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As a former and potentially future president, Donald Trump hailed what would become Project 2025 as a road map for “exactly what our movement will do” with another crack at the White House.
As the blueprint for a hard-right turn in America became a liability during the 2024 campaign, Trump pulled an about-face. He denied knowing anything about the “ridiculous and abysmal” plans written in part by his first-term aides and allies.
Now, after being elected the 47th president on Nov. 5, Trump is stocking his second administration with key players in the detailed effort he temporarily shunned. Most notably, Trump has 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 chief of policy.
Those moves have accelerated criticisms from Democrats who warn that Trump's election hands government reins to movement conservatives who spent years envisioning how to concentrate power in the West Wing and impose a starkly rightward shift across the U.S. government and society.
Trump and his aides maintain that he won a mandate to overhaul Washington. But they maintain the specifics are his alone.
“President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025,” said Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “All of President Trumps' Cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump's agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”
Here is a look at what some of Trump's choices portend for his second presidency.
The Office of Management and Budget director, a role Vought held under Trump previously and requires Senate confirmation, prepares a president's proposed budget and is generally responsible for implementing the administration's agenda across agencies.
The job is influential but Vought made clear as author of a Project 2025 chapter on presidential authority that he wants the post to wield more direct power.
“The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind,” Vought wrote. The OMB, he wrote, “is a President’s air-traffic control system” and should be “involved in all aspects of the White House policy process,” becoming “powerful enough to override implementing agencies’ bureaucracies.”
Trump did not go into such details when naming Vought but implicitly endorsed aggressive action. Vought, the president-elect said, “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State” — Trump’s catch-all for 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.”
The strategy of further concentrating federal authority in the presidency permeates Project 2025's and Trump's campaign proposals. Vought's vision is especially striking when paired with Trump's proposals to dramatically expand the president's control over federal workers and government purse strings — ideas intertwined with the president-elect tapping mega-billionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Trump in his first term sought to remake the federal civil service by reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers — who have job protection through changes in administration — as political appointees, making them easier 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's and Ramaswamy's sweeping “efficiency” mandates from Trump could turn on an old, defunct constitutional theory that the president — not Congress — is the real gatekeeper of federal spending. In his “Agenda 47,” Trump endorsed so-called “impoundment,” which holds that when lawmakers pass appropriations bills, they simply set a spending ceiling, but not a floor. The president, the theory holds, can simply decide not to spend money on anything he deems unnecessary.
Vought did not venture into impoundment in his Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote, “The President should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”
Trump's choice immediately sparked backlash.
“Russ Vought is a far-right ideologue who has tried to break the law to give President Trump unilateral authority he does not possess to override the spending decisions of Congress (and) who has and will again fight to give Trump the ability to summarily fire tens of thousands of civil servants,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat and outgoing Senate Appropriations chairwoman.
Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, leading Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said Vought wants to “dismantle the expert federal workforce” to the detriment of Americans who depend on everything from veterans' health care to Social Security benefits.
“Pain itself is the agenda,” they said.
Trump’s protests about Project 2025 always glossed over overlaps in the two agendas. Both want to reimpose Trump-era immigration limits. Project 2025 includes a litany of detailed proposals for various U.S. 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 architect of his immigration ideas, including his promise of the largest deportation force in U.S. history. As deputy policy chief, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, Miller would remain in Trump's West Wing inner circle.
“America is for Americans and Americans only,” Miller said at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27.
“America First Legal,” Miller’s organization founded as an ideological counter to the American Civil Liberties Union, was listed as an advisory group to Project 2025 until Miller asked that the name be removed because of negative attention.
Homan, a Project 2025 named contributor, was an acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director 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’s off the table. If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
John Ratcliffe, Trump's pick to lead the CIA, was previously one of Trump's directors of national intelligence. He is a Project 2025 contributor. The document's chapter on U.S. intelligence was written by Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe's chief of staff in the first Trump administration.
Reflecting Ratcliffe's and Trump's approach, Carmack declared the intelligence establishment too cautious. Ratcliffe, like the chapter attributed to Carmack, is hawkish toward China. Throughout the Project 2025 document, Beijing is framed as a U.S. adversary that cannot be trusted.
Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, wrote Project 2025's FCC chapter and is now Trump's pick to chair the panel. Carr wrote that the FCC chairman “is empowered with significant authority that is not shared” with other FCC members. He called for the FCC to address “threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market,” specifically “Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.”
He called for more stringent transparency rules for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube and “empower consumers to choose their own content filters and fact checkers, if any.”
Carr and Ratcliffe would require Senate confirmation for their posts.
© Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
40 Comments
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dagon
More 'OMG Leopards Ate my face " moments for the women, minorities and workers who voted Trump.
The corporatocracy is always pushing their agenda forward and with Trump it is in acceleration mode.
