Latest news with #Dans
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The man who led Project 2025 gives his assessment of Trump's first 100 days
The former head of Project 2025 believes an 'unchained' President Donald Trump has made immense progress during the first 100 days of his second term toward undoing liberal gains dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. But Paul Dans — who led the effort to produce a detailed conservative transition plan and policy blueprint that was at the center of last year's presidential election — believes the president needs an influx of new attorneys to fight for his policies in court. Those battles, Dans told NBC News, will shape the next 100 days. 'If Roosevelt had the New Deal, this is what I would think of as Trump's real deal,' Dans said. 'This is deconstructing the administrative state and walking back a lot of this progressive architecture that had been built up by FDR.' 'What's coming next is really a squaring off with the courts,' Dans said, adding, 'This is going to reach, certainly, a boiling point, and so look to that getting resolved.' The Dans-led Project 2025 was an effort overseen by the Heritage Foundation ahead of the 2024 campaign, which began with the basic premise of setting up a future right-wing administration to govern on Day 1 with more preparation and planning than Trump had for his first term. Much of Project 2025 centered on plans for radically restructuring the civil service, as well as providing a database of potential MAGA-inspired hires in a new administration. But it was a 900-plus-page memo, outlining many policy positions a future administration should consider, that garnered the most attention, as Democrats put it at the center of their campaign. Even though many of the policies included in the document mirrored policies Trump pledged to enact in his own plan, Agenda47, the president and his campaign distanced themselves from Project 2025 on the trail. And Dans, who worked in Trump's first administration, was forced out of his position over the summer as anger from the campaign intensified. After Trump won, however, he hired multiple authors of the report to key positions, including Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, immigration czar Tom Homan, top trade adviser Peter Navarro and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, among others. NBC News reported during the transition that the transition team was utilizing the Project 2025 database of potential hires, too. The blueprint ultimately foreshadowed plenty of what Trump has enacted or attempted once in power. An independent tracker found that the administration has completed or taken action on roughly 40% of the material in Project 2025's blueprint. That includes everything from cutting research grants to universities to readying cuts for climate research, stripping some immigrants of Temporary Protected Status, and an all-out assault on diversity programs in government. With that in the foreground as Trump hits the 100-day mark, Dans spoke with NBC News in a pair of interviews in recent days. He doesn't believe measuring Trump's actions against Project 2025's plan 'is really accurate,' adding, 'these are, to be sure, President Trump's own policies, many of which were embodied in Project 2025.' 'It's with great excitement that I read what's going on every day and see a new step that they're taking,' Dans said. 'But to be sure, this has to get implemented. At this point, a lot of the executive orders and the like are policy pronouncements, and the real rubber is going to meet the road when it comes to implementing all these directives.' With a tightly divided Congress passing few new laws, though, a number of Trump's executive initiatives — whether they be on immigration, the civil service or federal funding — are tied up in court battles that will be key in determining just how far the president is able to go. 'Many of us always saw this as the ultimate end game, that this is where the two sides would meet,' Dans said. 'It comes down to having the right people. Ultimately, you need to have zealous advocates for MAGA in position and ready to face off with their counterparts. … To be sure, this is where all the eyes are going to go next.' 'He needs additional reinforcements on his team,' Dans said, 'as this kind of slows down into a war of attrition with the deep state, particularly on the legal front.' He added: 'As much as he can continue to get his team on the field, that's imperative.' On his Truth Social platform Monday, Trump posted that his administration has so far hired to fill more than 80% of political appointee positions in some of the largest agencies, including the departments of Justice, State, Defense and Treasury. Those positions make up a small number of the jobs in each agency, but Trump recently moved to reclassify a whole host of federal workers to make them easier to replace. The administration has already suffered some setbacks in court. The fallout over Kilmar Abrego Garcia's deportation to El Salvador began when the administration said in court filings that he was deported because of an 'administrative error.' Last week, the administration replaced its lawyers in a case challenging New York City's congestion pricing, after the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan said it mistakenly filed a memo that detailed weaknesses in the administration's argument and strategy. 'This is where the worry comes in,' Dans said. 'Is there enough of a MAGA elite among the top legal minds to meet' the administration's needs? 