Led by the right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, the Presidential Transition Project has given the nation A Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a massive, 922-page governmental, bureaucratic map laying out in stark, matter-of-fact terms how far-right conservatives plan to steer the next Republican administration. Known simply as Project 2025, the tome brings together 54 conservative organizations who all contributed to the mammoth undertaking, which has taken three years to write, and cost $22 million to produce.
Project 2025 is basically a collection of policy transition proposals from those 54 conservative organizations that outline how, should Trump win the November election, he can vastly remake the federal government to most effectively carry out an extremist agenda.
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” the project’s website states. “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”
Were Project 2025 to be implemented, we would see the beginnings of fascism in America. I know that sounds alarmist in the extreme, but it may actually be understating the threat.
There are five sections to Project 2025:
- Taking back the reins of government;
- The common defense;
- The general welfare;
- The economy; and,
- Independent regulatory agencies.
Throughout these sections, the authors attack and, in many cases, eviscerate, every department of the federal government.
Although organized superbly and well-written throughout, Project 2025 is inaccurate in many areas, completely false in others, and downright scary from beginning to end.
For example, take the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The VA, a Department with a budget of $325 billion and an employee force of about 484 thousand full time staff, is the largest integrated health care system in America. It boasts 1,321 health care facilities, including 172 Hospital Medical Centers and 1,138 outpatient facilities of varying complexity, providing care to 9.1 million of the country’s 18 million Veterans.
As a veteran, I am interested in the VA, its mission, performance, and in how veterans feel about the care they receive. According to the VA Trust Report for 2023, nearly 90% of Veterans the VA treats trust the VA for their care (based on 560,000 surveys). Additionally, more than 79% of Veterans trust the VA overall, reflecting a 24% increase since 2016, the year before Donald Trump first occupied the White House. And, with the Pact Act of 2022, VA benefits have been expanded for Veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances.
However, you’d never know about the VA’s success in treating all those veterans from reading Project 2025. Its author, Brooks D. Tucker, addresses what he perceives as the VA’s shortcomings at the end of Section 3, beginning on Page 641. Tucker, a retired lieutenant colonel and infantry officer in the Marine Corps, served as VA Acting Chief of Staff during most of the Trump Administration. With a degree in English from the University of Maryland, Tucker is also a graduate of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College.
This Trump Administration alumnus is now Project 2025’s VA point man. In Project 2025, despite the VA Trust Report’s findings, Tucker maintains, without citing any evidence, that Veterans’ trust of the VA is woeful, care is sporadic and unreliable, and veterans do not trust the Department to deliver the high-quality care they need and deserve.
Tucker writes that the Trump Administration handed the Biden Administration an outstanding medical machine, which has mostly floundered since 2021. He writes:
There also is growing concern in Congress and the veteran community that the VA is poorly managing and in some cases disregarding provisions of the VA MISSION [Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks] Act of 2018 that codify broad access for veterans to non-VA health care providers. Efforts to expand disability benefits to large populations without adequate planning have caused an erosion of veterans’ trust in the VA enterprise.
The Mission Act of 2018 is the legislation that allows veterans to receive care in what’s called “community care” settings. That is, outside of the VA system. After its passage, the VA began setting up Community Care Networks (CCNs) of providers. There are now more than 300,000 of them. The Mission Act is popular among veterans, especially those living in areas where VA treatment is hard to access. It is so popular that a 2022 analysis by the National Institutes of Health found “wait times increased sharply at VA facilities that did and did not implement CCNs, regardless of rural/urban or Primary Care HPSA status, suggesting community care demand likely overwhelmed VA resources…”
The Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute fears the Mission Act is the first step on the road to privatizing the VA.
Brooks Tucker, the Heritage Foundation, and Project 2025 offer recommendations to improve what they consider the VA’s abysmal performance. At least two these two are concerning:
- Rescind all delegations of authority promulgated by the VA under the prior
Administration.- Transfer all career SES (Senior Executive Service) out of PA/PAS-designated positions (advisors to the President) on the first day and ensure political control of the VA.
These two recommendations run hand in glove with Project 2025’s goal of politicizing upper level governmental SES positions by placing them directly under the authority of the President. This is the infamous Schedule F, which could have terminated about 50,000 experienced governmental employees by removing their civil service protections, essentially turning them into at-will employees, thereby allowing the President to to quickly staff the positions with true loyalists. It was developed in the final weeks of the Trump Administration and rescinded in the first week of the Biden Administration. Project 2025 buries its massive reboot on page 80. Note the final two sentences:
Frustrated with these activities by top career executives, the Trump Administration issued Executive Order 1395724 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F. It ordered the Director of OPM and agency heads to set procedures to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, from which they can relocate back to the regular civil service after such service. The order was subsequently reversed by President Biden at the demand of the civil service associations and unions. It should be reinstated, but SES responsibility should come first.
I have only lightly touched the surface of Project 2025 in this letter. With 922 pages, it’s hard to do much more. In subsequent Letters I will dig deeper, beginning with Project 2025’s call for the abolition of the Department of Education.
Before closing, two final points are in order. First, Project 2025 is the work of 54 authors, most of whom had senior positions in the Trump Administration, many in the White House itself, such as Russ Vought, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Stephen Miller, Senior Advisor for Policy and Trump’s Director of Speechwriting. Second, fearing his former minions might have gone too far, last week Trump wrote on social media, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Without knowing anything about Project 2025, he seems to know what’s in it. And, even though he and Stephen Miller were joined at the hip in their anti-immigrant war, he now seems to not know him.
Which leads me to offer this observation: Donald Trump is congenitally incapable of telling the truth. Even when faced with no reason to lie, he will lie anyway. That, coupled with his existential need for sycophantic loyalists, mirrors the Germany of the 1930s. History rhymes again.
It was Vladimir Lenin who said, “When one demands nothing but obedience, one will get nothing but obedient fools.”
