conservatives,” as Paul Dans, the lead of “Project 2025,” described it.

Their work dovetails with the goals expressed in Donald Trump’s calls to “destroy the deep state,” for example, and his plans to fire and replace federal workers en masse. Rivals like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have already accused Trump of not going far enough as president in rooting out ineffective or disloyal appointees and civil servants.

“What fundamentally unites our coalition is deconstructing the administrative state,” Dans told Semafor.

“The overall principle of this project is, you know, we've got to reassert political control over the government, reassert presidential control over the executive branch,” the project’s associate director, Spencer Chretien, later added.

besides the database the group is continuing to compile, the conservative think-tank’s ambitious effort is comprised of three additional pillars: A policy book for the next administration, an organized training effort dubbed the “Presidential Administration Academy,” and eventually a “180-day game plan of regulations and executive orders that a president could sign on day one,” Dans explained.

They’ve even recently begun taking the show on the road — some of the project’s top members have already visited Hillsdale College and Florida International University — to try and attract more promising young conservatives to Washington. (There’s also an upcoming visit to Denver for the Western Conservative Summit planned). Eventually, they hope to begin hosting roundtables and debates featuring some of the experts involved in the project’s policy book, and are even considering setting up posts along the campaign trail in key early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

Title iconSHELBY'S VIEW

“Project 2025” is, at its core, a response to Trump’s win back in 2016. In an interview, Dans said how his upset victory “took Conservative, Inc., by surprise” and thus the movement was unprepared to properly help him as he took office.  Trump, who was superstitious about preparing a transition before winning, struggled to fill in the gaps himself.

“They certainly hadn't done a lot of homework to support them,” Dans said, later adding: “I think we acknowledge, if nothing else, Biden was prepared to go in there.”

Heritage’s efforts also tie into ongoing conservative allegations of “weaponization” of government officials against their priorities (which are fiercely disputed by Democrats.) This is perhaps the most organized effort thus far to respond by trying to pack the executive branch with staff of their choosing.

Prior to this, the most aggressive attempt came from Trump, who issued an executive order dubbed “Schedule F” late in his term, with guidance from former Heritage staffers. The proposal — reversed by President Biden — sought to allow the White House to get rid of huge numbers of civil servants, who are typically protected against the whims of a new president. It’s now a key part of his plans for a second term.

“I think any candidate is going to have to, at a minimum, embrace a Schedule F sort of major reform,” Dans told Semafor. “We're embarking on the 100 year reform period here in the United States.”

Heritage is also distributing its dense 887-page policy booklet, which covers topics ranging from, as Dans put it, “ending the woke military” to establishing “full spectrum energy dominance,” to 2024 presidential hopefuls plus some notable politicians. They’ve passed it on to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — who closed a door on launching a presidential run this year but has left open a crack that he may still enter as a last minute candidate — as well as Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a critic of COVID-19 policies and a prominent spreader of anti-government conspiracy theories, and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.px="px"> THE VIEW FROM DEMOCRATS< Democrats and many critics on the left see Trump’s “Schedule F” proposals as an attempt to undermine the basic functionings of government and consolidate power.

“This is a classic case of what Republicans love to do — to tell people that government doesn’t work for them and then work to dismantle and break the government on purpose,” a national Democratic operative said of the latest effort.,,, ;of appointees and staff who have defied his orders — including those who testified about his behavior as part of impeachment trials and federal investigations — have some observers worried his plans would be a step toward silencing his critics (or a Trump-like president’s) and enabling corruption.

“The last thing we need is for a president to fire dedicated and experienced public servants and replace them with sycophants and grifters without the skills to carry out the functions of government within the rule of law,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. said last year after In an op-ed published by The Hill, Donald F. Kettl recently ===

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Alarm at rightwing push to reverse clean-energy success in Texas and beyond

Supporters of clean energy say they expect further battles ahead to prevent state’s progress in solar and wind from being unwound

guardian.org

About this content

Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor

Thu 8 Jun 2023 

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In the scramble before the end of Texas’s legislative session last week,a must-pass bill was amended to impose new costs upon renewable energy.This came amid a barrage of anti-solar and wind power measures pushed forward by Republicans to reshape a state that has become the US’s powerhouse of clean energy.

But the conservative lawmakers had help.

Sections of the bill that impose new burdens upon clean energy providers were directly crafted and edited by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (or TPPF), a conservative group that has led the backlash to renewables and to make what it calls “the moral case for fossil fuels”, according to a copy of the draft language seen by the Guardian.

Several dozen edits were made to the bill’s amendments by Brent Bennett, a TPPF policy staffer, the document shows, and Texas lawmakers subsequently passed parts of this language along with the key TPPF desires – to impose new transmission costs on renewables and require them to source fossil fuel “backup” power when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing.

The passage of the bill, which funds the ongoing operation of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, was the flagship victory for TPPF even as a raft of other Republican bills that would have “shut down the renewable energy industry in Texas”, as energy analyst Doug Lewin put it, faltered.

The burgeoning influence of TPPF, an organization substantially funded by fossil fuel interests and publicly lauded by Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, is the catalyst to a rightwing attempt to crimp the stunning progress of renewable energy in the state, whichnow produces more than a quarter of all wind-powered electricity in the US.

The group’s agenda is now extending far beyond Texas, bankrolling efforts to halt offshore wind turbines in Massachusetts and to prop up coal power on native American land in Arizona while spearheading efforts to crack down on sustainable finance in energy-producing states like West Virginia.

“We are very influential, we are meeting with policymakers to share recommendations and we’re having success around the country,” said Jason Isaac, a former state representative and now director of TPPF’s energy initiatives. Isaac said that TPFF regularly helped craft “certain aspects” of bills in Texas related to the state’s electricity grid or environmental, social, and corporate governance (or ESG) issues.

“I think conservatives are slowly but surely moving away from variable generation and towards reliable generation,” he said of the group’s quest against renewables. Isaac claimed renewables have been unfairly propped up by a “cult-like fascination” among politicians who have pursued what he called a “dangerous and deadly” agenda to reduce planet-heating emissions.

The aggressive push against renewables in Texas has alarmed environmentalists who fret it will undermine the state’s nation-leading wind industry and threaten the revenues solar and wind generates for local communities and farmers. More broadly, the template used by TPPF in Texas could hobble efforts by Joe Biden’s administration to tackle the climate crisis.

“We are seeing a rush of these bills attempting to wind the clock back on renewables and TPPF really are at the point of the spear on this,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. “They are transparent advocates for the fossil fuel industry and I think they pose an incredible threat to renewables. TPPF have gained incredible traction, they really are shifting the narrative in Texas.

“They’ve won over the top politicians in the state, which is very dangerous. Texas is going to be critical if the US going to get to net zero emissions, so we should take this threat seriously.”

TPPF’s impact can now be found thousands of miles from its base in Austin, Texas, with the group filing a lawsuit in 2021 on behalf of six east coast fishing businesses – collectively calledNantucket Residents Against Turbines – targeting a major windfarm currently under construction off the coast of Massachusetts. Slated to come online by the end of the year, Vineyard Wind will be the first major offshore wind project to be built off the US east coast.

The lawsuit claimed federal agencies did not sufficiently analyze how the project, which is set to deliver enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, would affect wildlife – specifically the endangered North Atlantic right whale – and thereby violated the Endangered Species Act and slew of other environmental policies.

Meghan Lapp, a seafood dealer and longtime offshore wind critic who was a plaintiff in the suit, told Reuters in 2021 that TPPF got involved in the suit at her request. As it announced its involvement in the case, the thinktank also took the unusual step of releasing a trailer called “A Heavy Wind”.

The case was ultimately unsuccessful after a federal judge dismissed it last month, but the idea that wind turbines kill whales has been seized upon by conservatives, especially since December, when dozens of whales began washing up on the Atlantic coast in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) calls an “unusual mortality event”.

Noaa has said there is no evidence that offshore wind power is killing off whales, with fishing practices, boat strikes and the climate crisis among the primary dangers to marine mammals, but congressional Republicans have called on the White House to pause offshore wind development, while Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News, aired a critical series of segments called “The Biden Whale Extinction”.