'I think it's really incumbent on the administration to get a lot of these good lawyers who are out in the 50 states, get them to Washington and press them into service,' Dans continued. Enhancing MAGA staffing has been front of mind for Dans for a long time, given how central deconstructing the existing federal bureaucracy was to Project 2025. That mission has been carried out by Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser who's overseen the effort dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency. 'What's elementally important is that Project 2025 identified the administrative state as the major blockade to effectuating change for the better,' Dans said. The Trump administration hasn't 'fired enough people, to be sure,' he added, describing how difficult it is to do so under existing regulations. With Trump recently moving on the policy known as Schedule F — the reclassification of some career government employees to make them easier to remove — Dans said he expects to see 'a lot more of this taking place.' Dans had plenty of praise for Musk and his effort, as the tech titan announced this month that he will soon dedicate more time to his business interests and decrease how much time he's spending in government. 'Without DOGE, I don't believe any of this would be able to be accomplished at the pace it has been,' Dans said, adding its structure remains necessary to achieve Trump's goals in the months to come. 'This is a great 100-day mark, a watershed moment in history. This is the slamming of the door on the progressive era.' But Dans did offer some caution on artificial intelligence policy, as Trump has sought to loosen restrictions around AI via executive orders while Musk and DOGE have implemented AI programs at some federal agencies. 'AI has produced this MRI of the blob, and now we can actually make connections that would have been impossible before, in a matter of a weekend, that might have taken two years of study,' Dans said, adding, 'But I do believe that AI needs to be carefully policed by the administration.' As Trump hits the 100-day mark of his administration, polling is flashing several warning signs for him on signature issues, like immigration and the economy, as deportations to a prison in El Salvador and the president's global tariffs garner headlines. Dans, though, says Trump is on target and maintains a mandate for 'sweeping change.' 'This is Trump, unchained and able to do what he promised the American people,' he said. 'There's no playbook out there for restoring the country. Much of this is intuitive to him and to others. There are going to be ups and downs. It's a long-term proposition. So there will be some short-term pain, but all for long-term gain.' Moving forward, Dans said he's eager to see more reforms at the Defense Department, including a 'large repurposing' of the agency as it sharpens its focus on Asia, which he believes is coming once there's a settlement in Ukraine. He also wants to see Trump take action on a policy he proposed during the campaign but has gotten little attention in recent months: the construction of 10 'freedom cities' on federal land. 'I always thought that was an intriguing Trump idea,' Dans said. 'It captures the imagination of everybody to build something new. He's a builder. So the first part of building is demolition, but he's going to get on to the construction phase pretty soon.' Looking ahead to 2028, Dans said there won't be a need for a Project 2029. 'We have President Trump in power now, he has a team,' Dans said. 'The premise of Project 2025 was that we needed, as conservatives, to get together. We were a herd of cats, often scratching at one another, and we needed to kind of start marching in the line. And that's what Project 2025 did.' 'And I think, not only our initiative, but other presidential transition projects really put this forward that time was of the essence,' Dans continued. 'And President Trump has certainly come out and played with an urgency that is 100% correct.' This article was originally published on
NBC News
29-04-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
The man who led Project 2025 gives his assessment of Trump's first 100 days
The former head of Project 2025 believes an 'unchained' President Donald Trump has made immense progress during the first 100 days of his second term toward undoing liberal gains dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. But Paul Dans — who led the effort to produce a detailed conservative transition plan and policy blueprint that was at the center of last year's presidential election — believes the president needs an influx of new attorneys to fight for his policies in court. Those battles, Dans told NBC News, will shape the next 100 days. 'If Roosevelt had the New Deal, this is what I would think of as Trump's real deal,' Dans said. 'This is deconstructing the administrative state and walking back a lot of this progressive architecture that had been built up by FDR.' 'What's coming next is really a squaring off with the courts,' Dans said, adding, 'This is going to reach, certainly, a boiling point, and so look to that getting resolved.' The Dans-led Project 2025 was an effort overseen by the Heritage Foundation ahead of the 2024 campaign, which began with the basic premise of setting up a future right-wing administration to govern on Day 1 with more preparation and planning than Trump had for his first term. Much of Project 2025 centered on plans for radically restructuring the civil service, as well as providing a database of potential MAGA-inspired hires in a new administration. But it was a 900-plus-page memo, outlining many policy positions a future administration should consider, that garnered the most attention, as Democrats put it at the center of their campaign. Even though many of the policies included in the document mirrored