Digging Deep into Project 2025 - (a multi-part Series)

Part One: I Read the Damn Thing So You Don’t Have To.

In the coming days I’ll dig deep into the specifics of a handbook for seizing power and ruling the United States in an authoritarian manner. 

Word about Project 2025 has finally come into public consciousness, and there are bullet lists of things to be (at a minimum) concerned about popping up all over. I promise more detail. 

I’ve already seen claims on social media that are untrue or exaggerations of what is proposed. There are more than enough untruths floating around these days; adding to them serves no useful purpose.

The full name of the initiative is “The 2025 Presidential Transition Project”  It’s roughly 900 pages divided into 30 chapters, and chock full of ideas to remake the country within the parameters of the Christian Nationalist movement. 

Although Trump’s name appears 312 times in the handbook, it’s important to understand these proposals could be used by any would be authoritarian who happened to come into power.

This isn’t about some whacky far right fringe; Project 2025 is mainstream material for today’s Republicans.

The Heritage Foundation –which has undertaken creating conservative wish lists dating back to the end of the Carter administration– facilitated Project 2025, and says more than 100 organizations and 400+ scholars contributed to the document. 

What makes Project 2025 unique is the specificity of its guidance, down to drafts of executive orders designed to side-step checks and balances. Its playbook provides step-by-step instructions for the first 180 days of an incoming Trump administration.

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Heritage makes some dubious claims about past efforts to guide governance when conservatives are in power, like Trump’s first crack at running the government having adopted more than two thirds of its suggestions during its first year in office.

Underlying this year's proposals is an understanding of just how scatterbrained and inefficient the executive branch of government was during the forty fifth president’s tenure. They don’t dare say it was Trump’s fault for only working three hours a day or that the people he appointed were incompetent; instead the Deep State and recalcitrant federal bureaucrats were to blame.

This time around, the right wing wants it done right, even if they have to work around Dear Leader. In March, Project Director Paul Dans claimed the Project had a thousand people divided into 30 teams crafting a document. 

They were being directed by Russ Voight, also tasked by the Trump campaign to co-lead the GOP 2024 Platform Committee. 

You might have heard that Donald Trump has disassociated himself from Project 2025. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pollsters have measured public distaste for much of what’s proposed; hence the excuses and denials. 

Eighty one percent of Project 2025’s primary authors had formal roles in the first Trump administration.Trump's own Make America Great Again, Inc. super PAC is running ads highlighting Project 2025.

The presidential candidate does have something called Agenda 47 on his campaign website; its stated objectives are essentially the same as Project 2025, just sans the pointy headed language.

At this point I want to remind readers that assertions coming from MAGA-land are often confessions. It’s all part of their everyday gaslighting. 

The Project has developed a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically as early as inauguration day under the Insurrection Act. The Washington Post has been privy to transcription of internal discussions about such deployments identifying it as an immediate priority for an incoming Trump administration.

Not included in the Project 2025 document are specifics about individuals and groups likely to be targeted by civilian agencies. Trump’s probable pick for Attorney General, Mike Davis, isn’t being shy about this topic, as he elaborated during a recent interview:

Via People Magazine:

• First, he said, he would fire "a lot of people in the executive branch," which he called the "deep state." Then, "We're gonna indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden," he continued.

• "We're gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing — anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We're gonna put kids in cages. It's gonna be glorious," he said of his third objective.

• Fourth: "We're gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo."

• "And list number five: I'm gonna recommend a lot of pardons," Davis concluded. "Every January 6th defendant is gonna get a pardon, especially my hero horn man."

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Now I’ll get into specifics, written about in the order in which they appear.

Section One: Taking the Reins of Government.

This introduction gives the rationale for Project 2025, namely that they’re trying to save the nation from going to hell in a handbasket.

• Just two years after the death of the last surviving Constitutional Convention delegate, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln warned that the greatest threat to America would come not from without, but from within. 

• This is evident today: Whether it be mask and vaccine mandates, school and business closures, efforts to keep Americans from driving gas cars or using gas stoves, or efforts to defund the police, indoctrinate schoolchildren, alter beloved books, abridge free speech, undermine the colorblind ideal, or deny the biological reality that there are only two sexes, the Left’s steady stream of insanity appears to be never-ending. 

