President-elect Donald Trump spent months on the campaign trail saying he has no connection to Project 2025, a radical right-wing policy plan put together by the Heritage Foundation that seeks to be a road map for a second Trump term.
“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Trump has sought to disown the 900-page report because of the negative publicity that it has received.
The more voters heard about Project 2025, the more they disliked it.
Despite Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the plan, Project 2025 features several officials and proposals from Trump’s first term in office.
The Washington Post reports that “Trump has named at least four other nominees who are credited by name in Project 2025, a product of the conservative Heritage Foundation: Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for ‘border czar’; John Ratcliffe, Trump’s planned nominee for CIA director; Brendan Carr, his selection to head the Federal Communications Commission; and Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s selection for ambassador to Canada. Homan, Hoekstra and Ratcliffe were listed as contributors to Project 2025’s 900-plus-page manifesto. Carr wrote an entire chapter on the agency that Trump now wants him to run.
“One of the groups that advised Project 2025, America First Legal, is led by Stephen Miller, a former top Trump aide whom Trump has now picked to return to the White House as assistant to the president, deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.”
The former president has selected Russ Vought to lead the White House budget office, a role he held in the first Trump administration. Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, wrote a chapter on the executive office that advocates that the next president wield his power more aggressively.
In addition to increasing the power of the president, Trump opponents should prepare now for Trump’s vow to make wide-scale changes to the federal workforce, cutting jobs and replacing career civil servants with political appointees.
Replacing federal workers with loyalists to the president is proposed in Project 2025. Other proposals outlined in the plan that could potentially be part of Trump’s second term agenda include eliminating administrative tools to address discrimination, disbanding all federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and abolishing the Department of Education.
As Trump prepares for his second term, it is crucial that our elected officials, civil rights groups and others take a close look at Project 2025, the policies that could be implemented in a second Trump term and how to stop their implementation.
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune)
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