policies Trump pledged to enact in his own plan, Agenda47, the president and his campaign distanced themselves from Project 2025 on the trail. And Dans, who worked in Trump's first administration, was forced out of his position over the summer as anger from the campaign intensified. After Trump won, however, he hired multiple authors of the report to key positions, including Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, immigration czar Tom Homan, top trade adviser Peter Navarro and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, among others. NBC News reported during the transition that the transition team was utilizing the Project 2025 database of potential hires, too. The blueprint ultimately foreshadowed plenty of what Trump has enacted or attempted once in power. An independent tracker found that the administration has completed or taken action on roughly 40% of the material in Project 2025's blueprint. That includes everything from cutting research grants to universities to readying cuts for climate research, stripping some immigrants of Temporary Protected Status, and an all-out assault on diversity programs in government. With that in the foreground as Trump hits the 100-day mark, Dans spoke with NBC News in a pair of interviews in recent days. He doesn't believe measuring Trump's actions against Project 2025's plan 'is really accurate,' adding, 'these are, to be sure, President Trump's own policies, many of which were embodied in Project 2025.' 'It's with great excitement that I read what's going on every day and see a new step that they're taking,' Dans said. 'But to be sure, this has to get implemented. At this point, a lot of the executive orders and the like are policy pronouncements, and the real rubber is going to meet the road when it comes to implementing all these directives.' With a tightly divided Congress passing few new laws, though, a number of Trump's executive initiatives — whether they be on immigration, the civil service or federal funding — are tied up in court battles that will be key in determining just how far the president is able to go. 'Many of us always saw this as the ultimate end game, that this is where the two sides would meet,' Dans said. 'It comes down to having the right people. Ultimately, you need to have zealous advocates for MAGA in position and ready to face off with their counterparts. … To be sure, this is where all the eyes are going to go next.' 'He needs additional reinforcements on his team,' Dans said, 'as this kind of slows down into a war of attrition with the deep state, particularly on the legal front.' He added: 'As much as he can continue to get his team on the field, that's imperative.' Personnel is policy On his Truth Social platform Monday, Trump posted that his administration has so far hired to fill more than 80% of political appointee positions in some of the largest agencies, including the departments of Justice, State, Defense and Treasury. Those positions make up a small number of the jobs in each agency, but Trump recently moved to reclassify a whole host of federal workers to make them easier to replace. The administration has already suffered some setbacks in court. The fallout over Kilmar Abrego Garcia's deportation to El Salvador began when the administration said in court filings that he was deported because of an 'administrative error.' Last week, the administration replaced its lawyers in a case challenging New York City's congestion pricing, after the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan said it mistakenly filed a memo that detailed weaknesses in the administration's argument and strategy. 'This is where the worry comes in,' Dans said. 'Is there enough of a MAGA elite among the top legal minds to meet' the administration's needs? 'I think it's really incumbent on the administration to get a lot of these good lawyers who are out in the 50 states, get them to Washington and press them into service,' Dans continued. Enhancing MAGA staffing has been front of mind for Dans for a long time, given how central deconstructing the existing federal bureaucracy was to Project 2025. That mission has been carried out by Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser who's overseen the effort dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency. 'What's elementally important is that Project 2025 identified the administrative state as the major blockade to effectuating change for the better,' Dans said. The Trump administration hasn't 'fired enough people, to be sure,' he added, describing how difficult it is to do so under existing regulations. With Trump recently moving on the policy known as Schedule F — the reclassification of some career government employees to make them easier to remove — Dans said he expects to see 'a lot more of this taking place.' Dans had plenty of praise for Musk and his effort, as the tech titan announced this month that he will soon dedicate more time to his business interests and decrease how much time he's spending in government. 'Without DOGE, I don't believe any of this would be able to be accomplished at the pace it has been,' Dans said, adding its structure remains necessary to achieve Trump's goals in the months to come. 'This is a great 100-day mark, a watershed moment in history. This is the slamming of the door on the progressive era.' But Dans did offer some caution on artificial intelligence policy, as Trump has sought to loosen restrictions around AI via executive orders while Musk and DOGE have implemented AI programs at some federal agencies. 'AI has produced this MRI of the blob, and now we can actually make connections that would have been impossible before, in a matter of a weekend, that might have taken two years of study,' Dans said, adding, 'But I do believe that AI needs to be carefully policed by the administration.' 