The Heritage Foundation’s policy document “Project 2025” has gotten a lot of press, but what exactly is included in this 922-page document — and is it even relevant after the Trump campaign slammed it? Andrew Prokop, senior politics correspondent at Vox, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the policy suggestions laid out in the conservative think tank’s agenda, how much of it might actually be adopted by a potential Trump administration, and the shakeup that’s happened at Heritage since its publication. His article is “Project 2025: The myths and the facts.”
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Transcript
Project 2025 Podcast Full.wav
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] You’ve heard about project 2025, right? It is or was a carefully crafted list of recommendations pulled together by a conservative think tank called the Heritage Foundation, which, in addition to ideas for what a reelected Trump administration should do with four more years of power, had been preparing potential appointees ready to carry out those ideas. Some of those proposals have proved unpopular with the all important swing voters who will likely decide this year’s election. And this week, the Trump campaign stated explicitly that project 2025 does not speak for their candidate, and project 2025 director announced his resignation from KERA in Dallas. This is think I’m Kris Boyd. It would seem like that’s it, right? But project 2025 policy work always came with an expiration date. And while the Trump campaign stresses it has never taken marching orders from this or any think tank, that is not the same as saying the former president doesn’t agree with anything project 2025 endorses. For one thing, it was written in part by former Trump staffers, many of whom are hoping to play a role in staffing a second Trump term in the white House. To get some perspective on the lingering influence of project 2025. We have invited Vox senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop, whose reporting includes the article headlined project 2025 The Myths and the facts. Andrew, welcome to think.
Andrew Prokop [00:01:27] Thanks so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:28] I have to say, trying to keep up with news the past few weeks has been like drinking through a firehose, and I appreciate you making time for us. It is tempting to think, okay, project 20 2025 is shutting down operations. The director is out the door. We don’t need to pay attention to this, but the end of the project doesn’t mean the end of all those ideas contained within it for the Trump campaign. So I want to start with the very basics and then drill down. First of all, how did project 2025 come about in the first place?
Andrew Prokop [00:01:58] Sure. I’ll just start off by saying it’s not entirely clear to me that it is totally ending. Last I heard, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the main group behind the project, has said that he would now oversee it. It would continue its work in some other form. So who knows? It’s all up in the air at this point. But project 2025, it was put together by this Heritage Foundation, which is a leading conservative right wing think tank that was founded back in the 1970s. It’s been around for decades. Its main goal is to push the Republican Party to the right on various policy issues, more in line with what ideological movement conservatives want to do every few years since, 1980, actually. The Heritage Foundation has put together this long list of policy recommendations they would like the next Republican president to do. They’ve called it mandate for leadership in the past. So this is something that they have been doing for a long time, but this one has has hit different to many people. And I think that’s for a few reasons. One is that, you know, the project first is the new name project 2025. It sounds a little more, a little more, mysterious than mandate for leadership, but intriguing. You want to know about this? What? What’s the project? What are they up to? But more to the point, it’s all of this intrigue around the fact that of Trump being a president who already served one term, left office amidst a good deal of controversy. Questions about, you know, the future of democracy, major changes in American life, like the overturning of Roe v Wade. And amidst that, the Heritage Foundation, which he heavily relied upon to staff. His first administration convenes a bunch of former Trump officials and other conservative, experts and activists, as well as 100 other conservative groups, to put together their wish list for what they want the next Republican president to do. And the this was put together in 2023, when actually Trump was being challenged by Ron DeSantis, and it wasn’t yet totally clear that next president would be Trump. But I think I counted out of the authors of the chapters. There are about 36 chapters in this, gigantic document, 922 pages, that lists everything they want the next administration to do. But two thirds of those chapter authors are served in the first Trump administration. So naturally, there’s good reason to believe they would want to do so again. And in fact, they’ve they’ve learned from what happened in the first Trump administration and have come up with some very specific ideas, very wonky. The stuff in this document, it’s not like big broad campaign promises like you see in a political platform for a convention. This is, very granular stuff that goes agency by agency in the federal government, saying this agency needs to do all of these specific things, these new executive actions, like, use this, obscure legal authority to, to make this big change and so on. So it’s a very long list. And in it there is, some not so surprising stuff and some pretty surprising and pretty far out there stuff that has really caught fire in, the minds of a lot of the public.
