the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025:
What it is and how it is becoming reality.

From essays by Heather Cox Richardson
and other authors

You're not going to believe the craziness! I have nephews and nieces like cousins because they were born only a few years after me. I was just enough older enough they considered me wise.

Don Schriefer, Jr., technically a nephew but in reality more a cousin, called from The University of Illinois in 1973 where he was a Law Student. Heritage Foundation recruiters were on campus trying to convince people like him to join in response to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. He said only the most extremist students were buying the "Interpret the Scriptures and translate them into public policy" message being sold. We laughed off the craziness because what was being proposed was unconstitutional.

Seven decades later
six United States Supreme Court Judges were recruited and installed
because of their belief in Heritage Foundation doctrine.

Monday, July 1, 2024 the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that gives the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts. Belief in the need of a "Unified all powerful Executive" King) is Heritage Foundation doctrine.

On July 2, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, went onto Bannon's webcast War Room to hearten Bannon's right-wing followers with "We are going to win.". "We're in the process of taking this country back…. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail." "That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons," Roberts said, "the radical left…has taken over our institutions."

"[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,"
which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." he said.

Trump ran for President insisting that he had not read Project 2025 and did not know its authors. "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," he wrote in a July post on his Truth Social platform. Not a reader that may be accurate but is not true.

More than 350 people who contributed to Project 2025, at least 60 percent are linked to the incoming president, according to a list of contributors. They range from appointees and nominees from Trump's first administration, like Vought, to members of his previous transition team who served on commissions as unofficial advisers.

Roberts took over the presidency of the Heritage Foundation in 2021 and shifted it from a conservative think tank to an organization devoted to "institutionalizing Trumpism." Central to that project for Roberts has been working to bring the policies of Hungary's president Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Putin, to the United States.

Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy and replace it with what he called "illiberal democracy" or "Christian democracy." He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject "adaptable family models" in favor of "the Christian family model." He is moving Hungary away from stabilizing international systems supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

He has used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among cronies, and reworked the country's judicial system and civil service system to stack it with loyalists, has attacked immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. While Hungary still holds elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means it is impossible for the people of Hungary to remove him from power.

Trump supporters have long admired Orbán's nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy. No matter what he calls it Orbán's model is not democracy.

The tight cooperation between Heritage Foundation and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump like he is a King. Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace…

1. "[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children";
2. "[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people";
3. "[d]efend our nation's sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats"; and
4. "[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely-what our Constitution calls 'the Blessings of Liberty.'"

In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means using government power…to restore the American family" means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is "pornography" and must be banned.

In Robert'd words "Overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision accomplishing that end "is just the beginning."

Dismantling the administrative state starts from the premise that "people are policy" which explains why Trump charged Elon Musk with firing thousands of Federal employees like the 400 Air Traffic Controllers fired a few days before two aircraft collided on approach to under staffed Newark Airport. Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump's agenda in his first term, authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce of about 2 million people and replacing them with loyalists who will carry out "Unified Executive's" demands.

Project 2025 asserts the "existential need" for an authoritarian leader to dismantle the current government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and protects civil rights. Instead of the government Americans have built since 1933, Project 2025 calls for the national government to "decentralize and privatize as much as possible" leaving "the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance." It attacks embrace of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and for their willingness to work with other countries. It calls for abandoning all international partnerships and alliances. Roberts's "second American revolution," would destroy American democracy to echo a small-time dictator like Orbán and align our country with authoritarian leaders like Putin.

Trump nominee intends to make Project 2025 reality. He has installed Russell Vought, Former Head of the extremist Opus Dei Latin lic Heritage Society and author of Project 2025, to lead his Office of Management and Budget. During Trump's first term, OMB helped find money to begin building a small section of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border - a key campaign promise Trump made in 2016 - "because Congress wouldn't give him the ordinary money," Trump said Vought "knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government." Vought's vision for OMB, as presented in Project 2025, is "to basically change the plumbing so they can do whatever they want without any meaningful checks and balances" during Trump's second term.

Vought has firsthand knowledge of the OMB.. During Trump's first term, he was OMB's deputy director, acting director and, finally, is Director. During his first term Trump enlisted OMB to withhold $400 million in military aid that Congress had approved for Ukraine, as Trump and his associates tried to pressure the country to investigate Biden and his family. The move prompted the abuse-of-power case House Democrats made against Trump during his first impeachment, when Vought defied a subpoena to testify. It was he who helped President Trump craft a plan to jettison job protections for thousands of federal workers and assisted with a legally ambiguous effort to redirect congressionally appropriated foreign aid from Ukraine.

In August, Vought told a pair of British journalists posing as potential donors that the Center for Renewing America "is an organization I helped turn into the Death Star," the fictional Star Wars space station that can destroy planets, and it "is accomplishing all of the debates you are reading about."

The chapter that Vought wrote for Project 2025 details how the Office of Management and Budget could be a vehicle to advance the Christian nationalist agenda he favors - and he has not hesitated to talk about it. "I think you have to rehabilitate Christian nationalism," Vought told the British journalists at the Centre for Climate Reporting, which released video of the conversation that was recorded using hidden cameras.

In an interview with conservative activist Tucker Carlson shortly after Trump's reelection, Vought likened OMB to the "nerve center" through which a president can ensure their policy directives trickle down to the multitude of federal agencies and a civilian workforce of more than two million people. "Properly understood, [OMB] is a President's air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course," Vought wrote in Project 2025.

Some of Project 2025's recommendations include restricting abortion access and supporting a "biblically based" definition of family, because the "male-female dyad is essential to human nature," by replacing policies related to LGBTQ+ equity with those that "support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families."

It also suggests transforming the FBI into a politically motivated entity to settle scores and barring U.S. citizens from receiving federal housing assistance if they live with anyone who is not a citizen or permanent legal resident, which would serve Trump's campaign promise to take extraordinary measures to crack down on illegal immigration.

During remarks in September titled Theology of America's Statecraft: The Case for Immigration Restriction, Vought justified the separation of families and condemned so-called sanctuary cities, or those that pass laws that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities. "Failing to secure the border is a complete abdication of [the government's God give responsibility," he said.

In late 2020, as Trump's first term drew to a close, Vought helped him craft an executive order known as "Schedule F," which reclassified thousands of civil servants and, with that, stripped them of their job protections; Vought recommended that close to 90 percent of OMB's workforce be reclassified. President Joe Biden rescinded the executive order on his third day in office. Project 2025 recommends reinstating it.

Former Trump officials, campaign advisers and others in his orbit have already identified as many as 50,000 federal employees who could be fired, according to published reports. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia warned a "loyalty-based system would impede the work of the federal government, expose people to intimidation and bring people into jobs that are not qualified to do them, thus risking the American public's safety and quality of life."

Vought is among the Trump loyalists who have been open about their desire to slash the federal workforce - as a route to purge critics, improve efficiency or both.

Vought said, "There certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don't even think should exist." His language appeared to communicate an effort to ensure obedience and compliance. With the firings and layoffs, Vought said he wants to avoid having "really awesome Cabinet secretaries sitting on top of massive bureaucracies that largely don't do what they tell them to do."

Power of the Purse: During Trump's first term, OMB helped find money to begin building a small section of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border - a key campaign promise Trump made in 2016 - "because Congress wouldn't give him the ordinary money," Vought said.

When Trump announced Vought as his OMB pick, he said Vought "knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government."

This is where we are as a nation.