'Short-term pain, but all for long-term gain' As Trump hits the 100-day mark of his administration, polling is flashing several warning signs for him on signature issues, like immigration and the economy, as deportations to a prison in El Salvador and the president's global tariffs garner headlines. Dans, though, says Trump is on target and maintains a mandate for 'sweeping change.' 'This is Trump, unchained and able to do what he promised the American people,' he said. 'There's no playbook out there for restoring the country. Much of this is intuitive to him and to others. There are going to be ups and downs. It's a long-term proposition. So there will be some short-term pain, but all for long-term gain.' Moving forward, Dans said he's eager to see more reforms at the Defense Department, including a 'large repurposing' of the agency as it sharpens its focus on Asia, which he believes is coming once there's a settlement in Ukraine. He also wants to see Trump take action on a policy he proposed during the campaign but has gotten little attention in recent months: the construction of 10 ' freedom cities ' on federal land. 'I always thought that was an intriguing Trump idea,' Dans said. 'It captures the imagination of everybody to build something new. He's a builder. So the first part of building is demolition, but he's going to get on to the construction phase pretty soon.' Looking ahead to 2028, Dans said there won't be a need for a Project 2029. 'We have President Trump in power now, he has a team,' Dans said. 'The premise of Project 2025 was that we needed, as conservatives, to get together. We were a herd of cats, often scratching at one another, and we needed to kind of start marching in the line. And that's what Project 2025 did.' 'And I think, not only our initiative, but other presidential transition projects really put this forward that time was of the essence,' Dans continued. 'And President Trump has certainly come out and played with an urgency that is 100% correct.'
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Project 2025 Presidency
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. After Donald Trump won in November, I sat down to read all 922 pages of Project 2025. As I write in my new book, what I discovered was more radical and more interesting than I'd expected. It predicted much of what we've seen in the first three months of the second Trump administration—and much of what's to come, including the dismantling of federal climate research that's started to take shape in recent weeks. Paul Dans was a true believer in Donald Trump from the start, and by 2020, he had finally clawed his way to a job as a White House staffer. When Trump left office, Dans returned to private life but remained ready if the MAGA movement needed him—like the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, he said. The call came in the spring of 2022, when Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, summoned him to Washington and asked him to convene policy thinkers from across the full sweep of the American right to write an aspirational agenda for the next Republican president. The contributors Dans gathered believed that the Christian, right-wing nation they desired could come about only if Republicans stopped doing politics the way they always had and refused to accept the structure of the executive branch as it existed. They also understood that the faster a new president moved, the more he'd be able to achieve as the courts, Congress, and civil society struggled to keep up. The blueprint they produced for achieving that was Project 2025. The agenda was endlessly dissected by the press and Democrats during the election, leading Trump to angrily distance himself from it. Heritage forced Dans out in July 2024 as a sacrificial gesture. Yet these ideas have been key to the head-spinning first three months of the Trump administration, and they offer the best indications of where Trump's attention will land next. The most important tactic laid out in the plan was to transform the federal bureaucracy by firing as many civil servants as possible, changing others into political appointees, and terrifying the rest into obeisance. We are already seeing the impact: Trump has bought out, driven off, or fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and although courts have ordered some of them reinstated, he has transformed—perhaps permanently—the federal bureaucracy. The attack on the civil service was one of the best-known planks of the plan, but many of the most shocking moments of the Trump presidency so far have actually come from less prominent ideas buried across Project 2025's 922 pages. It foretold the sacking of top generals (see, for example, C. Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), branding these officials as 'Barack Obama's general officer corps' (page 88), and it said military officers had 'been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess' (page 104). The repeal of Temporary Protected Status for people from Venezuela, and the targeting of academia by slashing student visas? Those are in there, too (pages 145 and 141). An obsessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs appears throughout Project 2025; that has become a recurring theme of the Trump presidency, leading to the removal of certain webpages about Black winners of combat medals and the purging of references to the Enola Gay, the atomic bomber whose name suddenly made it vulnerable to keyword-search deletion. Trump's attempts to fire agency officials, in defiance of the law, reflect a conviction by Project 