Project 2025: It's On (Predictably)

Before Bill Barr became Donald Trump’s third attorney general, he circulated a memo that was more or less an audition tape for the job he ultimately got. That memo reached both the White House Counsel’s Office and Main Justice. In it, Barr argued in favor of what had previously been a fringe theory of a powerful “unitary executive,” in other words, a president able to consolidate power at the expense of the other two branches as a very powerful leader. The writing was on the wall with Barr’s selection, although the Supreme Court cast it in stone when the conservative majority signed off on the view that presidents couldn’t be criminally prosecuted as long as the crimes they committed fell under the umbrella of official acts. Even Bill Barr would have never dreamed of arguing the president could use SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and walk away with no consequences. Now, the Supreme Court says it’s so.

That’s the context that’s essential for understanding Trump’s Friday evening “nomination” (if you can call a social media announcement that) of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought is a proponent of a powerful executive and of restructuring our institutions to facilitate a government that veers toward the monarchical and away from the democratic. He was one of only four out of forty-four of Trump’s cabinet officials from his first administration who said they’d support him this time.

Vought entered OMB at the start of Trump’s first administration and was confirmed as its director in July 2020. In the archive of his official biography, his role is described like this: “he is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the President’s policy, management and regulatory agendas across the Executive Branch.” OMB is a powerful agency, and its director is, in a very real sense, a president’s right-hand man. Among the job experience Vought touts in his bio are his seven years as Vice President of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, which, as readers of Civil Discourse are well aware, is where Project 2025 was incubated.

The website for the Center for Renewing America lists Vought as its President. Jeff Clark, the DOJ appointee who tried to use the Justice Department to do Trump’s bidding and spread the Big Lie following the 2020 election is a fellow at the Center, as is Ken Cuccinelli, who wrote the DHS chapter of Project 2025. Its mission is “to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions, and history, where individuals’ enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities.” The Project 2025 website lists the Center as one of the 100 groups that are part of its advisory board.

Now Vought, godfather to Project 2025 and author of its chapter on OMB, will be in charge of administering policy in the next Trump Administration. So much for Trump’s efforts—back when reporting about Project 2025 led to enormous public concern and seemed poised to shift the tide against him— to distance himself from the project. At the time, he disavowed any knowledge of or agreement with the plan, but the claims felt hollow.

In fact, we discussed Trump’s ties to Project 2025, despite his claim that he knew nothing, back in August. Here’s the linchpin, showing that Trump was being disingenuous in that post:

“Tonight, the Washington Post reported that in April 2022, Trump and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, the front man for Project 2025, took a 45-minute private plane flight together to get to a Heritage Foundation conference where the former president was one of the speakers. Trump told the audience that the Heritage Foundation was ‘going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.’

Project 2025 is a wrap. It’s locked, loaded, and ready to go. If you believe it’s about to disappear or that Trump won’t use any of it, I have some swampland in Florida for you.

How do we know that? Because Kevin Roberts told us so. After Trump made his threat, and Paul Dans, who had been running the Project at Heritage, stepped down, Roberts said on Twitter that ‘Project 2025 has completed exactly what it set out to do.’”

Last August, Vought claimed that Trump had “blessed” Project 2025 and that it was ready to be put into action. We know this only because British journalists secretly recorded him making those claims; they were not intended for people like us. If confirmed, Vought will be in a position to make that reality.

Vought wrote the chapter of Project 2025 on “The Executive Office of the President of the United States,” which includes OMB. To give you a sense of its prominence, it’s Chapter 2, positioned in the first section of the document that is entitled “Taking The Reins of Government.” Vought writes, “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power— including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people.” But when has Donald Trump ceded power to anyone? And we have seen what happens when conservatives “send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.” American women end up as second-class citizens, unable to access reproductive care even when it’s necessary to save their lives.

We get a sense of how Vought would deploy OMB’s resources to enforce Trump’s policies. He writes, “OMB assists the President in the execution of his policy agenda across the government by employing many statutory and executive procedural levers to bring the bureaucracy in line with all budgetary, regulatory, and management decisions.” In other words, anyone—agency or otherwise—that doesn’t fall in lockstep with Trump’s policy dictates will find themselves stripped of federal funding and other resources and assistance. Trump tried that with Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan during his first term in office when she refused to relinquish her city’s sanctuary status for migrants. Trump was ultimately forced to turn over close to three-quarters of a million dollars of grant money for law enforcement he tried to withhold. Expect them to have learned from past experience and be more deliberate about using the levers of power to achieve their aims this time.

The bottom line is that all of the pieces of Project 2025 that we’ve discussed for the last year are in play. We’ve known that here, even though Project 2025 seemed to fall off the radar screen after Trump's ersatz denial. Now it’s clear that all of the horribles are on the table, everything from the end of the Department of Education to the discontinuation of the weather warnings NOAA provides. In July, Roberts said on a podcast, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” If the left won’t “allow” the proponents of Project 2025 to have their way, they’re going to force it on us, and apparently, they’re willing to engage in bloodshed if Americans stand up for democracy.

We are headed into a holiday week, and folks are still weary and demoralized from the election. But it’s time. It’s time to reengage and decide what role we’re going to play. Project 2025 isn’t about the best interests of the American people. It’s about a powerful president who can carry out the policies that people like Vought and Roberts have spent years crafting—whether we like them or not. Let’s pay attention!

We’re in this together,

Joyce