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The assault on renewables by TPPF and its Republican allies has stunned conservatives who remain supportive of the longstanding bipartisan enthusiasm for clean energy.

The reversal has been particularly stark for Texas which, blessed with the capacious, flat terrain and amenable climate for abundantwind and solar energy, was championed as a bastion for renewables by previous Republican governors George W Bush and Rick Perry, even as they embraced the ubiquitous oil industry.

More than 40% of Texas’s electricity came from carbon-free sources last year, with the state now producing more wind and solar than the next three states – California, Iowa and Oklahoma – combined. This imperious status now seems uncertain.

“I don’t recognize the state sometimes any more from our elected leaders. It’s like we are in a twilight zone where up is down and day is night,” said Matt Welch, state director of Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation.

“I fear we’re losing our lead in the nation and the world as the source for clean energy advancement. It’s just amazing we’ve rolled up the welcome mat and told wind and solar operators they’re just not welcome here any more.”

The Texas Public Policy Foundation was founded in 1989 by James R Leininger, a San Antonio-based physician who made his fortune selling hospital beds, and initially focused on the issue of charter schools before branching out into other topics such as energy. The thinktank is a member of theState Policy Network, a network of far-right non-profits across the country that fight climate-focused legislation.

In 2021, the most recent year for which records are available, donations for the thinktank totaled $25.6m. Publicly available data shows that – like many State Policy Network affiliates – its largest known funder isCharles Koch, the billionaire industrialist who made his fortune from fossil fuels. Entities tied to Koch have contributed at least $8.8m to the group since 2012, according to an analysis by researcher Connor Gibson.

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Tax filings show that the group has received donations from fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, but, as a non-profit, the full extent of TPPF’s fossil fuel funding is unknown.

Issac said, however, it has been “many years” since large oil firms such as Exxon have donated to TPPF as these companies now ostensibly support decarbonization and environmentally responsible corporate governance, which conflicts with the foundation. He insisted that the foundation is committed to “free enterprise and individual liberty” and the eradication of “market distorting” subsidies, not just for renewables but also fossil fuels.

But Welch said that Republican lawmakers, backed by TPPF, have ditched any ideological consistency by heaping onerous restrictions on renewable energy development on private property, in some cases attempting to impose requirements absent from oil and gas drilling, and trying to slash subsidies for the industry at the same time as offering state support for the buildout of new gas plants.

One proposed bill that didn’t get sufficient backing in the latest Texas legislative session would have placed stringent new rules for wind and solar projects, including written permissions from neighboring property owners and setbacks of up to half a mile from the edge of a property for wind turbines. Another would have cut all subsidies for renewable energy.

“On a Tuesday these lawmakers will be adamantly for private property rights, but on a Thursday they will want to stop the growth of renewable energy even though it’s on somebody’s private land,” Welch said, adding thatTPPF was once full of “mini Milton Friedmans for years until recently, and now all of a sudden they throw that out the window.

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“It’s been a shocker. It’s so hypocritical,” he said. “I used to be an acolyte of TPPF but they are now driven by oil and gas billionaires who want to stop alternative forms of energy to benefit their own bottom line. They’ve sold their soul to the almighty dollar.”

Renewable energy remains broadly popular with the Texas public for delivering cheap, clean power along with an injection of cash for entities such as school districts, but affection has somewhat curdled among some of the state’s Republican leadership. A devastating winter storm in 2021, which left millions of Texans without power and led to several hundred deaths, was a major accelerant of this trend.

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In the days following the crippling event, known as winter storm Uri, Abbott and other leading Republicans pushed the blame for the power blackouts upon renewable energy, with misleading pictures of frozen wind turbines from Europe quickly circulating social media as the supposed cause of the grid’s breakdown.

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Subsequent studies have made clear the primary cause of the blackouts were frozen gas pipelines and a lack of infrastructure resiliency to extreme weather, rather than renewables per se, but the perception of faulty wind and solar has stuck, eagerly fanned by TPPF.

“I still believe [renewables] deserve a lot of the blame,” said Isaac. “The storm was helpful in educating people who just assumed when they flip a switch the lights come on that there are issues with grid reliability, that solar panels covered in snow don’t produce electricity.”

Isaac said the foundation accepts that the climate is changing but disputes that this is harmful to people,claiming that the benefits of burning of fossil fuels “far outweighs” any negatives, including deadly air pollution, which he asserts isn’t an issue for the US and its “near natural” air quality. Scientists have, in fact, found that the climate crisis poses huge and growing risks to humanity, with airborne pollutants from burning coal, oil and gas linked to an array of different health problems.

While the most severe of the anti-renewables bills pushed forward in Texas didn’t pass the legislature this year, Isaac said that TPPF remains undaunted and will continue to agitate against what he called “the false panacea of variable power”. Supporters of clean energy said they expect further battles ahead to prevent Texas’s progress in solar and wind from being unwound.

“With the growth trajectory of renewable energy, TPPF can either get on the train or lay down in front of the tracks,” said Welch. “I suspect they won’t rest on their laurels. They’re going to come for renewables again and again and again.”

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https://www.project2025.org/news/press-releases/project-2025-publishes-comprehensive-policy-guide-mandate-for-leadership-the-conservative-promise/

guk ref apr press release

wASHINGTON—With the goal of shaping policy decisions among presidential candidates, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project announced the publication of the ninth edition of “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” It’s the earliest publication of “Mandate” ever—months before candidates square off in the first presidential primary debate.

A comprehensive policy guide for the next conservative U.S. president, the book pulls from the expertise of hundreds of political appointees, policy scholars, and conservative leaders across the conservative movement. The book builds upon the legacy of the 1981 edition of “Mandate for Leadership,” which appeared on The Washington Post’s paperback bestseller list.

“Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” offers both specific proposals for addressing every major issue facing the country and a blueprint for how to restructure each agency to solve those issues.

Among the recommendations in this edition:

• Restore the integrity of the Department of Justice to ensure accountability by giving the FBI a hard rest, ensuring consistent litigation decisions, and enforcing immigration laws.
• Solidify our border by restructuring the Department of Homeland Security and its priorities in ways that streamline the immigration process, end unclear immigration visas, and create a more secure immigration process.
• Break up the Department of Education to strengthen education freedom, enhance parental rights in education, and protect taxpayers from student loan “forgiveness.”

“Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” features 30 chapters spanning all aspects of the federal government. Editors Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, and Steven Groves, the Margaret Thatcher fellow at Heritage, worked with more than 35 primary authors and hundreds of contributors to assemble the 900-page book, which will be distributed Friday at Heritage’s two-day Leadership Summit in National Harbor, Maryland.

Heritage President Dr. Kevin Roberts released the following statement Friday praising the publication:

“For over two years, the Left has ignored the voice of everyday Americans leading to crippling inflation, biological males dominating women’s sports, rampant violence, and a crisis in education not seen in decades. Our country is all but unrecognizable.

“This is why the conservative movement is coming together to prepare for the next conservative administration. Heritage is convening the conservative movement behind the policies to ensure that the next president has the right policy and personnel necessary to dismantle the administrative state and restore self-governance to the American people.

“‘The Conservative Promise’ is just the first step in preparing future conservative leaders for the task of serving their country, and it will continue to guide the movement-wide coalition. We know what time it is; the conservative movement is on offense to restore our great nation.”

Since the first edition of “Mandate for Leadership” more than 40 years ago, this “policy bible” aims to provide administrations with a blueprint of policy solutions. The Reagan administration implemented nearly half of the ideas included in the first edition by the end of his first year in office, while the Trump administration embraced nearly 64% of the 2016 edition’s policy solutions after one year.

The following is a list of the 30 chapters and authors for each.