2025's architects that any restrictions on the president's hiring and firing powers inside the executive branch are unconstitutional, a position they hope to persuade the Supreme Court to bless (page 560). Even the muddled approach to tariffs of Trump's three months in office—now on, now off, now postponed—mirrors cleavages in the Republican Party that appear in Project 2025. Although Trump is a lifelong fan of protectionism, trade is one of the few areas where conservative wonks have not entirely surrendered to his view. Instead of taking a solid position, as Project 2025's authors did on most topics, they instead offered a point and counterpoint between the Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who favors aggressive tariffs on China, and a pro-free-trade voice. As for what comes next, the text suggests two major things to watch. One is an end to any policies that acknowledge climate change, and to any federal climate research. Already, the Defense Department has canceled climate work, NASA has fired its chief scientist, NOAA has laid off hundreds of workers, and the EPA has plans to fire hundreds more, but even these steep cuts are likely only the start. Earlier this month, Politico reported on an Office of Management and Budget memo proposing an evisceration of NOAA that closely mirrors Project 2025's proposals. Unlike some on the right, Project 2025 doesn't treat climate change as a hoax, but it does view these programs as an impediment to the unfettered exploitation of fossil fuels, especially on federal land, that they want. The second is a more organized campaign to promote conservative gender norms, traditional families, and Christian morality. Trump has already moved to limit transgender rights, but the Project 2025 agenda is much wider, aiming to return the United States to a country of married families with male breadwinners and female caregivers. The authors also want to ban abortion nationally, though Trump has shown little enthusiasm for the idea. Though he's content to let states strictly limit abortion, he's attuned to how unpopular overturning Roe v. Wade was outside of his base. Even if Trump won't act, the authors of Project 2025 have ideas for how to chip away at abortion access. They want to revoke federal approval for abortion drugs and criminalize mailing them, and they envision wide-ranging federal surveillance of abortion at the state level. To bolster traditional families, they want to pay caregivers to remain at home, nudge single fathers toward marriage, and restructure welfare programs to reward married couples. Taken together, these moves will try to replicate an idealized vision of pre–Roe v. Wade America. 'We had hoped, those of us who worked putting together Project 2025, that the next conservative president would seize the day, but Trump is seizing every minute of every hour,' Dans told Politico last month. Though Dans has not joined the administration, many of the people involved in Project 2025 have landed top jobs, including Russ Vought, head of OMB; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. If Dans's ouster from Heritage last summer seemed like a defeat, it was only a temporary one. When Politico asked him to assess the administration's progress in enacting Project 2025's agenda, he was euphoric. 'It's actually way beyond my wildest dreams,' he said. Thinking about Project 2025 as simply a laundry list of management tweaks and policy proposals is a mistake. The authors set out to turbocharge the Trump administration and reshape the executive branch, but their ambitions are much bigger. Their goal is to transform American society in their image. So far, everything is going according to plan. Related: The top goal of Project 2025 is still to come. Trump's assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child's play. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: 'This is not how we do science, ever.' Congressional Republicans might set off the debt bomb. Radio Atlantic: Elon Musk's luck runs out. Today's News President Donald Trump posted 'Vladimir, STOP!' in response to Russia's deadliest attack on Kyiv in months. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to return a second migrant deported to El Salvador, whose removal violated a previous settlement agreement. The gunman in the 2022 Highland Park shooting was sentenced to seven life sentences. He killed seven people and wounded dozens of others during an Independence Day parade in Illinois. Dispatches Time-Travel Thursdays: When the critic Francis Davis pronounced judgment on music, it carried a great deal of weight, David A. Graham writes. Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read The 'Profound' Experience of Seeing a New Color By Ross Andersen The color 'olo' can't be found on a Pantone color chart. It can be experienced only in a cramped 9-by-13 room in Northern California. That small space, in a lab on the UC Berkeley campus, contains a large contraption of lenses and other hardware on a table. To see olo, you need to scootch up to the table, chomp down on a bite plate, and keep your head as steady as you can. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic Musk's high-tech polygamy is a dead end. The Supreme Court's 'selective proceduralism' would suffocate the Constitution. Trump is attempting to use wartime powers in the United States. Heads, Ukraine loses. Tails, Russia wins. Culture Break Examine. The happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks shares three principles to help you decide whether to go to college. Go down a rabbit hole. Celebrity legal disputes are juicier than gossip, less stressful than true crime, and unavoidable on social media, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Project 2025 Presidency