Krys Boyd [00:05:43] So the far out there stuff is the social policy that is influenced maybe by the religious right.
Andrew Prokop [00:05:50] Yes, I would say I think of the actual substance of this very long document, which is of course, too long to fully, elaborate on, as falling into basically three categories. I would say the first is long time conservative priorities that pre-date Trump. You know, this is they want to prioritize fighting climate change, you know, overhaul Medicaid, cut federal spending on the poor, eliminate the Department of Education. A lot of these policies, you know, people in the center and on the left would view as very. Dream and, and very, and very wrong. But, they’re not new. Exactly. And they’re not Trump specific. This is the sort of stuff that the Heritage Foundation and a lot of the movement, conservative activists, have always been about. The second category I would call something like centralizing executive power. And this is a set of recommendations that’s really geared around the fact that Trump and the people around him believe that he failed in his first term because of saboteurs, because he didn’t have loyal enough people in key government posts to carry out his agenda, in fact. Instead, he was faced with resistance from deep state bureaucrats who have, like, hold permanent, career civil service jobs as well as appointees that Trump himself picked that turned out to be not, like, truly loyal to him. And who, who would probably argue since he’s fallen out with many of these appointees that they were putting, you know, their country and the law and the Constitution above Donald Trump’s own demands, which they often objected to. But this part of project 2025 is saying, here is how Trump can actually get the federal government to do whatever he wants next time. This includes stuff such as, the schedule F executive order. That is a plan to change tens of thousands of civil servant jobs, which which right now can’t be fired by the president by law, just unilaterally reclassify them as political jobs that he can fire so that he can fire them and install a bunch of, you know, true, loyal MAGA people in these jobs. Reconsidering the traditional separation between the white House and Justice Department. Trump always wants to order, in his first term, we saw him frustrated often that, the Justice Department thought it was inappropriate that he would try to interfere in investigations, and he thinks that’s totally fine and he should be able to do that. And, and just adding many more political appointees throughout the federal government. So this is what, you know, the people who fear about kind of, you know, the future of democracy and, and abuses of power in a second Trump term. This is the sort of stuff that they’re worried about. And then I think that’s the third category is what do you reference the the social policies or what I think of as a pretty, extreme religious right agenda that, that really goes beyond anything that Trump himself has publicly supported or called for and is now very inconvenient for him politically as he’s trying to get elected. A lot of this is about abortion. The document calls for revoking FDA approval of the most common abortion pill in the country, and also using the Justice Department authority under an old law to prosecute anyone who sends abortion pills through the mail. They want to, crack down on, women who are leaving, states that ban abortion and going to pro-choice states by, by using federal power in various ways, requiring some of these states to to report on where the women getting abortions are coming from and cutting their federal funds if they refuse. And then there’s also a proposal in the introduction of this long, long document that says that pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. And, telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. So this this is, the abortion stuff. Trump has said pretty repeatedly that he wants to leave the issue of abortion to the states in his second term, but there’s going to be federal issues where the question of what he and his appointees will do, will come up. And I think it’s far from clear whether he will appoint, people who will exercise restraint in those jobs, or pro-lifers who believe it is their their calling to try to prevent, as many abortions from happening as they can in the country. The porn ban. I don’t I don’t really think that that is something that is actually on the table. The document doesn’t really go into how it would happen, but it’s kind of an example of of the stuff that is, thrown in here, which is, not commonly on the political agenda.
Krys Boyd [00:11:04] So, yeah, the last category that you just described, I mean, it’s understandable that a lot of people on the left would have, like, hair on fire concerns about these things. But since you mentioned at the top that, you know, the goal of the Heritage Foundation is to move the GOP and perhaps by extension, the entire country, more to the right. I mean, to what extent does the. Values of the Heritage Foundation reflect the values of like the average Republican in this country.
Andrew Prokop [00:11:32] I don’t think they do necessarily. But, when it comes to Donald Trump or who Donald Trump will choose to appoint in key administration jobs in his second term if he’s elected. I think, there is a lot of overlap. I mentioned at the end the areas of some disagreement or at least political inconvenience for Trump. But I think those those first two categories, I laid out the traditional kind of conservative agenda, economic and, spending issues, as well as, the centralization of executive power. Trump is on board with all of that stuff. These are often proposals that have been seemingly crafted to meet his approval, to be things that he would want to do. And so I think it’s fair to read a lot of the document as pretty likely, predictors of what Trump’s appointees would try to do in his second term, with the caveat that certainly he hasn’t endorsed everything in here. That there, and that there are certain things that he definitely, has at least currently expressed some, some very, political concern about.
