All posts tagged "project 2025"

Project 2025's next plan shocks other Heritage Foundation members

The conservative group behind the Project 2025 is about to propose a sweeping change to domestic economic policy to explicitly encourage married heterosexual couples to have more children.

The right-wing Heritage Foundation will ask lawmakers to steer money away from Head Start and other child care programs to fund government-seeded savings accounts specifically meant to encourage parents to stay home and raise children, reported the Washington Post.

“For family policy to succeed, old orthodoxies must be re-examined and innovative approaches embraced, but more than that, we need to mobilize a nation to meet this moment,” states a draft of the paper, which was sent to Heritage police experts by the think tank's domestic policy vice president, Roger Severino.

A five-page summary of the forthcoming position paper titled “We Must Save the American Family" calls for “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family,” which represents a major break away from its longstanding ideals of limited government and free-market conservatism and toward the "pronatalist" movement supported by Vice President JD Vance and Heritage President Kevin Roberts.

"I want more babies in the United States of America," Vance said in his first public speech in office.

“It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family," Roberts wrote in the introduction to Project 2025, which has served as a blueprint for President Donald Trump's second term.

The apparent shift in priorities has caught some at the institute off guard, with one person comparing the policies to "eugenics" and another calling the policies "'social engineering' that would reverse a half century of progress toward gender equality."

“That paper is not a compromise between the limited government folks and the big government folks,” said that person. “It is an outright steamrolling of the limited government folks.”

“Going back 50 years?” the person added. “I wouldn’t want to go back 50 years.”

'Fire him': Trump urged to 'immediately' axe official over eyebrow-raising crack

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded the White House fire budget director Russ Vought over a crack he made at a breakfast Thursday morning, according to Politico.

Vought is the controversial author of Project 2025, which Democrats have called a "right-wing plot to undermine democracy."

Vought told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast that the government funding process should be "less bipartisan," according to the report.

“Donald Trump should fire Russell Vought immediately before he destroys our democracy,” Schumer said, adding that if the White House attempted to "walk back" Vought's comments because they believed they were wrong, "all the more reason they should fire him.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) posted about the incident to social media, writing, "Trump's budget chief, Russ Vought, has said he wants the appropriations process to be LESS bipartisan. This is a man who ignores our laws and flaunts it. My message to my Republican colleagues this afternoon? STAND UP for Congress as a co-equal branch of government."

Read the Politico piece here.

Senate Dems hatch plan for all-nighter to oppose a Project 2025 architect

Senate Democrats are planning a full night of speeches in opposition to Russell Vought's nomination to head up the Office of Management and Budget.

Vought, who was instrumental in creating the right-wing to-do list "Project 2025," is expected to be confirmed in a vote Thursday evening. Democrats hope to stall the confirmation, however, by planning a marathon of speeches explaining why Vought is "dangerously unfit" for the job.

The all-nighter is being led by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), as well as Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Patty Murray (D-WA), Gary Peters (D-MI), and Brian Schatz (D-HI). The speeches got underway shortly after 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday.

According to a Senate release posted online by journalist David Corn, "As the architect of the radical Project 2025, Vought's proposals to slash federal funding will threaten Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Vought will also continue to carry out President Donald Trump's illegal federal funding cuts, stopping taxpayer dollars from supporting local schools, police departments, community health centers, food pantries, firefighters, and other vital programs."

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Sen. Murray posted a video to social media making her case against Vought.

"Russ Vought—Trump's nominee to manage our nation's budget—is an abortion abolitionist, meaning he supports *prosecuting abortion as homicide and putting women in prison* even in cases of rape or when the mother's life is at risk. He's an extremist who has NO place in government," Murray said.

CNN reported, "Democrats have been sounding the alarm on Vought’s ties to Project 2025, and his insistence that the 2020 election was 'rigged,' for weeks, but their calls for Trump to pull his nomination only grew after OMB released a memo last week freezing federal funding. This memo was eventually rescinded, but Democrats called it a warning sign for how Vought would run the office. OMB plays a key role in enacting the president’s agenda."

'Some voters feel betrayed' as Trump gives 'middle finger' to campaign promises: analyst

Donald Trump promised during his presidential campaign that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, and wanted nothing to do with it, but his embrace of figures close to the conservative plan to overhaul the federal government could be upsetting some of his voters, according to a political analyst.

