Washington (AP) Donald Trump, a past and possibly future president, praised Project 2025 as a blueprint for what our movement would accomplish if it gets another chance to win the presidency.
Trump reversed course throughout the 2024 campaign, turning the plan for a hard-right swing in America into a liability. He denied having any knowledge of the absurd and appalling proposals that his first-term allies and aides had written.
Following his election as the 47th president on November 5, Trump is now appointing important figures to his second administration in the intricate endeavor he briefly avoided. Notably, Trump appointed immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as deputy head of policy, former immigration chief Tom Homan as border czar, and Russell Vought for a comeback as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
These actions have intensified Democratic criticism, which warns that Trump’s win gives the government to movement conservatives who have spent years imagining ways to consolidate control in the West Wing and impose a radical rightward shift on American society and governance.
According to Trump and his supporters, he was given the mandate to restructure Washington. However, they insist that the details belong to him alone.
In a statement, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that President Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025. Every member of President Trump’s Cabinet, whether appointed or nominated, is fully dedicated to his agenda rather than that of other parties.
Here are some predictions for Trump’s second term based on his picks.
As head of the budget, Vought sees a broad, influential position
The director of the Office of Management and Budget, a position Vought previously held under Trump and which needs Senate confirmation, creates the president’s proposed budget and is often in charge of carrying out the administration’s agenda throughout all agencies.
Although the position has a lot of influence, Vought said clearly in his Project 2025 chapter on presidential authority that he wants the position to have more direct authority.
According to Vought, the Director must see his position as the most accurate and thorough representation of the President’s thoughts. He wrote that the OMB should be involved in every facet of the White House policy process and should have the authority to override the bureaucracy of implementing agencies because it is the president’s air traffic control system.
Trump impliedly supported forceful action when he named Vought, but he did not elaborate. The president-elect said that Vought will help restore budgetary sanity and that he is well capable of dismantling the Deep State, which is Trump’s catch-all for federal bureaucracy.
Vought enjoyed the possible tension when he said in June on former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast: “We’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation.”
Project 2025 and Trump’s campaign platforms both aim to further consolidate federal power in the presidency. Trump’s plans to significantly increase the president’s authority over federal employees and government funds, along with the president-elect’s appointment of venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy and megabillionaire Elon Musk to head a Department of Government Efficiency, make Vought’s vision particularly remarkable.
Tens of thousands of federal civil service employees who have job protection due to administration changes were reclassified as political appointees during Trump’s first term in an attempt to restructure the federal civil service and make it simpler to fire them and replace them with loyalists. Only about 4,000 of the approximately 2 million federal employees are political appointees at the moment. Trump’s amendments were revoked by President Joe Biden. They can now be reinstated by Trump.
Trump’s broad efficiency goals for Musk and Ramaswamy, however, have the potential to revive the long-defunct constitutional idea that the president, not Congress, is the true gatekeeper of federal spending. Trump supported the so-called impoundment theory in Agenda 47, which maintains that when appropriations bills are passed by lawmakers, they only establish a spending cap rather than a floor. According to the argument, the president has the power to simply decide not to spend money on anything that he believes is superfluous.
Vought avoided discussing impoundment in his chapter on Project 2025. However, he said, the president ought to employ every resource at his disposal to suggest and enforce fiscal restraint on the federal government. Anything less than that would be a complete failure.
Trump’s decision attracted criticism right away.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat and the outgoing chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that Russ Vought is a far-right ideologue who has attempted to violate the law in order to give President Trump unilateral authority that he does not have to override the spending decisions of Congress. She also stated that Vought has and will continue to fight to give Trump the power to summarily fire tens of thousands of civil servants.
Leading Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, stated that Vought seeks to destroy the skilled federal workforce at the expense of Americans who rely on everything from Social Security benefits to Veterans health care.
They claimed that the goal is pain itself.
Project 2025 overlaps were consistently obscured by Trump’s protests. They both seek to reinstate Trump’s immigration restrictions. For instance, Project 2025 consists of a long list of specific recommendations for several U.S. immigration laws, executive branch regulations, and international agreements aimed at lowering the number of refugees, work visa holders, and asylum seekers.
One of Trump’s most enduring advisors, Miller is the creator of his immigration policies, which include his pledge to establish the biggest deportation army in American history. Miller would continue to be a member of Trump’s inner circle in the West Wing in his role as deputy policy chief, which is not subject to Senate confirmation.
Miller stated during Trump’s October 27 event in Madison Square Garden that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
Before Miller requested that the name be taken down due to unfavorable publicity, America First Legal—his group established as an ideological opposition to the American Civil Liberties Union—was identified as an advisory group to Project 2025.
During Trump’s first term as president, Homan, a contributor to Project 2025, served as the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and was instrumental in the implementation of what became known as Trump’s family separation policy.
Homan stated earlier this year that no one was off the table in his preview of Trump 2.0. You had better watch your back if you’re here illegally.
Trump’s choice to head the CIA, John Ratcliffe, was once one of his national intelligence directors. He contributes to Project 2025. Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe’s chief of staff during the first Trump administration, wrote the chapter on U.S. intelligence.
The intelligence establishment is too cautious, Carmack said, echoing Ratcliffe’s and Trump’s stance. Ratcliffe is aggressive toward China, just like the chapter that Carmack is credited with writing. Beijing is shown as an untrustworthy enemy of the United States throughout the Project 2025 manifesto.
The senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, drafted the FCC chapter for Project 2025 and was appointed chair by Trump. According to Carr, the chairman of the FCC has considerable power that is not distributed among the other FCC members. He demanded that the FCC confront the dangers to individual liberty posed by businesses abusing their market dominance, particularly Big Tech and its efforts to exclude a range of political opinions from the virtual town square.
In addition to empowering users to select their own content filters and fact checkers, if any, he demanded more transparency regulations for social media sites like Facebook and YouTube.
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