• The next Administration must stand up for American ideals, American families, and American culture—all things in which, thankfully, most Americans still believe.

The White House Office. By Rick Dearborn* This 42 page section is useful in that it lays out all the departments and policy councils within the president’s direct purview. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of them, and the document stresses the need for a chief executive to delegate policy tasks to subordinates. 

I doubt whether the intended recipient of that wisdom will follow that pointer.

There are job descriptions, primarily based on historical precedent. Loyalty to the President’s agenda is of paramount importance.

*Rick Dearborn was Trump’s transition coordinator and served as deputy chief of staff for policy. He was one of two officials ordered by the White House to defy congressional subpoenas during the impeachment hearings on the president’s role in Ukraine.  

Executive Office of the President of the United States. By By Russ Vought*   

This is where the rubber meets the road, the departments where oversight and enforcement of the federal government emanates.

The most important of these departments is the Office of Management and Budget. The document refers to this office as comparable to an airport’s flight control tower.

The difference in how OMB operated between the Trump and Biden administrations, starts with the shifting of oversight responsibilities from political appointees to career civil servants. Prior to the term of the forty-fifth president, OMB was thought of as a resource. Under Trump this role shifted to being a tool to enforce directives on other agencies.

OMB will play a critical role in a Trump promise to use a revival of impoundment. This, in his interpretation, would give him the power to effectively cancel any federal program — or even an entire agency — by refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress. 

Via Judd Legum at Popular Information:

• The last president to claim the authority to impound Congressionally-appropriated funds was former President Richard Nixon. In the 1970s, Nixon unilaterally canceled billions in spending "for highways, water pollution, environmental assistance, drug rehabilitation, public housing, and disaster relief." Nixon's impoundment of Congressionally-appropriated funds was challenged frequently — and often successfully — in court.

• But, to remove any doubt, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which prohibits the president from impounding funds without Congressional approval. The Impoundment Control Act is consistent with the Justice Department’s views of presidential impoundment under Nixon and former President Ronald Reagan. In 1969, then-Assistant Attorney General (and future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) William Rehnquist wrote that "the suggestion that the President has a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds" is "supported by neither reason nor precedent." In 1988, then-Assistant Attorney General Charles Cooper declared that "[t]here is no textual source in the Constitution for any inherent authority to impound." Cooper noted the president is obligated to "faithfully execute" the law, not ignore it. 

Trump has decided that the 1974 law is unconstitutional, has plans to challenge it in court, and has pledged to use impoundment starting on day one of his administration.

In practical terms, such an interpretation of impoundment would mean the president can avoid congressional mayhem over eliminating the Department of Education by simply decreeing its entire budget impounded.

*The author of this section was Trump’s director of the Office of Budget and Management. The day before Trump left office, Vought wrote a letter to Congress claiming the Impoundment Control Act "is an albatross around a President's neck, disincentivizing the prudent stewardship of taxpayer money and inviting detractors in Congress to second-guess complex program implementation decisions."   

More details…

The National Economic Council will be expected to develop a well-defined economic policy agenda to promote innovation as a foundation for economic growth and the creation of an environment that fosters economic growth through tax reform and the elimination of regulatory and procedural barriers.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative will lead the charge against China through rebalancing and refocusing international trading relationships “in favor of democratic nations that embrace free, fair, and open trade principles built on market-driven economies.”

Read between the lines here; past experience shows that a Trump administration will cut off its nose to spite its face when it comes to tariffs on Chinese goods. Other nations will have to vie for the administration’s favor in seeking trade agreements.

The Council of Economic Advisers needs to be more responsive to the president’s wishes, a task that can be accomplished by changing the timing and methods for hiring economic advisors.

The National Space Council’s responsibility for ensuring space considerations are part of the policy making process will include “transitioning International Space Station operations to multiple, privately owned space platforms; and (most important) accelerating the acquisition and fielding of national security space capabilities in response to an increasingly aggressive China.”