Alexi McCammond, who serves as an opinion editor for the Washington Post and has previously commented on Trump's relationship to the MAGA base, appeared on MSNBC on Saturday. The host, Alex Witt, asked about Trump appointing those with close ties to Project 2025.

"Several of the latest picks, they have direct ties to Project 2025, in spite of Trump distancing himself, saying he didn't know what it was about during the campaign," Witt said. "I'm curious your interpretation and could this all be theoretical as some Republicans say? I mean, not even to be specifically applied."

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"No, I mean, it's remarkable because I feel like at least some voters might feel betrayed by this," McCammond replied. "As you mentioned, Donald Trump straight up said on the campaign trail many times, like I have no idea what Project 2025 is, I have nothing to do with that, that is not my campaign. So he created a healthy amount of distance between himself and his campaign between Project 2025 even though folks had known the ties that existed between the personnel and policy and ideology behind the things laid out was obviously informed by Donald Trump and his Republican brand of politics."

She continued, saying Trump is "continuing to, I think, Mike and Jim and Axios put it this way, give people the middle finger in choosing folks that are controversial picks or that go directly against what he said time and again on the trail because he will do what he wants at the end of the day. And if there's something we all know well, especially after winning the presidency again and facing federal criminal charges and more allegations of assault from different women among many other things, Trump only feels more emboldened to do what he wants to do. It's worth noting Russ Vought who you put on the screen said we're living in a post constitutional society. So that's kind of alarming."

Watch below or click the link here.

'We told you so': Trump team scouring Project 2025 database for political appointees

Donald Trump's transition team has been using the Project 2025 database to begin filling the ranks of its political appointees for the next administration, according to a new report Friday.

The former president and his allies attempted to distance themselves from the politically toxic blueprint for a right-wing restructure the federal government, but he has already tapped several of the plan's architects to serve in key roles and, according to a source, looked into filling lower-profile positions with its recommended appointees, reported NBC News.

“There’s a lot of positions to fill and we continue to send names over, including ones from the database as they are conservative, qualified and vetted,” said the source, who worked on Project 2025. “Hard to find 4,000 solid people so we are happy to help.”

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That person said officials overseeing plans for some departments and agencies have been reaching out to potential hires who were identified in the Project 2025 database, which officials have described as a conservative LinkedIn to help staff the next Republican administration.

“The transition is working to ensure great people are in position to deliver the promises made through president Trump’s common sense agenda and overwhelming victory on Election Day," said a Trump transition official when asked about the database.

Plenty of Trump policies overlapped with Project 2025 recommendations – including mass deportations and drastic cuts to the federal bureaucracy – but the blueprint's call to ban pornography and break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration differed from the campaign messaging.

“Very, very conservative,” Trump said at a campaign event in July. “Sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right. They came up with this. I don’t know what it is. … Then you read some of these things and they are seriously extreme. But I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Solid majorities of voters consistently expressed negative views of the Heritage Foundation project, while almost none said they viewed it positively, but Democrats say voters are getting the government they warned about before the election.

“It’s easy to say ‘we told you so,’ but more importantly, we now know what they’re going to do, so it’s on Democrats to decide how to fight back,” said Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. “Which is exactly what I’m doing.”

Trump appoints Project 2025 author to be chairman of the FCC

Donald Trump on Sunday announced that he has nominated a Project 2025 author to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Trump, who earlier in the day sought an investigation into a political pollster, said in a statement that he has chosen Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the FCC, to be its head.

"Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans' Freedoms, and held back our economy," Trump said. "He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America's Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America."

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Trump's statement does not mention Carr's connection to Project 2025, the governance plan from which the former and incoming president has tried to distance himself since polls showed it was highly unpopular.

"Carr also wrote the FCC section of Project 2025, the agenda that the conservative Heritage Foundation sketched out for a second Trump term," according to NPR. "Trump disavowed it during the campaign but its themes have dovetailed with his public pronouncements since the election. (A call by House Democrats for Carr to be investigated for engaging in partisan activity over the report did not result in formal action. Carr said he had secured approval from FCC ethics officials to do so in his personal capacity.)"

Republicans against Trump responded to the news, simply saying, "Shocking."

'They need to be burned': Project 2025 chief calls for destruction of Boy Scouts

Kevin Roberts, the architect of the controversial Project 2025, writes in his soon-to-be-released book that he wants to conduct a "slow burn" of multiple American institutions.

The Guardian has obtained a copy of the book, which is titled "Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America," and calls for setting presumably metaphorical fire to a wide variety of institutions that are insufficiently right wing.