Krys Boyd [00:12:47] Okay. So just to draw a line under that, Trump has been unequivocal in saying, like project 2025 does not speak for him or the campaign. This is not the same as saying he rejects every proposal that is contained within project 2025.
Andrew Prokop [00:13:03] Yes. And you know, his his denials and distancing now, is because it has the project 2025 has kind of caught fire, online among liberals, on TikTok. A lot of people are talking about it. It’s turned out to be a surprisingly and unexpectedly, effective, way to get, to get people across the country interested in the question of what a second term for Trump would be like and what he might do, and so and to mobilize them to perhaps oppose it. So he and and he hasn’t endorsed all these ideas. He doesn’t want it to be viewed as his agenda, even though a lot of it probably would be his agenda. So he’s been distancing himself from it. Notably in 2022, just a few years ago, he went to the Heritage Foundation, and he actually said that they were a great group that will lay the groundwork and detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. So, you know, that pretty clearly conflicts with his recent claim that he has no idea who’s behind project 2025, and he has nothing to do with them. More recently, he said, like, these people are very, very conservative. They are the severe right, and I’m not them, basically. So, so yeah, he’s still kind of searching for ways to distance himself from that. One problem is that his new vice presidential pick, JD Vance, has endorsed a lot of the ideas in project 2025 that that Trump hasn’t.
Krys Boyd [00:14:47] Andrew, you mentioned, you know, people on TikTok have been very fired up and opposed to, some elements of project 2025. Chances are they may not have read the entire 922 page document. It’s a lot to take in. What are the misunderstandings of what it contains? And what have people, mistakenly attributed to project 2025?
Andrew Prokop [00:15:16] So I think there’s a lot of pretty extreme stuff in project 2025, but there are also a lot of claims circulating online about what’s in it that are exaggerated or totally false. Like, I see these viral lists or videos going around that says, oh, project 2025. Does this, does that, does this, does that. And, you know, some of those are correct. Some of them are kind of correct and some of the doubt at all. So, you know, I, for instance, I’ve seen the claim that project 2025 calls for ending no fault divorce for a complete ban on all abortions in the country, with no exceptions for a ban on contraceptives. In total, for raising the retirement age for teaching Christian beliefs in public schools, ending marriage equality, banning Muslims from entering the country, or abolishing the FDA and the EPA. And none of those are in the document. And, you know, it’s 922 pages long. It’s tough for people to actually, you know, read the whole thing, but it is thankfully. Searchable, and you can search for some of these keywords and pretty quickly ascertain that they are not in there. Now, it is true that, you know, one one of the rhetorical, tricks that I see happening here sometimes from people who who may be being a bit misleading, are saying that, project 2025 partners have supported these ideas. And as I mentioned, 100 different conservative groups were involved in project 2025 in some way, even though the main the anchor of it was really the Heritage Foundation. And so it’s become kind of a parlor game to find, you know, anyone in any of these 100 groups. The most extreme thing they’ve said, oh, well, a project 2025 partner said that. And, you know, I think it’s kind of I think what’s in there is, concerning enough that, it’s it’s kind of unnecessary to do this exaggeration. And I wish people would focus on, you know, the facts and be a little more careful about it. However, it’s also true that, you know, the Heritage Foundation has and the people involved in it has kind of supported, a fair amount of of the ideas that I just mentioned, the myths that are not in project 2025, but, you know, the obviously Trump himself called for a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States when he was running for office in 2015 and 2016. He called for abolishing the EPA. The Heritage Foundation has called for raising the retirement age and for a nationwide abortion heartbeat ban. And so, you know, these horror story examples are like, not technically accurate. But, you know, if you want to really say, oh, people involved in this conservative movement effort, this is where they want to take the country. Even though project 2025 itself does not say that they want to take it there. There’s evidence from their other writings that, you know, they they would like to move policy in this direction. You know, I think that’s a fair thing to say.
Krys Boyd [00:18:42] Project 2025 does call for, this is not their language, but gutting the school nutrition program, killing the Department of Education. Has Donald Trump gone that far with either of those ideas?