Chapter 1: White House Office, Rick Dearborn

Chapter 2: Executive Office of the President of the United States, Russ Vought

Chapter 3: Central Personnel Agencies: Donald Devine, Dennis Dean Kirk, andPaul Dans

Chapter 4: Department of Defense, Christopher Miller

Chapter 5: Department of Homeland Security, Ken Cuccinelli

Chapter 6: Department of State, Kiron K. Skinner

Chapter 7: Intelligence Community, Dustin J. Carmack

Chapter 8: U.S. Agency for Global Media, Mora Namdar; Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Mike Gonzalez

Chapter 9: Agency for International Development, Max Primorac

Chapter 10: Department of Agriculture,Daren Bakst

Chapter 11: Department of Education, Lindsey M. Burke

Chapter 12: Department of Energy and Related Commissions, Bernard L. McNamee

Chapter 13: Environmental Protection Agency, Mandy M. Gunasekara

Chapter 14: Department of Health and Human Services,Roger Severino

Chapter 15: Department of Housing and Urban Development, Benjamin S. Carson, Sr., MD

Chapter 16: Department of the Interior, William Perry Pendley

Chapter 17: Department of Justice, Gene Hamilton

Chapter 18: Department of Labor and Related Agencies, Jonathan Berry

Chapter 19: Department of Transportation, Diana Furchtgott-Roth

Chapter 20: Department of Veterans Affairs, Brooks D. Tucker

Chapter 21: Department of Commerce, Thomas F. Gilman

Chapter 22: Department of the Treasury, William L. Walton, Stephen Moore, and David R. Burton

Chapter 23: Export-Import Bank, Veronique de Rugy and Jennifer Hazelton

Chapter 24: Federal Reserve, Paul Winfree

Chapter 25: Small Business Administration, Karen Kerrigan

Chapter 26: Trade,Peter Navarro and Kent Lassman

Chapter 27: Securities and Exchange Commission, David R. Burton; Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Robert Bowes

Chapter 28: Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr

Chapter 29: Federal Election Commission, Hans A. von Spakovsky

Chapter 30: Federal Trade Commission, Adam Candeub

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far right Heritage Foundation created a platform for Trump that plots an authoritarian take-over of the country.

Donald Trump nearly destroyed American democracy in his first term in office. If he is reelected, he plans to try to finish the job. This isn’t a matter of speculation; it’s a virtual certainty.

In campaign speeches, TV interviews, posts on Truth Social, and a head-spinning list of promises posted on his official campaign website, Trump has vowed to pressure Congress to pass legislation imposing the death penalty on drug smugglers and human traffickers; purge “Marxists” from the Department of Education; remove civil service protections for federal employees; and “obliterate the deep state [and] rout the fake news media.” He has also pledged to fire Special Counsel Jack Smith, whom he has labeled “a deranged lunatic, [a] psycho, and a “crackhead,” and appoint “a real special prosecutor” to target President Biden and his family, along with a litany of other real and imagined enemies.

It would be bad enough if such threats were simply the ravings of a wannabe dictator desperate to stay out of jail, but they are much more dangerous than that. Trump’s 2024 election bid and his vows of revenge and retribution are backed by a sophisticated and multi-faceted movement that seeks to expand presidential power to unprecedented heights should he or another like-minded GOP extremist win back the Oval Office.

The intellectual heart of the movement is the Heritage Foundation, the well-known and influential Washington-D.C.-based think tank, founded in 1973, that played an integral role in shaping the policies of President Ronald Reagan. From its early days as a pivotal player in the mainstream of the Republican Party, the Heritage Foundation went full MAGA during Trump’s first term. Last year, it launched a new initiative—dubbed the “2025 Presidential Transition Project,” or “Project 2025” for short—to ensure that the next GOP President’s authority will be unchecked.

The project’s webpage describes its vision in ambitious and unambiguous terms:

The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.

It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.

The specific goals of the project are discussed in great detail in the ninth edition of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership. First published in 1981, the Mandate is designed to serve as a guide for conservative governance, and is updated periodically, usually at the outset of each presidential administration. The current version totals some 920 pages.

If you lack the stomach to plow through the entire tome, you can turn to a two-page preface written by Paul Dans, Project 2025’s director who served as the Trump Administration’s Chief of Staff for the Office of Personnel Management. Dans outlines the project’s four basic objectives, which he calls its “four pillars.” These are: the development of a broad “policy agenda” for the next rightwing President to implement; the construction of a “personnel database” to assist the President in making staffing decisions; the creation of a “Presidential Academy” to train the next set of high-level government appointees; and a “Playbook” for the first 180 days of the next administration.

One of the project’s more disturbing aims is to bring all federal agencies under direct presidential control, ending the operational independence not only of the Department of Justice and the FBI, but also the Federal Reserve, which oversees the banking industry and regulates interest rates; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees television, radio, and the Internet; and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which enforces antitrust and consumer protection laws.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought told The New York Times in an interview for a lengthy article published earlier this month on Trump’s plans for a second term. Vought ran the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump White House, and currently serves as the president of the Center for Renewing America, one of sixty-five ultra-right organizations that have come together to form Project 2025’s advisory board. (Others include the American Family Project, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America, America First Legal, the Claremont Institute, Moms for Liberty, Freedom Works, the James Madison Institute, and ALEC.)

“The President’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” John McEntee, another former Trump White House staffer, also told the Times. “Our current executive branch,” McEntee continued, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.” McEntee joined Project 2025 in May as a senior advisor, working on the initiative’s “personnel” pillar.

Dismantling the New Deal-era regulatory framework of the administrative state, as McEntee advocates, has long been a goal of the radical right. The right has also long advocated a bloated view of presidential power known as the “unitary executive theory.” The doctrine was popularized in the early 1980s by Ed Meese, who served as counselor to the President in Reagan’s first term, and as attorney general in his second term, before assuming a full-time post with the Heritage Foundation in 1988. Bill Barr, Trump’s last Senate-confirmed Attorney General, is another prominent proponent of the theory.

In an oft-quoted 2006 essay, professors Karl Manheim and Allan Ides of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, California, described the theory as inimical to the core tenets of democracy, writing:

[T]he theory of the unitary executive is anything but an innocuous or unremarkable description of the presidency. In its stronger versions, it embraces and promotes a notion of consolidated presidential power that essentially isolates the Executive Branch from any type of Congressional or judicial oversight… Its proponents seek the cover of the Constitution, but in truth their theory wreaks havoc on the most fundamental principles of our constitutional traditions.

In a recent column published online by MSNBC, New York University Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an internationally renowned expert on fascism, compared the programmatic goals of the Trump campaign and Project 2025 to the crippling anti-democratic reforms implemented by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The question for the rest of us, who see democracy teetering on the brink, is how to stop Trump and Project 2025. It is possible, but unlikely, that Special Counsel Jack Smith could derail Trump’s campaign through the multiple prosecutions he is pursuing. It is also possible, but by no means certain, that the Supreme Court, currently stacked with three Trump appointees, could overturn or weaken some aspects of a second-term Trump agenda if Smith fails.

The most effective way to stop Trump and the new movement behind him, however, is to defeat him at the polls, making sure that he never accedes to power again. Sadly, that, too, remains decidedly uncertain.

GOP senator blocking 265 military promotions falsely promoted his father’s WWII service: report

Smith Jan. 6 prosecution

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html

Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control.

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Jonathan SwanCharlie Savage Maggie Haberman

By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

Published July 17, 2023

Updated July 18, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants 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.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.

The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.

A Divided Congress

[Under Scrutiny: A licensing agreement between Ford Motor and a major Chinese battery maker is facing questions by Republican lawmakers, who say the deal could make Ford reliant on a company with links to forced labor.

Air Travel: The House overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration for the next half-decade, moving at a time of growing dysfunction and disruption in the system to make a number of changes that affect passengers.

Supreme Court Ethics Bill: The Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation that would impose strict new ethics rules on the Supreme Court, moving over Republican objections to address revelations about justices receiving financial benefits from wealthy benefactors.

U.C. Berkeley: A House select committee is requesting more information about a partnership between the university and several Chinese entities that it said could help China gain access to cutting-edge research.]

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”

The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.

Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.

That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.

“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”

The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.

Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.

The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.

