A key architect in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 boasted in a secretly recorded interview that he and his allies are working to "destroy" the independence of federal agencies that have been in place for decades.
CNN reports that Russell Vought, a former Trump administration official, told undercover left-wing activists that the team behind Project 2025 is working on drafting hundreds of executive orders that he argued would fundamentally change the relationship between executive brand agencies and the president of the United States.
"Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said at one point in the recording. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence."
Much of Project 2025 dealt with undoing reforms that were put in place after the resignation of President Richard Nixon to prevent presidents from using executive branch agencies as tools to attack political opponents, as Nixon allegedly did with the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service.
ALSO READ: Trump lawyers ask New York judge to delay felony sentencing until after the election
Former President Donald Trump has denied having any knowledge of Project 2025, even though multiple people who authored sections of the project's manifesto served under his first administration.
Vought also talked up plans for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, which he said would be necessary to "save" America.
"You’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said of the mass deportation plan. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”