"Many of America’s institutions have been completely hollowed out," Roberts contends. "Decadent and rootless, these institutions serve only as shelter for our corrupt elite. Meanwhile, they block out the light and suck up the nutrients necessary for new American institutions to grow. For America to flourish again, they don’t need to be reformed; they need to be burned."

Roberts's list of institutions in need of a fiery cleanse includes both traditional conservative bogeymen such as the media and Ivy League universities but also some institutions that were once seen as staunchly conservative, including the FBI, "80% of ‘Catholic’ higher education," and even "The Boy Scouts of America."

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Also on Roberts's list is the asset management firm BlackRock, which The Guardian notes "has been a key investor in Trump Media & Technology Group, the president-elect’s social media company."

The Guardian also says that Roberts's obsession with fire is evident throughout the entire book, as he offers philosophical musings on the virtues of burning things.

"That’s the funny thing about fire. It is so fleeting, a flame flickering from moment to moment, yet in its evanescence, it is eternal," he writes at one point. "Of all the elements, fire is most associated with transformation, renewal, and change. You can’t have a blaze without some kind of sacrificial transformation of fuel into fire. Yet precisely for this reason, fire demands an attention to continuity. Unlike any of the other elements, fire dies … a fire must be continually tended.”

Billionaire Timothy Mellon has poured $165 million into 2024 elections — mostly for Trump

This story was originally published by OpenSecrets.

Timothy Mellon, heir to Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Mellon, has continued to pour tens of millions into the campaigns of former President Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Republican congressional candidates in 2024.

Mellon has pumped over $165 million into the 2024 election, making him the top donor fueling outside spending groups this year. Mellon is known as a “guardian angel donor,” a term given to contributors who are a political group’s top donor and account for more than 40% of the group’s funding.

In July, Mellon made a $50 million cash infusion to pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc., new Federal Election Commission filings show. This brings his total contributions to the group to $125 million this election cycle, including a $50 million check he wrote to the super PAC the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies.

Mellon’s latest $50 million contribution accounts for over 90% of what MAGA, Inc. raised in July. The super PAC ended the month with about $124.5 million cash on hand.

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Mellon’s first major foray into federal elections was during the 2020 cycle, when he poured $60.1 million into federal political committees supporting Republican candidates, including $20 million to pro-Trump super PAC America First Action. With two months to go until the November election, Mellon has more than doubled his giving in 2024.

This outpouring of support for conservative organizations was not always the norm for Mellon, who once backed groups with a focus on environmental, womens' rights and Native American rights. Timothy Mellon is an heir to his grandfather Andrew Mellon’s dynastic fortune, which positioned the Mellons as the 34th richest family in America, as of February 2024.

Andrew Mellon served as the U.S. Secretary of Treasury from 1921-1932 and was known for authoring policies during the Coolidge administration that reduced corporate taxes and increased revenue following World War I. Before entering politics, Andrew Mellon commanded a vast industrial empire, spanning banking, oil, coal, aluminum and shipping.

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Aside from his recent multimillion-dollar donations, Timothy Mellon is known to maintain a low profile. It is impossible to find more than one or two pictures of his face on the internet.

Mellon has been criticized for stances taken in his personal autobiography, where he called US safety net programs a “slavery redux” responsible for making black people “even more belligerent.”

Independent presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., whose hybrid PAC American Values 2024 received $25 million from Mellon earlier this year, is quoted on the book’s back cover, praising Mellon as a “maverick entrepreneur.” Kennedy faced allegations of being a "spoiler" candidate who could siphon votes from major party candidates before suspending his campaign on Aug. 23. and endorsing Trump.

The bulk of Mellon’s public political donations were made in the last three years. The top five all-time recipients of Mellon’s federal political donations are MAGA Inc., Congressional Leadership Fund, American Values 2024, Senate Leadership Fund and Sentinel Action Fund — which is aligned with the Heritage Foundation supporting Project 2025.

The Congressional Leadership Fund and Senate Leadership Fund are super PACs aligned with Republican leadership in their respective chambers of Congress, and dedicated to electing GOP candidates to Capitol Hill. During the 2022 midterms, the Congressional Leadership Fund spent over $227 million to bolster Republican candidates, with a total of $66 million spent opposing 23 candidates who ended up losing.

The hybrid PAC has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Republican congressional candidates this cycle, including Rep. Derek Merrin (R-Ohio) and Rep. Laurie Buck (R-N.C.), and over $5 million to oppose Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.).