Andrew Prokop [00:18:55] Trump has endorsed ending the Department of Education. This is a big, priority of the, the school choice activists that are a pretty big part of the Republican coalition. They’re supported by some very influential conservative donors that also fund the Heritage Foundation. And, you know, that’s part of the long running, ideological project on the right to sort of boost private schools, and, you know, weaken what they see as unfair advantages for public schools. They want to give vouchers for everyone, which, you know, critics argue would would really harm the public school system and, and badly weakened the ability to supply and education for all students. So I think that’s there. I’m not sure if Trump has said anything about the, nutrition issue. So.
Krys Boyd [00:19:48] You know, it’s interesting, this idea of abolishing the Department of Education that doesn’t necessarily abolish local school districts, but, at least in Texas, the state where the show is made, this question of school vouchers is actually pretty divisive among Republicans, at least in rural areas, which may not have any other alternatives to public school.
Andrew Prokop [00:20:11] Yes, actually, last wrote an article for Vox called the Conservative push for school choice has had its most successful year ever, kind of explaining why in a lot of the states around the country, these activists who have long been pushing these vouchers are finally succeeding. And when I interviewed some of these people, Texas would often come up. They would say, you know, Texas is is the next big target. We really are trying to make it happen. They think they have won, various primaries that will position them well to be able to actually pass it, next year, I believe. But but yes, this is, has been a long time, divisive proposal on the right, in part because, many people in rural areas believe it’s bad because it’s simply more difficult to get a lot of, private schools in rural areas where people are further apart and it would take longer to drive to them. They rely on their public school systems often, and they fear, proposals to weaken them. Now, eliminating the federal Department of Education. Obviously most, the vast. Majority, maybe even all local school systems in the country would continue to function effectively, though what what they are trying to say is we don’t want any more federal regulation of these schools, and we don’t want any more federal funding for low income schools. The document actually proposes zeroing out, title one, federal aid for low income schools, over ten years. And so, so that that is a pretty big that would make a big impact. However, most schools or also cause, public schools across the country are funded mostly, on the state and local level. So losing those federal funds would hurt, but wouldn’t, you know, be fatal or end these schools necessarily?
Krys Boyd [00:22:13] Did project 2025? Does project 2025 seem to tread lightly on areas where established Trump priorities diverge from traditional conservative ones? I’m thinking about trade policy here.
Andrew Prokop [00:22:27] Yes, it’s funny to look for those areas where Trump broke from what you might think of the trade as the traditional movement conservative heritage foundation. And Republican agenda. Trade policy. The document basically dodges they. Include a pro trade author and an anti-trade author. So they have the case for free trade and then the case for tariffs that are just and they just say, you know, the Republican coalition doesn’t agree on this. So we’re just going to present both sides and not, settle the matter here and say Trump should do take one of these sides or the next president should take one of these sides. Another interesting one is on Social Security and Medicare. That has also been a long time priority of movement conservatives to to really cut back federal spending on those programs, privatize them, gut them, overhaul them, however you want to say it. Trump, in 2016, said he would not do this. This was a big break from you know what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had ran on just four years ago. And, so the document basically dodges the issue of Medicare and Social Security. It doesn’t say, you know, no changes should be made to them, as, Trump has been claiming. But it also doesn’t, you know, contain the traditional conservative proposals to privatize them or what have you.
Krys Boyd [00:23:55] I mean, it does seem challenging for a populist to stay popular if they go after program social programs that are, in fact, quite popular with a broad swath of Americans.
Andrew Prokop [00:24:06] Yes. I think that was an underrated factor of Trump’s appeal and the reason that he won in the first place in 2016. A lot of people focus on immigration. A lot of people focus on trade. Those issues are important, I think, but also breaking with the traditional far right Republican support of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, a, actually an issue where Trump was more moderate than Mitt Romney or George W Bush, the presidential GOP nominees before him, I think also did a lot to set maybe older, voters minds at ease about, you know, defang the traditional attack from Democrats on Republicans that, if Trump was promising that he wasn’t going to touch or cut these programs in any way, then they had nothing to worry about and they could feel more comfortable supporting him.
Krys Boyd [00:25:01] Is there a lot of daylight between the Trump campaign and project 2025 on regulations geared at, say, minimizing climate change and environmental damage?