The denial of Project 2025 by MAGA pre election was so rich given their constant parroting of the corporate funded feed of the Heritage Foundation.
Peter Neil
let’s be clear, his answer was always that he never read it.
he doesn’t read, so he was telling the truth.
all he knows is what people tell him in person or what he hears on fox news.
bass4funk
Sounds more like a desperate leftist hit piece of the greatest exaggeration, Trump states multiple times that he’s unaware and the project won’t be implemented, shame on the AP for pushing out more fear and angst on a topic that has no merit, everything from immigration to overhauling wokeness and stamping out DEI was already known and Trump mentioned these were some of the issues he was going to tackle, like dismantle the Dept. of Education, nothing sinister or sneaky about it. He wants to destroy the far left progressive agenda, he absolutely should, it’s killing the nation, but it has nothing to do with P2025.
Can you prove he did?
Prove it.
Hardly, Trump found out last time, that doesn’t work.
PeaceIsReal
Hey world:
We can do so much better. I’ve seen it.
bye
Underworld
bass4funk
Nope. Trump was obviously lying. By tapping its authors and influencers for key roles, he intends on implementing Project 2025.
Anyone who believed him deserves what they get.
Tokyo Guy
bass4funk,
Coming from you, "prove it", is the ultimate in irony.
Some dude
So Trump, who's never heard of this project, and if he has, disavows it, has, quite coincidentally, proposed a whole bunch of people for cabinet positions who are neck-deep in this project.
It would take a pretty amazing level of denial, naiveté, or outright brainwashing to look past that, but then again I just described 76,838,984 people.
Ken
All the women and minorities who voted for Trump, remember this is your fault. We already know a whole bunch of Trumps buddies also associate with Project 2025 just like we all know Trump was very close with Epstein. But hey Freedom of Speech means Freedom to Lie and trick people
FizzBit
Hilarious when conspiracy theories are now headlines on JT.
wallace
Trump always intended to introduce Project 2025.
bass4funk
Prove it. I don’t care about emotionless and empty platitudes, show me the proof.
Again, show me the smoking gun. You also kept saying without a shadow of a doubt that Trump will lose the presidency, so please less talk and show proof.
Oh, I’m happy that the Dems lost all right
Peter Neil
musk and ramaswamy have no idea what they’re talking about, as shown in their ny times opinion piece. they misinterpreted every law and court decision they talked about.
deportation? haha. let’s say there are about 10 million illegals in the country. that’s the total for about the last 10 years. the u.s. has never deported more than about 300k in a year (biden, trump deported less).
lets say the goal is to deport 1 million per year. they don’t have the people to find them, the facilities to hold them, the court staff to issue the orders, the transportation to physically deport them.
the total cost would be about a trillion dollars extrapolating based on the current costs now.
i guess they could use illegals to build facilities, since thats who builds things now. real estate developers are freaking out in texas, since they estimate 50% of their workforce are illegals.
but employers never face any punishment for hiring them. america industry needs them.
the illegals are doing the san k jobs in america (3 d jobs) - dirty, dangerous and demanding - that no americans will do. the meat and poultry industry will collapse, the building industry and the agriculture industry.
talk about an economic catastrophe.
no food and no building anything. what will that do for prices? haha.
you have to be a complete moron to think deporting everyone is a good or financially sound idea.
deport the criminals, which is how they’re caught now after they enter the criminal justice system and issue work permits and a path to citizenship. let them legally pay taxes, social security, rent housing, buy consumer goods and continue continue contributing to economy.
dagon
MAGA is a cult who can deny the maliciousness of MAGA by automatically programming them for denial.
Three monkeys in the temple natch.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/08/15/what-we-know-about-trumps-link-to-project-2025-as-author-claims-ex-president-blessed-it-in-secret-recording/
Any worker, minority supporting MAGA is just a victim offering themselves up for consumption.
Yrral
Trump is crazy, telling people you gonna obstruct Justice,the Supreme Court do not control the judicial system,they can be impeached and tried as criminal themselves
plasticmonkey
It’s the heart and soul and guts of Project 2025 minus the name.
No one is surprised, and I’ve never bought the disingenuous denials that the Trump cult wants an authoritarian executive to push through its sick vision for America.
bass4funk
It can be easily done now, the great thing with having a Republican Congress, all he needs to do is get them to write a new law, which would state that if people into the country illegally, they are blocked 10 years from applying for citizenship, if any employee is found hiring illegal, they will suffer fine, if any states that would harbor illegal aliens will be denied federal funding, once that is written, signed, and put into law, other states will have to comply, and then the Democrats would be powerless to do anything, they can try to fight it in court, but the Supreme Court would most likely side with the law that was written. Either way, Trump has a mandate on this, and a lot of illegals will be leaving, they know it, and there’s not a whole lot. The Democrats can do about it, you enter any country illegally, you should be either incarcerated and or deported, otherwise you do not have a sovereign nation, we need to get back to that, and I really don’t care if liberals get upset about it, because I can’t stop it, not this time.