“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”

Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.

Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.

Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

One idea the people around Mr. Trump have developed centers on bringing independent agencies under his thumb.

Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings — putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)

Presidents of both parties have chafed at the agencies’ independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created many of them, endorsed a proposal in 1937 to fold them all into cabinet departments under his control, but Congress did not enact it.

Later presidents sought to impose greater control over nonindependent agencies Congress created, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by an administrator whom a president can remove at will. For example, President Ronald Reagan issued executive orders requiring nonindependent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. But overall, presidents have largely left the independent agencies alone.

Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review. Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them “under presidential authority.”

Such an order was drafted in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Justice Department — but never issued amid internal concerns. Some of the concerns were over how to carry out reviews for agencies that are headed by multiple commissioners and subject to administrative procedures and open-meetings laws, as well as over how the market would react if the order chipped away at the Federal Reserve’s independence, people familiar with the matter said.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn in the White House.Credit...John Tully for The New York Times

The Federal Reserve was ultimately exempted in the draft executive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his presidency ended. If Mr. Trump and his allies get another shot at power, the independence of the Federal Reserve — an institution Mr. Trump publicly railed at as president — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump campaign website’s discussion of bringing independent agencies under presidential control is silent on whether that includes the Fed.

Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But “at the bare minimum,” he said, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.

“It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution,” Mr. Vought said.

Other former Trump administration officials involved in the planning said there would also probably be a legal challenge to the limits on a president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, teeing up the question for the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the power of Congress to shield some executive branch officials from being fired without cause. But after justices appointed by Republicans since Reagan took control, it has started to erode those precedents.

Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University and a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, argued that it is constitutional and desirable for Congress, in creating and empowering an agency to perform some task, to also include some checks on the president’s control over officials “because we don’t want autocracy” and to prevent abuses.

“The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,” he said. “They are clawing away agency independence in ways that I find quite unfortunate and disrespectful of congressional choice.”

Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. After Nixon used the practice to aggressively block agency spending he was opposed to, on water pollution control, housing construction and other issues, Congress banned the tactic.

On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice — though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.

Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.

Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.

Critics say he could use it for a partisan purge. But James Sherk, a former Trump administration official who came up with the idea and now works at the America First Policy Institute — a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials — argued it would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president’s agenda.

“Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” Mr. Sherk said. “Schedule F employees would keep their jobs if they served effectively and impartially.”

Mr. Trump himself has characterized his intentions rather differently — promising on his campaign website to “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” and listing a litany of targets at a rally last month.

“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”

[Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022. More about Jonathan Swan

Charlie Savage is a Washington-based national security and legal policy correspondent. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Boston Globe and The Miami Herald. His most recent book is “Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy.” More about Charlie Savage

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump and Allies Seeking Vast Increase of His Power. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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'Seriously great danger': Ex-DHS official lays out Trump’s 2024 authoritarian threat

Alex Henderson July 18, 2023

On September 5, 2018, the New York Times anonymously published an op-ed headlined "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" — which was written from the perspective of a conservative Republican who considered then-President Donald Trump a threat to the United States yet stayed in his administration in the hope of mitigating the damage. Subsequently, in November 2019, an entire book by "Anonymous," was published; by that time, he had left Trump's administration.

In 2020, Miles Taylor — who had served as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's chief of staff under Trump — revealed that he was "Anonymous." And despite his conservative views, Taylor made it clear that he would be voting for now-President Joe Biden.

Three years later, Taylor is still sounding the alarm about Trump and the MAGA movement in his new book, "Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump." The ex-DHS official discussed the book and the authoritarian threat the U.S. is facing in an interview with The Guardian published on July 18.

READ MORE: 'Authoritarianism will be on the ballot': Experts recoil at Trump’s 'plans to centralize more power'

Taylor told The Guardian, "The people who most needed to come forward and tell the truth were cowed into silence, including me. I thought anonymously sounding the alarm about the president would draw attention to the message instead of the messenger and always intended to unveil myself. But in the aftermath, I realized I really should have done that a lot sooner both for political reasons and personal reasons."

In "Blowback," Taylor reveals that because of the stress he experienced from 2018-2020, he turned to substance abuse and suffered severe depression. On Election Night 2020, he was contemplating suicide.

Taylor laments that "the leading figures of the Republican Party" still "refuse to repudiate this man and continue to support him."

The former DHS official told The Guardian, "We are doing this again, even though those people say privately he's a threat…. (House Speaker Kevin McCarthy) thought Trump was a buffoon and a danger, and I'm sure Kevin still thinks that privately. Those people publicly, because they're afraid, are still supporting the man. That collective anonymity is putting us in pretty seriously great danger."

READ MORE: Jericho March extremists illustrate threat of present-day MAGA violence

Taylor vehemently disagrees with pundits who say that Trump is unelectable in 2024 and warns that "Trump 2.0" will be even more dangerous than his January 2017-January 2021 term if he becomes the GOP nominee and defeats Biden in the general election. The non-MAGA conservative proposes a "unity coalition" for 2024 and suggests that perhaps Biden should do something that would shock a lot of Democrats: replace Vice President Kamala Harris with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) as his running mate.

Taylor told The Guardian, "There's been a number of polls that show the ex-president beating Joe Biden by several points. It would be hubris to say, 'Oh, no, we would beat him again a second time.' Actually, I don't think that. If the election was held today, I think Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden, and that really concerns me."

READ MORE: 'It would be chaotic': How Trump plans to annihilate checks and balances if he wins in 2024

Read The Guardian's full interview with Miles Taylor at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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DHS officials 'terrified' that Trump 'seemed to welcome nuclear conflict' with North Korea: new book ›

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https://www.project2025.org/

https://live-project2025.pantheonsite.io/about/advisory-board/

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wow looks like caricature of libtard

eXON HILL, Md.—The Heritage Foundation and a small army of conservative allies on Friday launched the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, also known as Project 2025, calling for reining in federal agencies and curbing political weaponizaiton.

“For the most powerful think tank in America, it would be very easy to go it alone,” said Ed Corrigan, president of the Conservative Partnership Institute, referring to The Heritage Foundation. “This has been really a team effort, 50 different conservative organizations contributed to this. That’s what makes this a historic product.”

Policy and personnel recommendations dot Heritage’s blueprint for the next conservative president. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

The first pillar of the plan is Heritage’s book “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” which sets forth policy proposals touching on virtually every government agency. The second pillar is the concept that personnel is policy. The third is a call for training and the fourth recommends executive orders to advance conservative policy.

“This has never happened. We’ve never had this coming together in our movement to prepare for one thing—Day One, January 2025,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, referring to Jan. 21, 2025, when the next president will be sworn into office.

“What brings all these organizations together is our common theme to take down the administrative state, the bureaucracy,” Dans said. “The bottom line is we need to have an army of conservatives ready to march in on Day One.”

Dans stressed that the effort includes examing the 50 states for useful and practical knowledge outside Washington. The alliance of conservatives will be involved in recruiting and training officials.

Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s acting deputy secretary of homeland security, wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Homeland Security.

“We don’t agree on everything all the time—you may have noticed that in the conservative movement—but we reflect alternative options, and DHS is a good example of this,” said Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general who now is part of The Center for Renewing America. “We start out with a recommendation which may surprise some of you, to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security.”

Cuccinelli said he didn’t want to bet on that:

We don’t mean get rid of the missions. We mean [make them] better managed from the national standpoint, how American security is protected. We go through agency by agency as well, including some of the things we think we should get rid of, like the TSA [Transportation Security Administration]. There should be security, but government doesn’t need to run that.

“The peaceful transition of power is an awesome responsibility. I would have given my right arm to have the book on the tables out there,” Rick Dearborn, former deputy chief of staff for President Donald Trump and also executive director of Trump’s presidential transition team in late 2016 and early 2017.

Dearborn, who was referring to copies of “Mandate for Leadership 2025,” is now a Heritage visiting fellow on the Presidential Transition Project.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

Portrait of Fred Lucas

@FredLucasWH

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is chief news correspondent and manager of the Investigative Reporting Project for The Daily Signal. Lucas is also the author of "The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left's Assault on Clean Elections." Send an email to Fred.