Andrew Prokop [00:25:14] No, I would say that the Trump team is fully on board with the, the environmental and energy agenda in project 2025, which is basically, you know, unleash fossil fuel production, stop restricting it. And, and basically says that all sorts of federal agencies are simply caring too much about climate change. They should stop focusing on it. They should do less about it. Just like chill out, don’t worry about it and focus on, more production, fossil fuels and, and making, you know, trying to make energy, cheaper.
Krys Boyd [00:25:53] So another thing that project 2025 does, and that the Heritage Foundation does more broadly, is cultivating potential political appointees for incoming GOP administrations. What do you know about how that works?
Andrew Prokop [00:26:10] Yeah. So this is something that heritage has long done. A lot of, think tanks in Washington do is that they basically try to position themselves for if their preferred candidate wins the election, they want to have a lot of names, recommendations of people ready to go who when the administration is trying to quickly staff up and fill top government jobs, to say you should hire these people and. When Trump was first elected. It was obviously a shock to everyone, pretty much, and he wasn’t prepared for this at all. And so he just did not have a wide network of of people because he was new to politics, to work in all these federal agencies. So he ended up relying a good deal on Heritage Foundation recommendations. They, he basically that was when the Trump Heritage Connection kind of was first cemented. They had been a little critical of that of him during the campaign. But now that he had one, I think Mike pence helped make that connection. Two, because he’s been traditionally close to heritage. Then they could offer up all of these names for Trump to hire. And he did, in fact, hire and appoint, a lot of those people. So now, though, that long time kind of normal project has, taken on a different kind of valence because of this whole question of ten Trump appoint people who will actually carry out what he wants to do and not object on ethical or legal or simply on the substance, grounds. Can he appoint, you know, when he was trying to overturn the 2020 election result, he asked the Justice Department, officials back then, he wanted them to do something. He wanted them to get involved. He wanted them to make bogus claims about voter fraud sweeping the nation and these swing states. And they refused to do it. There was one exception, though. A, a an official named Jeffrey Clark, who was in the civil division of the Justice Department. So not a top, top official, but, a kind of mid upper middle official. He got connected with Trump and, and said, if you put me in at the top of the Justice Department and fire, the acting AG and the deputy AG and make me the attorney general, and I will do this for you, I will, release this letter saying, that we have reason to believe there was massive voter fraud changing the outcome in Georgia in, and in Michigan and in Pennsylvania and other key states. And, Trump considered doing it, but, the, the he basically backed down because too many other people in the Justice Department would have resigned. It would have been a big crisis. He might have been impeached and removed from office. He he he backed it out. So and so the question I have often wondered about is, what if Trump could just get a lot more clerks in there in the second Trump administration, if he is trying to do something like, you know, steal an election, have them say, you know, I’ll do this for you. I’m not going to try to object. I’m not I’m not going to dispute you on the facts. You’re the president, and I’m loyal to you, and, and and let’s do it. So that is one of the major questions to me about how a Trump second Trump administration might differ from the first. And so project 2025 and its personnel recommendations have taken on this, this sheen of or they position it this way of, of saying, like, these are the people who will actually do what Trump wants. These aren’t the deep state saboteurs and the disloyal bureaucrats or, you know, the rhinos, who will sabotage him? These are these are the people who will let him do what he wants and centralize power and, and remove checks on, the president’s authority from elsewhere in the executive branch.
Krys Boyd [00:30:47] I want to talk just a little bit more about this idea that, you know, career civil servants working in federal agencies could have their roles diminished, potentially be fired. I mean, could a president actually apply some kind of Partizan loyalty test, civil servants to determine, like, who might get to stay in their jobs as appointees and who would just be fired for and for what reason?