Blacklabel
are these considered “controversial” statements by the left?
the same left that promised to ram all their policies down our throats again by eliminating filibuster and stacking the Supreme Court if they had won?
Underworld
bass4funk
Nope. Trump was obviously lying.
Why? I don’t care if you believe me or not.
dutch
Right!!?
dutch
It just goes to show how diabolical Project 2025 is!
wallace
Trump has never read the Bible, but he still sells it.
Blacklabel
how is this controversial to the left? It’s super obvious because status as an “American” can be lawfully achieved by those who desire it and who want to earn it by their contribution to it.
It’s not any racial or ethic identity like other countries.
plasticmonkey
Less than 50% of the vote is hardly a mandate.
Again with this silly zero sum concept of politics.
Peter Neil
been on the books for 40 years, and the law includes prison time. but rarely enforced.
the laws are already in place. nothing new.
trump can have a mandate that all americans will have a monkey fly out of their butt. it doesn't mean it's going to happen.
TaiwanIsNotChina
The only way the 2025 agenda can be carried out is with the Insurrection Act. Let's hope it doesn't come to that and Failed Businessman goes back out on the golf course.
bass4funk
Prove it. I’m really not interested in what you feel or think. Just show me proof that without a shadow of a doubt the man was lying.
That’s right, I don’t because emotion has no place to be in a conversation.
Moderator
All readers, please control your emotions.
bass4funk
Huh?
Don’t worry it won’t.
bass4funk
It absolutely is a mandate, he has the House, the Senate and the Presidency.
Hey, the shoe fits
TaiwanIsNotChina
So would you say the Democrats in 2020 had a mandate?
wallace
"America is for Americans and Americans only,”
In reality, that is not correct. The country needs highly skilled foreign workers, especially in the tech sector. It also needs foreign business investors to build factories and create jobs. Japan provides millions of jobs. America cannot survive as an isolationist country.
Jimizo
I always got the feeling Trump isn’t particularly interested in policies - he’s too lazy to get into details and I doubt he’s ever done any homework in his life. He’s more at home at rallies and on social media - pretty good at it too.
In decision making, I remember a description of Trump as like a couch - he bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.
The people around him are vital given his laziness.
Blacklabel
he has 50%. And more importantly your team only has 48.4%.
mandate. Popular vote win.
House, Senate and Presidency.
ok1517
I didn't expect anything better coming from Donald!
Looking at his cabinet - only the worst of the worst qualify!
Abortion refusers, rapists, child-traffickers, sex offenders, Putain friends.
bass4funk
Not quite, but they did push their woke gender politics and now thankfully that’s going away, so rejoice.
TaiwanIsNotChina
Get ready for woke 2.0 in four years.
ok1517
black,
we got way too many deniers already on that "side of the ocean" (MAGA and Donald fans).
"good thing none of what you claim is actually true."
So let me help you (and others) out:
Robert F Kennedy Jr, is facing severe criticism for his vaccine scepticism.
Hegseth, the Pentagon nominee, had been investigated for an alleged sexual assault in California in 2017. (He only got off the hook after paying an undisclosed amount of money to the accuser / victim. Why pay money if you're innocent??)
Gaetz: allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and misuse of campaign funds. (dropped out of the race to avoid publishing of the report)
Doug Collins contesting the 2020 election, against abortion, against Obamacare, rejects scientific consensus on climate change, opposes the Equality Act and son.
Want more? Just ask for it and you shall be helped!
Blacklabel
But there will never be elections again now that Trump was elected, right?
or was that also a manufactured lie from the left?
bass4funk
Doubt it. If I were a lib, identity politics wouldn’t be something to run on, this is why they lost so big, so if they want to continue losing, go for it
Jimizo
Has he? I was under the impression he fell short of 50%.
Can you post a source to correct my misunderstanding?
Cheers.
Harry_Gatto
But the Bible is his "favourite book" /s
The guy is a serial liar and they are well-documented. Anyone not seeing straight through him is deluding themself.
Norm
Writing comments all day without reading the news is all fun and stuff, but nobody has said “no more elections.”
You, however, just manufactured the “never be elections again” part.
He actually said, in public:
"In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote."
And:
"Christians, get out and vote, just this time. "You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians."
I’m sure you’re ok with whatever he was implying.
Blacklabel
please do! As “vaccine skepticism” wasn’t on your list, Gaetz is not there and Hegseth was not charged. Collins you right just any of that stuff either.
put names to accusations?