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no lnx

Think Tank Watch

The World's Top Source for Think Tank News & Information

Friday, April 28, 2023

Heritage Foundation Making Plans to Staff a Republican Administration in 2025

The Heritage Foundation continues to make plans to staff a potential Republican administration in 2025.

Here is more from the New York Times:

Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 million presidential transition operation at a scale never attempted before in conservative politics — is being led by the Heritage Foundation, a group that has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era.

Heritage usually compiles its own personnel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project, set to start Friday.

They have already identified several thousand potential recruits and have set a goal of having up to 20,000 potential administration officials in their database by the end of 2024, according to Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Heritage has contracted the technology company Oracle to build a secure personnel database, Dr. Roberts said.

The key people involved with the Heritage-led database served in the former president’s administration. They include James Bacon, a Trump loyalist who worked in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, John McEntee. In the final year of the Trump administration, Mr. Bacon helped Mr. McEntee overhaul the government’s hiring process. They developed a questionnaire to vet government employees’ loyalty to Mr. Trump and his “America First” agenda.

The newspaper says that the Heritage Foundation and its partners have already briefed former President Donald Trump as well as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates on their efforts.

It also notes that the Dennis Kirk, a former Trump Administration lawyer who was involved with the adoption of "Schedule F," a plan that would give the president the power to terminate and replace as many as 50,000 career government officials who served in roles that influenced federal policies, is now employed at Heritage and working on Project 2025.

Here is more from Government Executive.

Update: Mr. John McEntee, who was director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump Administration, has joined the Heritage Foundation's 2025 Presidential Transition Project as a senior adviser.

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[The Heritage Foundation's] Project 2025 has launched an online questionnaire, asking would-be conservative wonks in a Republican  to explain their political philosophy, who influenced it, and asking them a series of questions, including whether the United Nations should have authority over sovereign countries, and whether the U.S. president "should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance [sic] from unelected federal officials."

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9 22 MMA  https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-and-christian-nationalist-russ-vought-promote-ideological-purity-tests

Christian nationalist Russ Vought recently appeared on Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk’s radio show to discuss plans to purge at least 10% of federal career staffers under a new Trump administration. Vought described that portion of the federal workforce as “the roots of the problem” that prevented former President Donald Trump from fully implementing his agenda. During the interview, Kirk suggested that the next Republican administration subject civil servants to “ideological purity tests.”

Vought ran the powerful Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now heads up a right-wing think tank called the Center for Renewing America, whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” While at OMB, Vought helped develop a policy called “Schedule F” as a tool that would allow a new conservative administration to circumvent job protections typically enjoyed by federal workers who aren’t politically appointed.

Speaking on the September 23 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought claimed to have reclassified 90% of the workers in his own office under that job category

CitationFrom the September 23, 2022 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

“Schedule F is an authority that we discovered and developed at the end of the Trump administration to give the president the ability to reclassify career civil servants, who normally have permanency within the bureaucracy, to turn them into essentially at-will employees,” Vought told Kirk.

When asked by Kirk how many career employees he’d like to potentially sack using this authority, Vought set the floor at 10% of current workers, but suggested that he considers as much as 80% of the federal workforce to be ideological opponents.

“I would say that within my agency, we had, you know, 80% of it was left-leaning,” Vought said. “Their paradigms were all rooted in this permanent class, ruling class that defines the milieu of Washington, D.C.”

“And you can reason and work with that crowd, but there is about a 10% of activists that are animated by the wokeism, the anti-racist movement, to be able to come into these agencies and they're just activists,” Vought added.

Vought then told Kirk that someone in the human resources department at OMB described themselves and their colleagues as “committed anti-racists.”

Kirk responded by calling that person the leader of “a sleeper cell of a woke communist ideology who's just right there within our federal government.”

“You're going to have to figure out how to solve that, I don’t know,” Kirk continued. “But ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let's break up the federal government first and then we'll go from there.”

In July, Axios reported on discussions Trump allies were having about staffing their next administration, with the Schedule F being central to the framework. Vought reportedly has been a leader in these efforts: As Media Matters reported a week prior to Axios’ story, Vought stated publicly that he wants to build an “army” of hard-right activists with “Biblical worldview” to run the federal agencies that he can’t outright destroy. He’s been very clear that the goal is to get “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies,” and he’s been similarly clear that Schedule F is the way to do it.

Right-wing propagandist Christopher Rufo – known for launching bad-faith attacks on critical race theory and targeting children’s hospitals that provide care to trans youth – has pushed for a similar course of action.

“The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it,” Rufo said in an interview with conservative website IM-1776 in July.

In furtherance of those shared goals, Vought has attempted to turn the Center for Renewing America into a shadow government-in-waiting for Trump or another conservative president. In June, Vought brought on Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice environmental lawyer and Trump’s top coup architect, as senior fellow at CRA. Kash Patel, another key figure in Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, is a CRA senior fellow as well.

In the recent interview with Kirk, Vought expressed a common regret among former Trump officials that the administration wasted precious time in its first years adjusting to the steep learning curve of running the government.

“My hope is that we don’t have to do that again because we're laying the groundwork now,” Vought said, later adding, “We want to make sure that can never happen again and make sure that from day one, we can ensure that the agenda is being done.”

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off bs

COMMENTARY BY

Spencer Chretien

Associate Director, 2025 Presidential Transition Project

Spencer is Associate Director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at The Heritage Foundation.

When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

It’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.

The policy book Mandate for Leadership represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success.

The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them?

With the Biden administration half over and with the immediate dangers inherent to one-party rule in Washington behind us for now, it’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right. For decades, as the left has continued its march through America’s institutions, conservatives have been outgunned and outmatched when it comes to the art of government.

One reason is because the Republican establishment never moved on from the 1980s. Beltway conservatives still prioritize supply-side economics and a bellicose foreign policy above all else. Belief in small government, strangely enough, has manifested itself in a belief among some conservatives that we should lead by example and not fill all political appointments. Belief in the primacy of the national security state has caused conservative administrations to defer political decisions to the generals and the intelligence community.

The result has been decades of disappointment.

Fortunately, this situation is changing. The conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America. More and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision, because the neutrality of “keeping the government out of it” will lose every time to the left’s vast power. The calls for a “new Church Committee” represent a momentous shift in energy; while conservatives used to lament liberal Sen. Frank Church’s original project as a kooky leftist attack against “The Brave Men And Women of Our Intelligence Community,” we’re now the ones agitating for Congress to go after the three-letter agencies.

This new vigor of the right can be found at Project 2025. Organized by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has brought together 45 (and counting) right-of-center organizations that are ready to get into the business of restoring this country through the combination of the right policies and well-trained people. The Project’s foundation is built on four interconnected pillars.

>>> Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project

The first pillar, the upcoming production of the policy book Mandate for Leadership, represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success at each federal agency during the next administration. Presidential candidates won’t be able to ignore what the conservative movement demands in this book.

The second is our online personnel database. This “Conservative LinkedIn” will launch in March and will provide an opportunity for rock-solid conservatives to place themselves in contention for roles in the next administration. This pillar will bring Mr. (and Mrs.) Smith to Washington.

The third is our Presidential Administration Academy. When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively. Through their action, inaction, and their encyclopedic knowledge of volumes of technicalities about the federal workforce, certain career federal employees are masterful in tripping us up. Our interactive, on-demand training sessions will change that. They will turn future conservative political appointees into experts in governmental effectiveness.

The fourth and final pillar of Project 2025 is our Playbook, which will take the policy ideas expressed in Mandate for Leadership and transform them into an implementation plan for each agency to advocate to the incoming administration. What regulations and executive orders must be signed on Day One? Where are the greatest needs for more political appointees? How can we effectively use the mechanisms of government to face our most challenging problems? Our Playbook will put our movement to work answering questions like these.

