As a former president and likely future president, Donald Trump celebrates what will become Project 2025 as a roadmap for “what exactly our movement will do” with another crack at the White House.
EQUAL blueprint as right turns in America have become a liability in the 2024 campaign, Trump has changed his face. He denied knowing anything about the “ridiculous and appalling” plans written by aides and allies during his first term.
Now, after being elected the 47th president on November 5, Trump is filling his second administration with key players in the detailed effort he temporarily shunned. Most notably, Trump exploited it Russell Vought for an encore as director of the Office of Management and Budget; Tom Homan, his former immigration director, as “border tsar;” and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as Deputy head of policy department.
Those moves have increased criticism from Democrats, who warn that Trump’s election hands control of the government to movement conservatives who have spent years envisions how to centralize power in the West Wing and impose a radical right-wing shift in American government and society.
Trump and his aides insist that he has earned the mandate to reform Washington. But they still maintain the specifics as their own.
“President Trump has never had anything to do with Project 2025,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “All of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees and appointees are wholeheartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”
Here’s a look at what some of Trump’s picks portend for his second term as president.
As budget director, Vought envisioned a strong and far-reaching perch
Director of the Office of Management and Budget, a role previously held under Trump and requiring Senate confirmation, prepares the president’s proposed budget and has overall responsibility for implementing the program. government agenda among agencies.
The job is influential, but Vought has made it clear as author of the Project 2025 chapter on presidential power that he wants the position to hold more direct power.
“The director must view his work as the closest, most comprehensive representation of the President’s mind,” Vought wrote. OMB, he wrote, “is the President’s air traffic control system” and must “engage in all aspects of the White House policy process,” becoming “powerful enough to overcome the bureaucracy of enforcement agencies”.
Trump did not go into such detail when naming Vought but implicitly endorsed the act of aggression. The president-elect said Mr. Vought “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State” – Trump’s trap for the federal bureaucracy – and will help “restore financial sanity.”
In June, speaking on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Vought appreciated the potential tension: “We’re not going to save our country without a little bit of confrontation ”.
Supposedly it could help Musk and Trump rework the role and scope of government
The strategy of further centralizing federal power in the presidency permeates Project 2025 and Trump’s campaign proposals. Vought’s vision is especially impressive when combined with Trump’s proposals to dramatically expand presidential control over federal workers and the government purse strings — ideas that are intertwined with the president’s election. tapped billionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to Head of the “Government Effectiveness Management Department”.
Trump in his first term sought to reorganize the federal civil service by reclassifying tens of thousands of federal workers — whose jobs were protected through changes in the administration — as employees. political appointments, making them easy to fire and replace with loyalists. Currently, only about 4,000 of the federal government’s roughly 2 million workers are political appointees. President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s changes. Trump can now reinstate them.
Meanwhile, Musk and Ramaswamy’s sweeping “efficiency” mandates from Trump could revive an old, defunct constitutional theory that the president — not Congress — is the gatekeeper actually for federal spending. In his “Agenda 47,” Trump has espoused so-called “blocking,” arguing that when lawmakers pass appropriations bills, they are simply placing a cap on spending. target, not the floor. In theory, the president could decide not to spend money on anything he considers unnecessary.
Vought did not commit to detention in its Project 2025 chapter. However, he wrote, “The President should use every tool possible to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute an abject failure.”
Trump’s choice immediately caused a backlash.
“Russ Vought is a far-right ideologue who attempted to violate the law to give President Trump unilateral authority he did not have over the spending decisions of Congress (and) who has and will again fought to give Trump the ability to fire him immediately. tens of thousands of public employees,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat and the outgoing chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
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 “eliminate the federal workforce.” state” disadvantages Americans who rely on everything from veterans’ health care to Social Security benefits.
“Pain itself is the agenda,” they say.
Homan and Miller reflect on the immigration overlap between Trump and Project 2025
Trump’s objections to Project 2025 have always been ignored overlap in the two agendas. Both want to reimpose Trump-era immigration limits. Project 2025 includes a series of detailed proposals on various US immigration laws, executive branch rules and agreements with other countries – such as reducing the number of refugees, accept work visas and asylum seekers.
Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving advisers and architects on his immigration ideas, including the promise of the largest deportation force in US history. As deputy policy director, who does not have to be confirmed by the Senate, Miller will remain within Trump’s West Wing inner circle.
“America is for Americans and Americans,” Miller said in Trump’s briefing room Protest at Madison Square Garden on October 27.
“America First Legal,” Miller’s organization founded as an ideological opposition to the American Civil Liberties Union, was listed as an advisory group for Project 2025 until Miller asked that the name be removed because of negative attention.
Homan, a named contributor to Project 2025, served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term as president, playing a key role in what has been called the Trump’s books. “family separation policy.”
Previewing Trump 2.0 earlier this year, Homan said: “No one can ignore it. If you are here illegally, you better be careful.”
Project 2025 contributors are expected to appoint the directors of the CIA and Federal Communications
John Ratcliffe, of Trump choose the leader of the CIAwas previously one of Trump’s directors of national intelligence. He is a contributor to Project 2025. The document’s chapter on American intelligence was written by Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe’s chief of staff during the first Trump administration.
Mirroring the approach of Ratcliffe and Trump, Carmack claimed the intelligence establishment was too cautious. Ratcliffe, like the chapter attributed to Carmack, takes a hawkish view of China. Throughout the Project 2025 document, Beijing is seen as an unreliable adversary of the United States.
Brendan Carr, ranking Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025 and is now it’s Trump’s choice chair the council. Carr wrote that the FCC chairman “is empowered with significant power that is not shared” with other FCC members. He called on the FCC to address “threats to individual freedoms posed by corporations that are abusing their dominant positions in the marketplace,” specifically “Big Tech and its efforts to promote push diverse political perspectives from the digital town square.”
He called for stricter transparency rules for social media platforms like Facebook And YouTube and “empower consumers to choose their own content filters and fact-checking tools, where applicable.”
Carr and Ratcliffe will seek Senate confirmation for their positions.
