Trump, Project 2025 and the plan to remake government

USA Today

16-05-2025

Trump, Project 2025 and the plan to remake government | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on May 15, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: For over 40 years, the conservative Washington think tank Heritage Foundation has issued a 'Mandate for Leadership' to guide incoming Republican administrations. The centerpiece of its latest version is Project 2025, a roughly 900-page blueprint created with input from more than 100 conservative groups. It outlines how President Donald Trump's second administration could reshape the federal government. What are the goals of Project 2025 and what roadmap does it lay out for deconstructing the administrative state? Author David A. Graham, a staff writer with The Atlantic, is out with a new book on this very topic. 'The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America,' is on bookshelves now. He joins us on The Excerpt to discuss whether or not Trump's policy choices align with Project 2025 so far and what might lie ahead.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here
Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, May 15th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. For over 40 years, beginning with Ronald Reagan's presidency, the Conservative Washington Think Tank Heritage Foundation has issued a mandate for leadership to guide incoming Republican administrations. The centerpiece of its latest version is Project 2025, a roughly 900-page blueprint created with input for more than 100 conservative groups.
It outlines how President Donald Trump's second administration could reshape the federal government. What are the goals of Project 2025 and what roadmap does it lay out for deconstructing the administrative state? During his campaign Donald Trump disavowed any ties to Project 2025, but have his policy choices so far aligned with it. Author David A. Graham, a staff writer with the Atlantic, is out with a new book on this very topic, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America is on Bookshelves now. David, thank you for joining me.
David A. Graham:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
What can you tell us about the Heritage Foundation and is what's proposed in this policy paper radically different from the traditional conservative push for limited government?
David A. Graham:
Heritage is, as you suggested, a long-running think tank. So it was founded in the mid-1970s. And at the time the founders believed that the Republican Party was too enthralled to a kind of Eisenhower Republicanism, which was fiscally conservative but not socially conservative enough. And they wanted to do both of those things. And it's waxed and waned over the years. And I think this Project 2025 was partly a bid to reclaim some influence in the movement by setting the agenda for the next Republican administration.
Trump, Project 2025 and the plan to remake government
The goals of Project 2025 and its roadmap for deconstructing the administrative state.
I think if you look at the policies, some of them are in fact in line with a traditional Heritage Foundation approach. But I think what really sets this apart is the willingness to use government and use the power of government in ways that previous conservatives resisted. And in particular, that means empowering the executive branch and the president, which is something that a lot of conservatives have been wary of for really all of American history.
Dana Taylor:
There's a lot to unpack when looking at efforts to reduce the size of government. Does Project 2025 lay specific goals, for example, the number of Americans who should work for the government or the elimination of certain agencies? Is there a clear vision here in terms of overall reduction?
David A. Graham:
They have a few different avenues they pursue. So one of them is something that was called originally Schedule F at the end of the first term administration, which maybe people have heard of and has come back. And that's to convert 50,000 civil service appointments to political appointments. So that's one block. There are also plans to close, in particular the Department of Education, and to shrink some other departments of the government. And then the third big one is simply to reduce the number of civil servants, laying people off, firing them, slimming down. And that's something we've seen pursued in particular through Elon Musk's DOGE at the beginning of the second Trump administration.
Dana Taylor:
What about a specific goal for capping government spending? Which areas are in the cross hairs in Project 2025?
David A. Graham:
Across the board there's potential cuts. And they advocate for balancing the budget. They don't really lay out a plan for that or particular numbers. They simply say they would be a good thing. And in fact, they don't talk about Medicare or social security, which would be important probably for balancing the budget without raising taxes, which they do resist. But in a lot of ways they do want to cut spending. So they want to reduce the spending on education, they want to reduce spending on any number of programs, they want to cap spending on Medicaid. All of these things that would cut the spending, but they don't put numbers on most of those things.
Dana Taylor:
Does Project 2025 address the risk of instability caused by rapidly shrinking the size of government? Is instability part of the goal here more chaotic destruction than measured deconstruction?
David A. Graham:
They don't, and in fact, there's an interesting conflict where in some places they want to use the power of the federal government to do things to implement large programs, and at the same time they want to cut it. And I don't think they really reckon with how that would work. They also don't reckon with what that impact would be. And in places they simply say we think private industry would handle this better or we think that nonprofit groups would handle this better or faith-based groups.
But I don't think they really give a clear plan of how they think government services will be provided if you cut all these things. And it's particularly acute in the case, for example, of rural healthcare, which is something that rural voters have overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump and for conservative candidates in recent years, and they propose cutting these things, but they don't offer a real explanation of how they would provide any services to these people in their stead.
Dana Taylor:
You mentioned the Department of Government Efficiency, and I want to talk about the role that they play here, if any, and is what they're doing something that aligns with Project 2025 or does it go beyond?
David A. Graham:
I think it both aligns and goes beyond. So when Project 2025 was convened in 2022 and when the Mandate for Leadership document was published in 2023, Elon Musk was not even really in the Trump camp yet. So they don't contemplate that. But I think they've done a really good job of working with Musk. And in a way I think they see Trump as a means to their ends or as a vessel and in the same way. I think they've used Musk in the same way.
So Musk doesn't know a lot about government, but the people who wrote Project 2025 and who are implementing it know a ton about it and have spent a lot of time thinking about government and serving in government. And so they've pointed Musk in directions and to do the work that they wanted to do. Sometimes he does a little bit more bluntly than they might have intended and a little bit more like a bulldozer, but they seem to have found a good working relationship.