In November 2016, American conservatives stood on the verge of greatness. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a triumph that offered the best chance to reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake. Many of the best accomplishments, though, happened only in the last year of the Trump administration, after our political appointees had finally figured out the policies and process of different agencies, and after the right personnel were finally in place.

The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them? That’s where Project 2025 comes in. We have two years, and one chance, to get this right.

This piece originally appeared in The American Conservative

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off bs

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TRAINING

Presidential Administration Academy

Preparing Political Appointees to be Ready on Day One

The Presidential Administration Academy is a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration. This academy provides aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.

APPLY TO ENROLL NOW

What You Will Learn

If you are a former political appointee or you’re exploring appointed service for the first time there is something for you to learn. The Presidential Administration Academy covers topics ranging from how to identify appointee positions for which you qualify to navigating the necessary background and security clearance processes to recognizing and addressing the dangers of the administrative state. Potential appointees will learn the intricacies of the federal budget process, how to work with the media, managing congressional and stakeholder relations, the federal procurement process, and dozens of other topics that provide the knowledge and skills you’ll need to be an effective presidential appointee.

Who Should Attend

If you’re interested in serving the next conservative President, you’ve come to the right place. Presidential Administration Academy participants are professionals at all career levels from across the country and in our nation’s capital who want to learn, engage, get credentialed, and BE PREPARED to serve the next President and the American people by advancing conservative policy at the federal level. Applicants ranging from new college grads to experienced professionals in all career fields are encouraged to apply. We also welcome those who have not previously served in an Administration as well as those who are former appointees.

Program Format

Currently, the Presidential Administration Academy is a fully online program where participants can take courses on-demand. As the presidential election approaches, additional online courses will be added and in-person training sessions will be available. Intense instruction tailored for high-level positions will be in-person.

The Presidential Administration Academy offers individual classes as well as full certificate programs. In order to receive a certificate of completion, all classes within the certificate program must be completed and each quiz must be passed.

Time Commitment

The majority of classes run 30 to 90 minutes. Since the program is largely offered online and on-demand, you can self-pace and cover the material at your convenience over time. Onsite, in-person programs will be intensive learning and run one to two days.

Faculty

You’ll learn from a distinguished roster of former political appointees from four previous presidential Administrations, as well as from policy experts, practitioners, and subject-matter experts representing over 65 partner organizations. The Presidential Administration Academy faculty is a veritable Who’s Who of the conservative movement.

Certificate Programs

PREPARED TO SERVE

Prepared to Serve introduces participants to federal appointed service by reviewing the processes, requirements, and preparations necessary to be a successful appointee candidate.

CONSERVATIVE GOVERNANCE 101

Conservative Governance 101 equips individuals with the institutional knowledge needed to navigate relationships, cut through the bureaucracy, and get to work on Day One as a political appointee.

CONSERVATIVE GOVERNANCE:

ADVANCING POLICY

Conservative Governance: Advancing Policy is designed to instruct future appointees on best practices for drafting and advancing policy. This program primes individuals to start implementing the President’s agenda on Day One.

Other Upcoming Certificate Programs

Conservative Governance: Managing Federal Personnel

The Administrative State and the Regulatory Process

Grants, Contracts, and the Federal Procurement Process

Want to be the first to know when certificate programs are released? Sign up for updates including content release dates and other exciting opportunities!

Frequently Asked Questions

When will I hear back after I apply?

Does the program cost?

Will I earn a certificate of completion that can be highlighted on my resume?

When will I receive my certificate of completion?

I’m already a participant in the Presidential Administration Academy but I can’t find my way back. Where do I go to log back in?

Still have questions? Send us an email at info@project2025.org.

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cornerstone pension plan roe amicus

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jul 29 2021 Brief amicus curiae of The American Cornerstone Institute and its founder Dr. Benjamin S. Carson filed.

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CPI meadows sinecure w  $1mill trump pac $, that he never turns loose of

Since the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, CPI has become a hub for insurrectionists and election deniers. The group made Meadows a senior partner and brought in Mitchell to lead its lead its “Election Integrity Network” network, organizing local GOP activists to engage in the election process based on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

So far, Mitchell has led partisan voter suppression and election subversion events in nine states with fellow Big Lie proponents and election fraud conspiracists like Meadows, DeSantis, Mike Gableman, Arizona Senate President and ALEC National Chair Karen Fann (R), and many others with the goal of subverting the electoral system.

CPI has also launched a number of spin-offs to further right-wing causes, including the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), America First Legal, Center for Renewing America, American Cornerstone Institute, American Moment, and the State Freedom Caucus Network.

american Cornerstone Institute: former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson is founder and chair of American Cornerstone Institute (ACI), where Carson hosts a podcast and creates YouTube videos, and which created the anti-woke "Little Patriots" platform "to teach children about our founding principles."

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3/20

i don’t want to’: Ben Carson sparks panic by refusing to reveal ‘plan’ for cruise ship patients

A Sunday interview with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben…

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april 2021

ben c unfortunate Cornerstone

Dr. Ben Carson has a new gig as the head of something called the American Cornerstone Institute. It seems that the outfit exists primarily as a funding vehicle for the good doctor himself, but that should hardly raise an eyebrow in today’s Washington, D.C.  The greater problem is that the operation’s poorly chosen name echoes an historically freighted pro-slavery declaration, issued on the eve of the Civil War.

The former presidential candidate, ex-secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and retired neurosurgeon’s not-for-profit think tank promises to “champion conservative solutions to the real problems our nation faces.” After four years of quiescence during the Trump administration, Carson now claims to have realized that values such as “compromise, compassion, and civility” have vanished from our political discourse, and he is determined to restore them.

The Cornerstone Institute is basically a one-man show. The website flogs Carson’s accomplishments, with multiple still photographs, video clips and pull-quotes touting his wisdom, insight, and principles, with no mention of anyone else. And of course, there are pitches for contributions. The Cornerstone Institute was only incorporated in February 2021, so it is too soon to obtain the IRS form with information on its top salaries, but it is a pretty safe bet that Carson is paying himself handsomely for what is essentially just a big exercise in self-promotion.

I don’t have any complaints about ex-Trump officials cashing in however they can. Carson wasn’t close enough to the president to write a tell-all book, he doesn’t seem to have the energetic people skills needed for lobbying, and he isn’t a lawyer. So that leaves think-tanking, with Carson evidently betting that he can do better on his own than he can working for one of the established right-wing outfits.

The actually disturbing thing about Carson’s endeavor is its name. “Cornerstone” seems obviously intended as a New Testament reference – although that is unmentioned on the website – but the word also has a much more poisonous association in American political history. It is odd that nobody appears to have warned Carson about it before he went public.

On March 21, 1861, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the recently formed Confederate States of American, delivered what has come to be known as the Cornerstone Address, explaining the reasons for secession from the Union. He minced no words, defending slavery as the guiding principle of the Confederacy:

Our new government is founded . . . its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition. . . . This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

The Cornerstone Address came just seventeen days after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, at a time when only Georgia and six other states had announced their secession from the Union. As a former Whig, previously a staunch Unionist, and a one-time friend of Lincoln, Stephens’s bold pronouncement did much to brace the Confederate cause. The firing on Fort Sumter was only three weeks later, leading to the secession of four more states.

The Civil War would have happened with or without Stephens’s Cornerstone speech, but it was still a defining moment in the struggle over disunion, leaving no doubt that the purpose of the rebellion was the perpetuation of slavery.

The Cornerstone Address continues to play an important role in our understanding of the Civil War. When contemporary apologists for the Confederacy argue that secession was driven by states’ rights, tariffs, or the so-called “Lost Cause,” it takes only one look at the Cornerstone Address to refute their claims. The Confederacy was premised on White supremacy. It armies were assembled and battles were fought in the commission of treason in defense of slavery.

It is likely that Carson was unaware of the Cornerstone Address when he named his foundation. Perhaps he never studied antebellum history during his pre-med and medical school education at Yale and the University of Michigan. Even so, there may be some words that cannot be reclaimed or repurposed. Nobody today would choose “Confederacy” as the name for a respectable political organization, or “Stasi” for a government office (even though that is merely a German abbreviation for “State Security Service”). “Cornerstone” is not quite so notorious, but its historical association with slavery is nonetheless profound.

