Important Alert: Update on Project 2025

This afternoon, Project 2025 director Paul Dans stepped down at the Heritage Foundation. Reportedly, the Trump campaign applied pressure to stop Project 2025. They’ve been taking a shellacking over it since early voices (like ours here at Civil Discourse) that were focusing on it caught on fire. Recently, there’s been mention of it everywhere, including from both President Biden and Vice President Harris.

We know from studying it that Project 2025 has something in it for everyone to hate, and with all of the attention being paid to it recently, the Trump campaign seems to have figured it out too.

In what appeared to be a closely related action to Dans departure, the Trump campaign disavowed Project 2025, claiming in a press release that they had “nothing to do” with it and that it wasn’t “associated with the campaign or the President in any way.”

Despite the campaign’s claim that “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed,” the goals of Project 2025 still align closely with Trump’s own plans. Politically speaking, Project 2025 had become such an albatross around his neck that he had to find a way to distance himself. And perhaps it’s a convenient opportunity to reassert control over personnel for his new administration. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 website said that it was in charge of vetting people for political appointment. So Trump may have killed two birds with one stone here. But don’t be deceived, whatever Trump’s public reaction to the massive negative publicity Project 2025 has generated, it’s unlikely his plans for the country have changed.

In the July 18 edition of the newsletter, we learned that Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said he knew Trump was lying about Project 2025.

Reporter Judd Legum has noted that of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition. That’s just over 81%. Many of its policy positions are closely echoed in Trump’s own Agenda 47, which is posted on the campaign website. Recently, video leaked of Trump’s pick for Vice President, J.D. Vance, thanking Heritage for their work on banning abortion and cutting Social Security.

Today’s news looks like political maneuvering, not a substantive disavowal of the policies Trump has advocated for up until now.

Here’s an example. Project 2025 calls for reclassifying tens of thousands of civil servants as political appointees, seeking to strip them of civil service labor protections so “the next conservative president” could replace them with political loyalists. That aligns with Trump’s announced plans.

In fact, he’s done it before. I wrote about it in our first newsletter discussing Project 2025 last November, Frogs Boiled: What Trump is planning for a Second Term. In October of 2020, before the last election, Trump signed an executive order that stripped out the protections that prevent a president from firing civil servants without cause, in other words, for reasons like he doesn’t think an individual is loyal to him. The order was characterized by people in the know as a “stunning attempt to politicize the civil service and undermine more than a century of laws aimed at preventing corruption and cronyism in the federal government.” At least 50,000 federal employees would be affected by the creation of this new “schedule F” unprotected status for any employee who has a role that could be loosely defined as involving policymaking. One of the first steps Joe Biden took after being sworn in was to rescind Trump’s executive order.

Trump’s Agenda 47, clearly states that he will reimpose schedule F on Day one. Despite his claim he doesn’t agree with Project 2025, his plans are the same. What a coincidence.

At the top of his Agenda 47 page on his website, Trump vows to “restore” his ability to fire “rogue bureaucrats” on “Day One.”

This is a big part of what we’re about here at Civil Discourse: Keeping the Republic. We’ve been working on Project 2025 since late last year. Over the last few months, Americans have become more aware of it. Just last night, I joined Joy Reid’s show on MSNBC—she devoted her entire hour to understanding Project 2025.

Voices like ours have made sure the public knows what was in Project 2025 and now Trump has been forced to disavow it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

We’re doing valuable work here! If you aren’t already, I hope you’ll subscribe to the newsletter. This is an important milestone—citizens like us have forced Trump to back down—but we have more work to do.

We’re in this together,

Joyce