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. After Donald Trump won in November, I sat down to read all 922 pages of Project 2025. As I write in my new book, what I discovered was more radical and more interesting than I'd expected. It predicted much of what we've seen in the first three months of the second Trump administration—and much of what's to come, including the dismantling of federal climate research that's started to take shape in recent weeks. Paul Dans was a true believer in Donald Trump from the start, and by 2020, he had finally clawed his way to a job as a White House staffer. When Trump left office, Dans returned to private life but remained ready if the MAGA movement needed him—like the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, he said. The call came in the spring of 2022, when Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, summoned him to Washington and asked him to convene policy thinkers from across the full sweep of the American right to write an aspirational agenda for the next Republican president. The contributors Dans gathered believed that the Christian, right-wing nation they desired could come about only if Republicans stopped doing politics the way they always had and refused to accept the structure of the executive branch as it existed. They also understood that the faster a new president moved, the more he'd be able to achieve as the courts, Congress, and civil society struggled to keep up. The blueprint they produced for achieving that was Project 2025. The agenda was endlessly dissected by the press and Democrats during the election, leading Trump to angrily distance himself from it. Heritage forced Dans out in July 2024 as a sacrificial gesture. Yet these ideas have been key to the head-spinning first three months of the Trump administration, and they offer the best indications of where Trump's attention will land next. The most important tactic laid out in the plan was to transform the federal bureaucracy by firing as many civil servants as possible, changing others into political appointees, and terrifying the rest into obeisance. We are already seeing the impact: Trump has bought out, driven off, or fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and although courts have ordered some of them reinstated, he has transformed—perhaps permanently—the federal bureaucracy. The attack on the civil service was one of the best-known planks of the plan, but many of the most shocking moments of the Trump presidency so far have actually come from less prominent ideas buried across Project 2025's 922 pages. It foretold the sacking of top generals (see, for example, C. Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), branding these officials as 'Barack Obama's general officer corps' (page 88), and it said military officers had 'been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess' (page 104). The repeal of Temporary Protected Status for people from Venezuela, and the targeting of academia by slashing student visas? Those are in there, too (pages 145 and 141). An obsessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs appears throughout Project 2025; that has become a recurring theme of the Trump presidency, leading to the removal of certain webpages about Black winners of combat medals and the purging of references to the Enola Gay, the atomic bomber whose name suddenly made it vulnerable to keyword-search deletion. Trump's attempts to fire agency officials, in defiance of the law, reflect a conviction by Project 2025's architects that any restrictions on the president's hiring and firing powers inside the executive branch are unconstitutional, a position they hope to persuade the Supreme Court to bless (page 560). Even the muddled approach to tariffs of Trump's three months in office—now on, now off, now postponed—mirrors cleavages in the Republican Party that appear in Project 2025. Although Trump is a lifelong fan of protectionism, trade is one of the few areas where conservative wonks have not entirely surrendered to his view. Instead of taking a solid position, as Project 2025's authors did on most topics, they instead offered a point and counterpoint between the Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who favors aggressive tariffs on China, and a pro-free-trade voice. As for what comes next, the text suggests two major things to watch. One is an end to any policies that acknowledge climate change, and to any federal climate research. Already, the Defense Department has canceled climate work, NASA has fired its chief scientist, NOAA has laid off hundreds of workers, and the EPA has plans to fire hundreds more, but even these steep cuts are likely only the start. Earlier this month, Politico reported on an Office of Management and Budget memo proposing an evisceration of NOAA that closely mirrors Project 2025's proposals. Unlike some on the right, Project 2025 doesn't treat climate change as a hoax, but it does view these programs as an impediment to the unfettered exploitation of fossil fuels, especially on federal land, that they want. The second is a more organized campaign to promote conservative gender norms, traditional families, and Christian morality. Trump has already moved to limit transgender rights, but the Project 2025 agenda is much wider, aiming to return the United States to a country of married families with male breadwinners and female caregivers. The authors also want to ban abortion nationally, though Trump has shown little enthusiasm for the idea. Though he's content to let states strictly limit abortion, he's attuned to how unpopular overturning Roe v. Wade was outside of his base. Even if Trump won't act, the authors of Project 2025 have ideas for how to chip away at abortion access. They want to revoke federal approval for abortion drugs and criminalize mailing them, and they envision wide-ranging federal surveillance of abortion at the state level. To bolster traditional families, they want to pay caregivers to remain at home, nudge single fathers toward marriage, and restructure welfare programs to reward married couples. Taken together, these moves will try to replicate an idealized vision of pre– Roe v. Wade America. 