Andrew Prokop [00:31:13] Yeah. So the way that this would work and it’s actually interesting, this is the proposal known as schedule F. It’s not entirely hypothetical because Trump actually did it in an executive order at the very end of his term. But he left office before, he could actually implement it. So. What ended up. What it does specifically is that it just says, I’m using the power of the president to to change all of these, career civil servant jobs into, political appointee jobs and political appointee jobs. It’s very normal for a new president to come in and, basically fire everyone in those jobs because they’re the new president and they are entitled to make those political appointees to put their people in at the top of departments and to carry out their own agenda. But. The obviously the career civil service protections were put in place to to stop politicization, to stop corruption, to stop the spoils system, to stop to to create a more professional federal government, workforce that could be policy experts and not, you know, political hacks that change over every four years and then don’t know what they’re doing when they come in. Now there is a conservative critique about how this has played out. They believe that the federal bureaucracy, the federal workforce, is just inherently going to be slanted in favor of Democrats due to, you know, just who chooses to take these jobs due to the fact that most of them are in Washington, D.C., a very Democratic city due to, you know, just the general leanings of, of, the, the, the divide, what’s called the diploma divide, where educated people, which are most federal government employees have to have degrees, are more pro-democratic in recent years than, people who did not complete college. The question, though, is how far he would go in actually doing this, in implementing it, because there are ways that you can envision this being put into place where he says, okay, we’re changing. These are to be political appointee jobs, tens of thousands of people, but we’re not going to, you know, fire everyone right away because that would be too crazy and chaotic. We are going to, you know, replace people when we find people to fill those jobs. And then you have what you might think of as the JD Vance approach where he said that, he said on a podcast in 2021 while he was running for Senate in Ohio, that if he was advising Trump in his second term, the first thing you do is to tell him to fire all the mid-level bureaucrats or all the civil servants and replace them with our people. And then when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court tries to stop you to say, the Chief justice has made his decision, let him enforce it. So JD Vance said that Trump should, you know, not only fire these career civil servants, he should defy the Supreme Court if, the Supreme Court tries to stop him from doing that. So, you know, in picking Vance, Trump has someone now in his inner circle who is probably going to be pushing him to go pretty far on this issue. Vance is pretty ideologically, interested in, a bunch of new right thinkers who who argue that, you know, the main problem of the right in America today is that the left controls too many institutions like academia, the media, and, the federal government bureaucracy. And so Vance has historically been pretty print on record, supporting some, some pretty wild proposals. He even said it’s going to have to get wild at one point to, to try to to totally overhaul the federal government and remake it in a more, Trump, supporting fashion.
Krys Boyd [00:35:34] Well, it’s an interesting way to set this up. You know, let the let the Supreme Court try and enforce this, especially given that the Supreme Court recently, you know, declared a significant level of presidential immunity, maybe the Supreme Court wouldn’t perceive itself as having the power to enforce this.
Andrew Prokop [00:35:52] Yes, that’s entirely possible. A lot of the you know, there has been tension between Trump and some Supreme Court justices, including some of his own appointees. They did not back any of his lawsuits aimed at, overturning the election outcome in 2020. They have sided against him on some key decisions, but they do have the conservatives on the court do have a long standing, investment in the argument that the president is the head of the executive branch and he should be the ultimate authority in it. He should be allowed to maybe fire more people. He should be allowed to, you know, as the recent, immunity decision explicitly said that the president should be allowed to say whatever he wants to his attorney general, he shouldn’t be able to be prosecuted for that. He, that that would be, in the conservative justices view, a major threat to the power of the presidency, to prosecute him for that as, Trump is currently under indictment for, regarding those, attempts to steal the election and and get the Justice Department to help that I mentioned earlier. So, so, yes, it’s it’s not clear on this particular issue whether, in fact, the Supreme Court would step in, you know, if Trump’s. Tries to do something as, as far out as like, you know, blatantly ignoring laws passed by Congress about federal government staff and how it should function. That might be too far for first for all of the conservatives to go, but, again, we don’t yet know.
Krys Boyd [00:37:29] I do want to acknowledge, I mean, I know some mid-level career civil servants, and they do have personal Partizan identities. Some of them are Republicans, some of them are Democrats. Is there, though, something about the culture of most federal agencies that encourages its permanent staffers to set their individual loyalties aside, to carry out their jobs, as required by the law set by whoever is president and whoever’s in charge of Congress at the time?