Dana Taylor:
There's now a deep focus on our three branches of government and how government functions overall. We saw a flurry of executive orders at the start of President Donald Trump's second term. How does Project 2025 align with the policies Donald Trump push through with those orders?
David A. Graham:
The first thing I'd say about balance of powers is that Project 2025 declares early on that Congress is not working well and has yielded up too many of its powers to the executive branch, which I think is a statement that a lot of Americans would agree with and a lot of experts would agree with. But their prescription is a little bit strange, which is to give more power to the executive branch. And so we've seen Trump doing that in a variety of ways. It's taking powers that have traditionally been legislative like implementing tariffs.
It's laying people off without using the congressionally mandated mechanisms for doing that. It's trying to seize control of the independent regulatory agencies, things like the FCC and FTC, which Congress has structured to be semi-independent and trying to mow through those things. And it's also using what's called the impoundment power, which is basically the power to not spend money that Congress has appropriated. That's very controversial, but the authors of Project 2025 believe that the president does have the power not to spend that money and basically to take any kind of spending and budgeting power away from Congress by doing that.
Dana Taylor:
Some political analysts have suggested that some of Trump's executive orders are really overreach in that he's already usurped some of the powers given to Congress, the power of the purse, for example. What does Project 2025 have to say on that front?
David A. Graham:
They believe that they are following their constitutional vision. So they look at some of these powers. They look, for example, at the law that bans impoundment or they look at the laws that create these independent regulatory agencies. And they believe that they're not constitutional. So this is something called the unitary executive theory, which is, if anything is part of the executive branch the president should have power over it. And so that means civil service employees should be subject to hiring and firing. That means these agencies in the executive branch should be subject to hiring and firing and follow his authority. And the same holds for the Justice Department. So in their eyes, what they're doing is in fact following the Constitution more directly than the status quo.
Dana Taylor:
David, you wrote in The Atlantic that the focus on heterosexual, married procreating couples is everywhere in Project 2025. Can you expound on that?
David A. Graham:
A lot of these moves to change executive power are in the service of a broader and larger agenda, which is to restructure American society and American life. The authors generally come from a very Christian and evangelical mindset. They believe that America was founded as a Christian nation and they believe that it's drifting away from that. They complain about, for example, a Marxist takeover of the government and society that has to be pushed back. And so they want to use all of these powers of government. They want to control the executive branch and use the departments and the agencies in order to further their vision of society.
And that is this very traditional vision. They want men who are winners. They want women at home raising children. They want a very traditional boys in blue and girls in pink vision. They want to push trans people into the closet. They want to write them out of the very language of government, in fact, with policies. And we've seen Trump do that with executive orders. And they want Christianity to be a guiding force in a lot of government policy. So, for example, they want social welfare organizations to push a biblically based vision of the family and educate recipients in that vision.
Dana Taylor:
We've seen town hall meetings and other public protests where some voters have voiced their dissent of Trump administration policies. Is public dissent addressed in Project 2025 or is the focus more on internal dissent and the so-called deep state?
David A. Graham:
Most of the focus is on internal dissent, but I think there's an implicit recognition that many of these things may be unpopular. And in fact, in the summer of 2024, the Heritage Foundation did some polling on Project 2025, and what it found is that when people knew about it they didn't like it. It was polling in the mid-teens, which is quite bad. And so they say we need to move quickly when we take office. We need to get a lot of things done in the first 100 days.
We need to get a lot of things done in the first two years before the midterm elections. Because they understand that once there is a chance for opposition parties or congressional Republicans or the courts to step in, it will slow a lot of these things down. But they're playing a long game. I think what they want to do is move the baseline for what government looks like so that when that public disapprobation comes, they're not going to be pushed back to where they were, but they're going to be starting from somewhere else.
Dana Taylor:
Staying with that, you read Project 2025 in its entirety. Given its size and scope, does it seem possible that it could be implemented in just four years?
David A. Graham:
I don't think they could implement everything in here in four years. And some of these policies I think they understand are not realistic. I mean, for example, they seek to eliminate the Federal Reserve and to replace the taxation system with a flat consumption tax. These are just such sweeping changes that they're unlikely to happen anytime soon, and they would require Congress to act. I think the most important thing for them is this shift in the executive branch? And then they have such a wide range of policies that they know they can get some of these things done and start moving government in that direction even if they don't get it all done in four years.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, David, what surprised you the most about Project 2025?
David A. Graham:
I think the two things that jumped out at me, one was, I had read a lot of Project 2025 during the campaign in bits and pieces, and it was only when I read it start to finish as a whole document that I understood what a complete vision it was for using the whole of government. The other thing that stuck out at me is where there are still cleavages in the conservative movement and in the MAGA movement, which I think are interesting.
So for example, you have a difference of opinion about tariffs with one author arguing that tariffs are an important tool for taking on China and Peter Navarro, who's now in the Trump administration, but another contributor saying tariffs will impoverish America, they're not a useful tool, and a third contributor saying trade deficits are not important. So there are these places where the interesting dissents and those are important I think, for understanding what a post-Trump Republican Party might look like and where the big cleavages will be.
Dana Taylor:
David, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
David A. Graham:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.