As a former and potentially future president, Donald Trump hailed what would become Project 2025 as a roadmap for “exactly what our movement is going to do” with another crack at the White House.
As the plan for a hard right turn in America became a liability during the 2024 election campaign, Trump drew his limits. He denied knowing anything about the “ridiculous and abysmal” plans which were partly written by his first-term aides and allies.
Now, after the election of the 47th president on Nov. 5, Trump is stocking his second administration with key players in the detailed effort he temporarily avoided. Most notably, Trump tapped Russell Vought for an encore as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tom Homan, his former immigration chief, as ‘border czar’. and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as deputy policy leader.
Those moves have fueled criticism from Democrats who warn that Trump’s election is handing the reins of government to conservatives who have spent years envisioning how to consolidate power in the West Wing and impose a rightward shift in government and society. of the USA.
Trump and his aides argue that he won the mandate to overhaul Washington. But they claim that the specifics are his alone.
“President Trump has never had anything to do with Project 2025,” Trump spokeswoman Caroline Levitt said in a statement. “All of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees and appointments are wholeheartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”
Here’s a look at what some of Trump’s choices portend for his second term.
As budget chief, Vought envisions a sweeping, powerful perch
The director of the Office of Management and Budget, a role previously held under Trump that requires Senate confirmation, prepares the president’s proposed budget and is generally responsible for implementing the administration’s agenda across all agencies.
The job is influential, but Vought has made it clear as author of a Project 2025 chapter on presidential power that he wants the position to wield more direct power.
“The Director must see his work as the best, most comprehensive approach to the mind of the President,” Vought wrote. The OMB, he wrote, “is the President’s air traffic control system” and should be “involved in all aspects of the White House policy process,” making it “powerful enough to bypass the bureaucracies of implementing agencies.”
Trump did not go into such detail when he named Vought, but he implicitly supported the offensive. Vought, the president-elect said, “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State” — Trump’s spearhead of the federal bureaucracy — and would help “restore fiscal sanity.”
In June, speaking on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Vought relished the potential tension: “We’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation.”
Vought could help Musk and Trump reshape the role and scope of government
The strategy of further concentrating federal power in the presidency permeates the proposals of Project 2025 and the Trump campaign. Vought’s vision is especially striking when combined with Trump’s proposals to dramatically expand the president’s control over federal workers and the government purse — ideas intertwined with president-elect mega-billionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Trump in his first term sought to overhaul the federal civil service by reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers — who have job protections through administration changes — as political appointees, making it easier to fire them and replace them with loyalists. Currently, only about 4,000 of the approximately 2 million federal government workers are political appointees. President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s changes. Trump can now bring them back.
Meanwhile, Trump’s sweeping “efficiency” orders of Musk and Ramaswamy could activate an old, dormant constitutional theory that the president — not Congress — is the real gatekeeper of federal spending. In his “Agenda 47,” Trump advocated so-called “sequestration,” which argues that when lawmakers pass appropriations bills, they simply set a spending cap, not a floor. The president, the theory goes, can simply decide not to spend money on anything he deems unnecessary.
Vought was hesitant to commit to the Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote, “The President should use every tool possible to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything less would be an abject failure.”
Trump’s choice immediately caused a backlash.
“Russ Vought is a far-right ideologue who tried to break the law to give President Trump the unilateral power he lacks to override Congress’s spending decisions (and) he has and will fight again to give Trump the ability to dismiss summarily. tens of thousands of public employees,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, D-Washington, D-D., and the outgoing Senate Appropriations Chair.
Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said Vought wants to “dismantle the skilled federal workforce” at the expense of Americans who depend on everything, from Veterans Health Care to Social Security Benefits.
“Pain itself is the agenda,” they said.
Homan and Miller Reflect on Trump and Project 2025 Immigration Overlap
Trump’s protests about Project 2025 have always covered overlaps in the two agendas. Both want to reimpose Trump-era immigration limits. Project 2025 includes a number of detailed proposals for various US immigration statutes, executive branch rules and agreements with other countries — reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients and asylum seekers, for example.
Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving advisers and an architect of his ideas on immigration, including his promise of the largest deportation force in US history. As deputy policy chief, who is not subject to Senate confirmation, Miller will remain in Trump’s inner circle in the West Wing.
“America is for Americans and for Americans only,” Miller said at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27.
America First Legal, Miller’s organization founded as an ideological opponent of the American Civil Liberties Union, was listed as an advisory group on Project 2025 until Miller requested that the name be removed due to negative attention.
Homan, a named Project 2025 fellow, was acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first presidency, playing a key role in what became known as Trump’s “family separation policy.”
Previewing Trump 2.0 earlier this year, Homan said, “No one is off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better look over your shoulder.”
Project 2025 contributors are intended to be heads of the CIA and Federal Communications
John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, was previously one of Trump’s national intelligence directors. He is a contributor to Project 2025. The document’s chapter on US intelligence was written by Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe’s chief of staff in the first Trump administration.
Mirroring the approach of Ratcliffe and Trump, Carmack said the intelligence establishment was being too cautious. Ratcliffe, like the chapter attributed to Carmack, is hawkish on China. Throughout the Project 2025 document, Beijing is framed as an adversary of the US that cannot be trusted.
Brendan Carr, the top Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025 and is now Trump’s pick to chair the commission. Carr wrote that the FCC chairman “is vested with significant authority that is not shared” with other members of the FCC. He called on the FCC to address “threats to individual liberty posed by companies abusing dominant market positions,” specifically “Big Tech and its efforts to banish dissenting political views from the digital town square.”
It called for stricter transparency rules for social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube and to “allow consumers to choose their own content filters and content controls, if any.”
Carr and Ratcliffe would require Senate confirmation for their positions.
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