Ironically, the American Cornerstone Institute has launched its “A More Perfect Union Project,” aimed at “educating our citizens in civics and history.” The project quotes Lincoln’s reverence for the Declaration of Independence as “the immortal emblem of humanity,” without noting that the Great Emancipator gave his life to destroy Alexander Stephens’s vision for the cornerstone of a government founded on racial subordination.

Trump's America: The return of Ben Carson | The NC Triad's altweekly

In a recent oped in the Washington Post, Carson bemoaned a “subtle shift” in the national conversation about race “from equality to equity.” This is “un-American,” he said, because it assumes that “all differential outcomes between groups are solely the result of that bigotry and oppression.” From there, Carson predictably inveighed against affirmative action hiring programs, campaigns to support Black-owned businesses, and even local “anti-poverty stipends” that target people of color.

If the McCarthyist condemnation of liberal causes seems at odds with the Cornerstone Institute’s commitment to restoring civility, well, you just have to figure that Carson didn’t really mean it that way. Our goal, he says, is to “heal the divide that has polarized our great nation,” and the nasty bit must have just slipped out by accident. It seems that you can take the man out of the Trump administration, but it is not so easy to take the Trump administration out of the man.

In that light, I have a suggestion for Dr. Carson, assuming that he is truly concerned about the un-American implications of subtle language. Nothing was ever more un-American than the Confederacy, so he ought to consider dropping Alexander Stephens’s “cornerstone” in favor of a quotation from Abraham Lincoln. How about the “New Birth of Freedom Institute”?

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thehill yikes clueless, book booster?

would we want the president elected in 2024 to jitterbug through the inaugural balls and arrive to the inauguration in a Ford Edsel? We certainly wouldn’t want to rely on the third quarter of the last century rather than the next quarter of this one.

But that’s just what the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” transition guide recommends, in reaching back to the government of the past instead of forward to the government of the future.

Its guide promises to “eliminate functions and programs that are duplicated across Cabinet departments or spread across multiple agencies.” That, in fact, was the strategy that former president Herbert Hoover followed in the two famous commissions he chaired during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. They worked then — but that was the last time a major reorganization effort did.

Since then, we’ve created six Cabinet departments, always with the promise to streamline government and boost its efficiency. They’ve unquestionably boosted the political prominence of key constituencies, from local schools (when the Department of Education was spun off the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1979) to veterans (with the elevation of the Veterans Administration to Cabinet status in 1989). But there’s not much evidence that these reorganizations made government work better or saved much money.

In fact, the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, which brought together 22 agencies into one department following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has created fresh frictions across the vast DHS empire. It has muddled accountability across the more than 100 committees and subcommittees on Capitol Hill that own a piece of the department’s oversight. Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff reports that, in one year, he had to figure out how to deal with more than 5,000 congressional briefings and 370 hearings. It’s so confusing that Congress has tried — and failed — to create basic ground rules for who ought to oversee which pieces of Homeland Security. That’s led to either too much oversight or, sometimes, to no oversight at all.

The problem — and here’s where the Heritage plan gets things wrong — is that we’re far past the point where we can reorganize our way out of important problems. There’s no problem that matters — no problem at all — that we can comfortably put into the box of any single government organization.

Consider the derailment of the Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio. Local police and fire units immediately responded to the scene. Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency soon arrived. Within hours, the federal Environmental Protection Agency joined teams from the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Railroad Administration, and FEMA. Public health experts from the Department of Health and Human Services added their expertise to toxicologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There’s no way that it’s possible to create a single agency, at any level of government, that could deal with all the issues that caused such devastation for the people of East Palestine. Government’s agencies don’t operate like a top-down vending machine, where taxpayers insert their money and wait for their services.

Rather, they’re more like different pieces of a very big orchestra, where we rely on different instruments to play different music, depending on what the situation demands. Eliminating programs spread across multiple agencies could leave the orchestra without cymbals just when we need an exclamation point in a governmental response.

Moreover, the next issue we face might very well need a different collection of instruments. We’ve learned that any reorganization created to solve one problem would only breed new problems for the next.

We should, of course, constantly be on the prowl for ways of eliminating duplication and overlap. Those opportunities, however, are far fewer than we typically presume, and they’re much harder to accomplish than we might hope. Government’s functions and programs are the product of congressional decisions. That means every single one of them has a friend on the Hill who’s reluctant to give up on something that, at one time or another, was hard-won.

What we need instead are bridgebuilders inside the bureaucracy: a new breed of agile, light-stepping government leaders who focus on the problems to be solved, who identify the organizations that can bring the assets needed to solve them, and who can conduct the orchestra to make the pieces fit seamlessly together.

we know how to do this. It’s the leadership that Admiral Thad Allen brought to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It’s the job that FEMA’s leaders used in south Florida, in concert with Florida’s state emergency managers, when Hurricane Ian struck last year. And it’s the effort that officials in the VA, HUD, nonprofits like the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and state and local officials across the country have brought to the campaign to reduce veterans homelessness, which is now down 11 percent since 2020.

And since we know how to do this, we need to do more of it. Our focus ought to be on building a new generation of bridgebuilders, who forge collaboration across the many barriers that too often separate government agencies — and who focus on producing outcomes for Americans rather than guarding the boundaries that separate government’s bureaucracies.

Donald F. Kettl is the co-author, with William D. Eggers, of the upcoming book ”Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.”

TAGS HERBERT HOOVER MICHAEL CHERTOFF

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rww

on the same day that the Trump-enhanced far right-wing majority on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Heritage Foundation announced that it is leading The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of Christian nationalist, pro-voter suppression, anti-LGBTQ-equality, anti-government, Big Lie-promoting, and Trump-cheerleading groups to “position the movement to take the reins of government” after what they expect will be a Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election. The project is being headed by former Trump administration official Paul Dans.

From the Heritage Foundation press release:

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is focused on two key fronts—preparing the next administration with conservative policy recommendations and the properly vetted and trained personnel needed to defeat the administrative state, implement those policies, and take back America.”

Notable among the groups represented on the project’s advisory board are religious-right legal giant Alliance Defending Freedom, whose “generational win” goals include banning abortion, reversing marriage equality, and further dismantling church-state separation; the American Legislative Exchange Council, which partners right-wing lawmakers with corporate funders; and the increasingly extremist Claremont Institute, home of Trumpist coup-promoting lawyer John Eastman.

Groups represented on the project’s advisory board so far:

Alliance Defending Freedom

America First Legal

American Accountability Foundation

American Center for Law and Justice

American Legislative Exchange Council

American Moment

American Principles Project

Center for Renewing America

Claremont Institute

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Concerned Women for America

Conservative Partnership Institute

Defense of Freedom Institute

Family Research Council

First Liberty Institute

Foundation for Government Accountability

FreedomWorks

Leadership Institute

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America

Texas Public Policy Foundation

Young America’s Foundation

Tags: Paul Dans Alliance Defending Freedom American Accountability Foundation American Center for Law and Justice American Legislative Exchange Council American Moment American Principles Project Center for Renewing America Claremont Institute Competitive Enterprise Institute Concerned Women for America Conservative Partnership Institute Defense of Freedom Institute Family Research Council First Liberty Institute Foundation for Government Accountability Freedom Works FreedomWorks Heritage Foundation Leadership Institute Susan B. Anthony List Texas Public Policy Foundation Young America's Foundation