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be used for “unwinding policies and procedures that are used to advance radical gender, racial, and equity initiatives under the banner of science. Similarly, the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding. As with other federal departments and agencies, the Biden Administration’s leveraging of the federal government’s resources to further the woke agenda should be reversed and scrubbed from all policy manuals, guidance documents, and agendas, and scientific excellence and innovation should be restored as the OSTP’s top priority.”

The Council on Environmental Quality would see to it that the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon (because facts are scary) and Office of Domestic Climate Policy are shut down. Additionally it would be charged with “fighting for sound energy and environment policies both domestically and internationally.” (DRILL, BABY, DRILL!) 

The Office of National Drug Control Policy would be managed by “political appointees who are committed to the Administration’s agenda and not acquiesce to management by political or career military personnel who oversaw the prior Administration’s ONDCP.” Funding for “woke nonprofits with leftist policy agendas” would be eliminated.

The Gender Policy Council would be quickly disbanded, eliminating “central promotion of abortion (“health services”); comprehensive sexuality education (“education”); and the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet “gender affirming care” and “sex-change” surgeries on minors.”

Office of the Vice President - “To the extent that he or she desires, a Vice President can have a direct role in shaping Administration policy. A Vice President who regularly attends meetings and disperses staff across the interagency and policy councils is a Vice President whose voice will be heard.” (And probably won’t get hung.)

Tomorrow: What’s expected of government agencies.

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Wednesday News to Peruse

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Upping the Ante on Thomas - Justice Clarence Thomas is about to go through some things. By Jay Kuo

• “We do not make this request lightly,” Whitehouse and Wyden said in a statement. “The evidence assembled thus far plainly suggests that Justice Thomas has committed numerous willful violations of federal ethics and false-statement laws and raises significant questions about whether he and his wealthy benefactors have complied with their federal tax obligations.”

• The possible violation of tax laws gets around the question that the Supreme Court opened up in one of its recent opinions, which limits the ability of federal law enforcement to charge local and state officials with corruption for accepting gifts after the fact. Even if a corrupt right wing of the Court could find a way to let its brethren off the hook for accepting gifts that sure look like bribes, it will be harder for Thomas to shake the possible violations of tax laws.

• Moreover, in their letter to Attorney General Garland, the senators not only made this more explicit, but threw down the gauntlet to both Thomas and his corrupt enablers: 

• “Supreme Court justices are properly expected to obey laws designed to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety and to comply with the federal tax code. We therefore request that you appoint a Special Counsel authorized to investigate potential criminal violations by Justice Thomas under the disclosure, false statement, and tax laws; pursue leads of related criminal violations by donors, lenders, and intermediate corporate entities; and determine whether any such loans and gifts were provided pursuant to a coordinated enterprise or plan.”

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Poll finds majority of San Diego, Imperial County officeholders experienced threats by Amita Sharma at KPBS

• Two-thirds of officeholders in San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties have received threats, according to the second phase of a University of San Diego survey on harassment of elected officials.

• The initial findings showed no significant difference in race or party affiliation. But findings did show a huge gender gap.

• Eight percent of men reported weekly intimidation, compared to 31% of women. Thirty-eight percent of men and 69% of women said they experienced hostility monthly. A social media analysis also showed local women politicians received up to four times as many aggressive replies as their male counterparts.

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Trump airs list of false grievances at Florida rally: ‘We don’t eat bacon any more’ via The Guardian

• Otherwise, it was a standard Trump stump speech, full of evidence-free claims that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent; baseless accusations that overseas nations were sending to the US “most of their prisoners”; and a laughable assertion that a gathering of supporters numbering in the hundreds was really a crowd of 45,000.

• It also touched on the surreal. Biden, he insisted, had raised the price of bacon four-fold.

• “We don’t eat bacon any more,” Trump said.

• Electric cars, he said, “cheated” the US public because drivers had to stop for three hours to recharge their vehicles after every 45 minutes of driving. And, in an echo of one of the more bizarre debate exchanges with Biden over who was the better golfer, he challenged his White House successor to 18 holes over the Doral course while granting a 10-stroke concession.