Adam Mossoff, a key solvency advocate for PERA, works for The Heritage Foundation. They’re responsible for Project 2025, a devastating alt-right manifesto. He has a clear bias.
Andrew Prokop 7/13 (Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. In his coverage of threats to US democracy, politicization of the Justice Department, the oddness of our electoral system, the Biden policy agenda, and much more, he’s interested in digging deep into the mechanics of how and why US politics works (or doesn’t), surfacing submerged debates, and exploring knotty complexities. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau, “Project 2025: The myths and the facts,” VOX, July 13, 2024, https://www.vox.com/politics/360318/project-2025-trump-policies-abortion-divorce ) //AI-VB
The story of Project 2025 starts with the Heritage Foundation. Since its founding in the 1970s, Heritage has styled itself as the main think tank of the conservative movement. Its goal is to push the Republican Party toward a further right agenda so that GOP officials listen more to ideologues and hardliners, not moderates and the traditional party establishment. Heritage does this partly by crafting and advocating for policy proposals. They also try to be a sort of “administration-in-waiting” when the GOP is out of power, with experts on their payroll who can join a newly elected administration. In some ways, Project 2025 is not new: The Heritage Foundation has been releasing extremely long (and extreme) plans for what the next conservative president should do .
Yet the dynamics this time around are different, in part due to Heritage’s close ties to Trump and in part due to the unusual situation where a former president is trying to regain office.
Ordinarily, there’d be a fair amount of ambiguity about who the next president would appoint to his administration if elected. But Trump has been president before, and when he was, he heavily relied on Heritage appointees. (After his unexpected 2016 win, he needed to quickly staff an administration and come up with policies, and was and .)
About two-thirds of authors and editors involved in Project 2025’s plan served in the Trump administration. HUD Secretary Ben Carson, acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, deputy White House chief of staff Rick Dearborn, former OMB director Russ Vought, and top DHS official Ken Cuccinelli contribute chapters, just to name a few. And John McEntee, the White House personnel director who officials viewed as disloyal to Trump, has a key role in for the project. ( that at least 140 former Trump administration officials were in some way involved in it.)
Trump also the Heritage Foundation at an April 2022 event, calling it a “great group” that would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do” when “the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” (Obviously, that conflicts with that he has “no idea who is behind” it and that he has “nothing to do with them.”) Much of the plan also seems crafted to appeal to Trump specifically, and there’s tons of stuff in it that he openly supports. Having said all that, it does appear true that Project 2025 was crafted without Trump’s personal involvement. It was put together , before Trump had actually won the nomination again, and while Heritage was cultivating close ties to Florida Gov. too. It’s a plan for what movement conservatives, including many close Trump allies, hope to do, but he hasn’t necessarily signed onto all of it.