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American Accountability Foundation

alabama policy institute

alliance defending freedom

American Center for Law and Justice

american compass

American Cornerstone Institute

The American Conservative

American Council of Trustees and Alumni

American Family Association

America First Legal

American Juris Link

American Legislative Exchange Council

american main street initiative

american moment

American principles project

American Family Project

California Family Council

Center for Equal Oppportunity

center for family and human rights

Center for Immigration Studies

center for renewing america

The Claremont Institute

Coalition for a Prosperous America

competitive enterprise institute

concerned women of america

conservative partnership institute

defense of freedom institute

ethics and public policy center

family policy alliance

family research council

Frederick Douglass Foundation

first liberty

foundation for defense of democracies

Foundation for Government Accountability

Forge Leadership Network

freedom works

The Heartland Institute

the heritage foundation

hillsdale college

Honest Election Project

Independent Women's Forum

Institute for Education Reform

Institute for energy research

Institute for the American Worker

institute for womens health

intercollegiate studies institute

james madison institute

keystone policy

leadership institute

Liberty University

Media Research Center

Mississippi Center for Public Policy

Moms for Liberty

national association of scholars

national center for public policy research

Project 21

Pacific Research Institute

patrick henry college

Personnel Policy Operations

Public Interest Legal Foundation

recovery for america now foundation

Susan B Anthony pro-life America

texas public policy foundation

Teneo Network

Young Americas Foundation

1792 Exchange

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WEAPONIZE OMB, UNITARY?

mma 7 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/center-renewing-america-preparing-next-republican-administration-govern

over the last several years, the United States has seen a dramatic rise in Christian nationalism, a loosely defined ideology that fuses patriarchy, xenophobia, and pretextual economic populism with an overtly biblical foundation and a deep distrust of democracy. This phenomenon has manifested in many ways, but one of the organizations driving the trend is a far-right think tank called the Center for Renewing America.

Several former Trump administration officials are associated with the group, including its president, Russ Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Vought led the administration’s efforts to demonize critical race theory, including removing anti-racism training from federal agencies. He is a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room: Pandemic and on Fox News. His organization is one of several far-right groups under the umbrella of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose top officials include former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and right-wing legal activist Cleta Mitchell. Both Meadows and Mitchell were intimately involved in Trump’s attempted insurrection, as were at least 18 other people associated with CPI, including CRA senior fellow Kash Patel,  former Trump Pentagon official.

Perhaps the most significant of Trump’s top coup allies is CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark, a former environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice who was hired by the think tank in June. About three weeks later, Clark was targeted in a raid by federal law enforcement. Little is publicly known about the investigation into Clark, but it may revolve around his proposal “to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in that key swing state,” according to The New York Times.

CRA works on an array of disparate, seemingly unrelated issues. In addition to CRA-linked individuals’ considerable efforts to justify the January 6 insurrection, the organization has sown doubt about future “election integrity.” Vought has remained at the heart of the anti-critical race theory push even after he left OMB. He is virulently anti-trans, calling trans identity a “contagion” in a 2021 podcast, and CRA has supported anti-trans legislation and opposed laws that would ban discrimination based on sexual and gender identity. Senior fellow and immigration restrictionist Ken Cuccinelli and Vought successfully lobbied counties in Texas to declare that they were under “invasion” by migrants. CRA is also an active participant in the conservative legal community, as exemplified by its senior fellow Mark Paoletta, who prepared Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas for their confirmation hearings. Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Vought celebrated Paoletta’s central role in the court’s rightward shift.

What unites these issues is what Vought refers to as a “biblical worldview,” a concept that has long been prevalent on the religious right and refers to an all-encompassing ideology derived from a conservative interpretation of the Bible. Although Vought eschews the aesthetics of some of the street-fighting Christian fascists who terrorized Pride events in June, he overtly believes the United States should be a Christian nation. CRA’s mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” Vought is signatory to a national conservative statement affirming that “the Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities.” Most revealingly, in 2021 Vought wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek with the headline: “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?'

Russ Vought: is there anything actually wrong with Christian nationalism

Vought argues that, no, there’s nothing wrong with Christian nationalism, so long as it’s defined in a circumscribed, non-threatening way.

“Once stripped of its superimposed liberal scar tissue, ‘Christian nationalism’ is actually a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country's Judeo-Christian heritage and making public policy decisions that are best for this country,” Vought writes.

This is a fig leaf. Christian nationalism as it actually operates — sometimes taking the modifier “white” at the beginning — endorses the racist “great replacement theory,” which posits that global elites are fueling non-white immigration to the United States to “replace” white people. The conspiracy theory holds that this upending of power relations will be done through demographic changes, and at the ballot box — which helps to explain CRA’s obsession with “secure borders” and “election integrity.”

For Vought, CRA’s issues of focus are not discrete policy battles. As he made clear recently on a right-wing podcast, he believes the country is in a Manichean war between the forces of good and evil. The battleground is so-called cultural issues, which, properly understood, are liberation movements to end racist and patriarchal oppression, but for Vought they must be opposed at every step of the way.

“These are the issues that if we don’t fight on we lose our civilization,” Vought said. “Critical race theory has to be front and center. Transgender contagion in our schools, impacting our daughters across the country, needs to be a front and center issue."

moment of truth pod]

vought wants to create an “army” of activists ready and waiting to serve in government who can be trusted to carry out a Christian nationalist agenda. And as former director of OMB, Vought has a unique insight into how to implement a whole-of-government approach to enacting a presidential directive, which is what he did with Trump’s initiative against so-called “critical race theory.”

“When the president says, ‘I want to not fund critical race theory through the federal government,’ that’s involving all of the agencies, and we have to then make sure that the president’s agenda is executed,” Vought said in the same interview [aud]

more broadly, Vought lamented that not enough religious right activists “operate on the basis of worldview.” As a result, less dogmatic “elite Christians” have adopted ideologies that “lack clarity at best” and are “damaging at worst.” Vought wants hardliners in the church and in the public sphere. In the context of running the government, that means replacing career staff with “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies.”

That idea aligns with the upcoming plans from the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who, along with Vought and CRA, spearheaded the broader backlash against critical race theory. As Rufo said in a recent interview:

As we approach 2024, I will be publishing a policy paper on “eliminating left-wing ideologies in the federal government,” using the power of the presidency to fundamentally reshape the bureaucracy with a six-part program targeting budget, content, personnel, grantmaking, and oversight. The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. We could easily wipe out a significant portion of the infrastructure for the left-wing ideologies within the federal bureaucracy and within the network of federal grantees and contractors, which would shift American politics in the right direction.

These plans are not theoretical. CRA is one of many hard-right organizations involved in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of zealots determined to avoid some of the shortcomings and incompetencies of the Trump administration. (Vought is a former vice president of the organization’s grassroot and advocacy arm, Heritage Action for America.)

Vought has made no secret of what he would do if given the opportunity to serve as a Cabinet-level appointee in a Republican administration. He would attempt to eliminate or drastically curtail the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

“We got to get after these agencies we talked about before, the administrative state, big money, EPA, CDC, [and] NIH that's weaponized against the American people and we need to put them on the chopping block before we get to some other things down the road,” Vought said on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

A subsequent Supreme Court decision that drastically limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions would likely serve as a template for Vought to dismantle broad swaths of the executive branch’s regulatory authority.

Vought’s antagonism toward the regulatory state extends to aspects of federal law enforcement, but only when those agencies are investigating conservatives for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk asked Vought about the Department of Justice’s supposed persecution of conservatives, including his colleague Jeffrey Clark, and how he thought it should be addressed.  The long-term plan is to structurally change it,” Vought said. “We've got to deconstruct the state that is weaponized against the American people.”

Like other organizations that have sprung up to harness Trumpism in the last several years, CRA’s broad influence remains limited. But its success in promoting the backlash against critical race theory shows it shouldn’t be underestimated, even though that topic may not have had the electoral influence Vought and others have claimed. What’s undeniable is that Vought and his fellow travelers have sweeping ambitions and the zeal of a true believer. They are telling us exactly what they are going to do if they return to power at the federal level, and it is a chilling vision of theocracy and repression.

vid Citation From the June 27, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's The Charlie Kirk Show

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Project 2025 | Presidential Transition Project

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YouTube

https://www.youtube.com › watch

13:36

Watch more episodes of The Kevin Roberts Show: https://bit.ly/3uCKM8BListen here...Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/36iuBoS (leave us a 5 ...

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Missing: Transition ‎| Must include: Transition

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