'We had hoped, those of us who worked putting together Project 2025, that the next conservative president would seize the day, but Trump is seizing every minute of every hour,' Dans told Politico last month. Though Dans has not joined the administration, many of the people involved in Project 2025 have landed top jobs, including Russ Vought, head of OMB; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. If Dans's ouster from Heritage last summer seemed like a defeat, it was only a temporary one. When Politico asked him to assess the administration's progress in enacting Project 2025's agenda, he was euphoric. 'It's actually way beyond my wildest dreams,' he said. Thinking about Project 2025 as simply a laundry list of management tweaks and policy proposals is a mistake. The authors set out to turbocharge the Trump administration and reshape the executive branch, but their ambitions are much bigger. Their goal is to transform American society in their image. So far, everything is going according to plan. Today's News President Donald Trump posted 'Vladimir, STOP!' in response to Russia's deadliest attack on Kyiv in months. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to return a second migrant deported to El Salvador, whose removal violated a previous settlement agreement. The gunman in the 2022 Highland Park shooting was sentenced to seven life sentences. He killed seven people and wounded dozens of others during an Independence Day parade in Illinois. Dispatches Time-Travel Thursdays: When the critic Francis Davis pronounced judgment on music, it carried a great deal of weight, David A. Graham writes. Evening Read The 'Profound' Experience of Seeing a New Color By Ross Andersen The color 'olo' can't be found on a Pantone color chart. It can be experienced only in a cramped 9-by-13 room in Northern California. That small space, in a lab on the UC Berkeley campus, contains a large contraption of lenses and other hardware on a table. To see olo, you need to scootch up to the table, chomp down on a bite plate, and keep your head as steady as you can. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic Culture Break Examine. The happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks shares three principles to help you decide whether to go to college. Go down a rabbit hole. Celebrity legal disputes are juicier than gossip, less stressful than true crime, and unavoidable on social media, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. Play our daily crossword.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Governor establishes first-of-its-kind 'superfund' program to combat pressing global issue: 'It will be interesting to see how the courts handle this'
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed legislation creating a Climate Superfund that will collect $75 billion from oil companies over the next 25 years to address climate emergency costs. As The Good Men Project reported, the new law notes a connection between pollution and extreme weather events, using scientific studies to determine financial responsibility. It will help fund infrastructure like coastal wetland restoration, energy-efficient cooling systems, and improved stormwater drainage without burdening taxpayers. This practical approach comes as climate-related repairs are projected to cost New York households over $65,000 each by 2050. The law standardizes emissions calculations, with major polluters facing significant financial responsibility. For instance, Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company, will pay $640 million every year for its pollution between 2000 and 2020. This development has promising potential to spread across the country. Vermont has already enacted similar legislation, and Maryland, Massachusetts, and California are exploring their own versions. This growing movement signals a turning point for long-term dirty fuel investments, which are becoming increasingly risky financial liabilities compared to clean energy alternatives. The shift combines environmental protection with straightforward economic logic. Despite the ESG bubble's flawed approach, the clean economy keeps gaining strength. Money that once funded climate damage will instead support resilient infrastructure, creating jobs and reducing costs for average Americans. While the industry pushes back, the financial signals are clear: The sunset of the dirty fuel era has begun. "These kinds of laws, which are likely to spread rapidly among other states and around the world, serve to deter those who invest in the destruction of the planet because they will anticipate huge losses," said blogger Enrique Dans in his analysis of the legislation. According to Dans, the American Petroleum Institute, representing some 600 industry members, criticized the law as "a punitive tax on U.S. energy" and indicated it is "evaluating its legal options in this regard." Should the government be able to control how we heat our homes? Definitely Only if it saves money I'm not sure No way Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. "It will be interesting to see how the courts handle this," noted Dans. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