Andrew Prokop [00:37:56] Yes. And I think the the argument that these staffers, you know, sabotage Trump’s first term is pretty overstated. In my experience, a lot of these, federal bureaucrats are are more focused on trying to avoid controversy, to stay out of the spotlight, to, to avoid, you know, anything that could put their job potentially at risk. And, that to the extent that Trump did face, difficulties in getting his administration to carry out his agenda, it was more with the people he picked himself, you know, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, national security adviser John Bolton, like all of these people, Trump ended up, either firing or they resigned on very bad terms because they just really disagreed with certain actions Trump was going to take. Even Attorney General Bill Barr, who had been seemingly Trump’s, most loyal soldier for quite some time, finally got off the bus after the election in those final months of the administration when, when Trump’s plot to overturn the outcome really got going. So, you know, I do feel that the, the permanent career civil servants are being kind of unfairly scapegoated for Trump’s own choices and who he chooses to appoint. I also think that there is kind of that to give the argument, its due. There are cases where, for instance, Trump wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria or Afghanistan more quickly, and his military advisers just constantly said, we can’t do this, we can’t do this, we can’t do this. They slow walk things. They use all sorts of bureaucratic resistance techniques because they just disagreed with his policy and on issues like that. You know, it’s tougher for me to, to endorse that because at the end of the day, the president was elected. And if his policy is legal, he should get to do it. If even if officials think it is a bad idea or personally disagree with it, I do think there is a bit of a problem there. To the extent that that the military was defying Trump and, you know, this was not a problem unique to Trump. Barack Obama also faced, kind of obfuscation and resistance from the military when he was seeking alternatives to, surging troops to Afghanistan. So, you know, points to the CIA as well. And there are different, specifics in all of these agencies. But I do think that is that is kind of like the more convincing version of the argument for Trump that, you know, when it when the bureaucratic resistance is simply about disagreement on policy substance. I think that is something that he is more within his rights to, to do something about.
Krys Boyd [00:41:04] And here I read just this week that, former President Trump has been reluctant to have his campaign staff begin to work on a transition plan. And the explanation I read was that he’s superstitious. He doesn’t want to start planning for anything until he has, won the presidency, should that happen? But but I wonder, you know, he was in some ways, it took a really long time for the 2016 Trump campaign to staff up, on all those appointed positions. And, they were sort of left waiting for a lot of these to be filled. Does it look like this could happen again if Trump wins in November?
Andrew Prokop [00:41:45] Well, he had this excellent group project, 2025, already to do that. And now he’s he’s mad at them and telling them to, wind down policy operations. I think this is this is interesting. It’s, some have covered this as a, a power struggle in Trump world that really the people who are currently running Trump’s campaign. Chris la Sevilla and, Susie Wiles. They that they, according to some claims, like they want to be the ones setting up the next administration. So and right now they are focused on winning the campaign. So they don’t want any transition planning to get too far ahead. I think one thing that happened last time is that Chris Christie was running the transition for Trump and doing some planning, and then and then Trump after he won in 2016, he fired Chris Christie and was like, no, we’re going to throw his plans in the garbage and start from scratch. So I feel like maybe this is something similar happening again. But, you know, the the reports of project 2025 demise, Trump’s campaign managers, who have been very vocal in, attacking project 2025 publicly and also reportedly making threats to them behind the scenes. They have, as part of this, like, intra MAGA power struggle. They have, the Washington Post reported that they even threatened that no one associated with project 2025 would get any job in the next administration if they didn’t make big changes to it. So, I don’t really think that threat is credible just because so many people were associated with this thing, and so many of them are like true Trump loyalists who, served in his first administration and, would be, at the top of, like, any reasonable list to serve in his second administration.
Krys Boyd [00:43:47] Before I let you go, I’m just curious what you think the Heritage Foundation might have learned from the events of this week. Should it decide to craft something like a project 2029 for the future?
Andrew Prokop [00:44:02] Yeah. I mean, I think they learned that it’s a bad idea to, become a political liability for the Republican presidential candidate. I don’t think they ever would have thought in their wildest dreams that a 922 page, deeply dull and boring document would end up becoming mega viral, becoming one of the top talking points of the Democratic nominee. And that would just very organically become something that, liberals and really people across the country are talking about are worried about are you can’t get enough of learning about, you know, to an extent, heritage has succeeded in getting its ideas in front of more people than, than perhaps ever before. But, but the price of that is, scrutiny and, some of their ideas, it turns out, may not have been ready for, for prime time for, a presidential candidate, who’s actually trying to win.
Krys Boyd [00:45:10] Andrew Prokop is senior politics correspondent at Vox, which published his article project 2025 The Myths and the facts. Andrew, thanks for making time to talk about all this.
Andrew Prokop [00:45:21] Thank you so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:45:23] You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and subscribe to our podcast. Wherever you like to get podcasts, just search for KERA, think or listen to the podcast, including many, many archive episodes at think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