While the vast majority of Mellon’s contributions are directed toward federal elections, he made one state-level contribution of $1 million earlier this year to a group called Fair Courts America in Wisconsin that opposes court-packing and prosecutors they claim have received support from Democratic megadonor George Soros.

“Fair Courts America will fight woke judicial activism and defend our courts,” its website reads.

Before 2018, Mellon had not made any public federal contributions exceeding one million dollars. However, it is possible that he might have given more donations in the past through dark money groups, which would allow him to preserve his anonymity.

Aug. 24, 2024: This article was updated to reflect Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s campaign suspension.

Project 2025: What scares Democratic delegates the most

CHICAGO — Saturday Night Live star alumnus Kenan Thompson and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis both appeared on the Democratic National Convention stage Wednesday night carrying a comically oversized book.

That prop, used throughout the third night of the convention, was intended to represent Project 2025, the controversial “presidential transition plan” from conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, that lays out a plan to overhaul the government with extremely conservative policies following a Republican presidential win.

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Thompson performed a sketch where he called out specific pages in the book. He told an OB/GYN doctor, a diabetes patient, LGBTQ+ woman and a civil servant how their lives would change under the plan.

Polis called the plan “Donald Trump’s roadmap to ban abortion in all 50 states” and noted it also calls for the governmental power to limit access to contraception and in-vitro fertilization.

“Project 2025 would turn the entire federal government and bureaucracy into a massive machine. It would weaponize it to control our reproductive and personal choices,” Polis said.

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But within the sprawling document, what single item scares Democrats more than any other?

Democratic delegates from around the country shared with Raw Story what parts of Project 2025 raise the most concerns for their personal lives.

“What concerns me number one is that my husband is an employee of the government for a large agency and that is one of the targeted areas,” said Carole Cadue-Blackwood, a Kansas delegate.

Kansas delegates Gina Spade and Carole Cadue-Blackwood (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

Cadue-Blackwood, who identifies as an indigenous person, said she also is concerned about “taking care of our elders, that should be paramount.”

“As a gay man, the fact that they want to fundamentally change my right to marriage, the ability for workplaces to discriminate against me, restaurants to discriminate [against] me, personally, that's a huge issue for me,” said Guy Cecil, a delegate from Washington, D.C., and longtime Democratic political operative.

Guy Cecil, Washington, D.C. delegate (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

Cecil also said he has a Black niece and nephew who would have “fewer rights than they did when they were born,” under Project 2025.

“There's a lot of things that are troublesome, but the reality is, it's their overall approach to creating essentially an autocratic government that wants to have control over every aspect of our lives, which is ironic given that’s their argument against Democrats,” he said.

Mayra Rivera-Vazquez, a South Carolina delegate, said the deportations of immigrants proposed in the plan are of most concern to her as a Latina.

Mayra Rivera-Vazquez, a South Carolina delegate (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

“We’re not taking jobs from no one. We’re coming here to achieve the American Dream, so everybody deserves a chance to thrive,” Rivera-Vazquez said.

Gina Spade, a Kansas delegate, was worried about the Department of Education and other civil servants who could lose their jobs if they don’t support a Trump administration.

“I used to be a federal employee and the idea that they can just replace people who gained expertise, worked for years on these issues, especially the scientific issues, just is crazy, really harms the country,” Spade said.

Tony Vauss, a New Jersey delegate and mayor of Irvington, N.J., said the scariest part of the plan was it being “supposedly drafted in secret.”

Tony Vauss, a New Jersey delegate and mayor of Irvington, N.J. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

“There's so many different aspects of the whole 900-plus pages that is scary for democracy, is scary for the future of this country,” Vauss said.

Trump disavowed Project 2025 last month, saying he knows nothing about it or who is behind it.

"President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” said Trump campaign advisers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, in a statement on July 30. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign— it will not end well for you."

The Trump campaign acknowledged Raw Story’s questions about Project 2025 but did not respond to them.

The Project 2025 website notes that Paul Dans and Spencer Chretien, who served in the Trump administration and advised the president, are leading the project. The website also says historically “the Trump administration relied heavily on Heritage’s ‘Mandate’ for policy guidance, embracing nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office.”

Vauss doesn’t buy Trump’s alleged ignorance about the Heritage Foundation’s plan.

“For Donald Trump, everything is a means to an end,” Vauss said. “People discovered it. He wanted to back away from it, so I really don't trust anything he says.”

GOP said to be 'tearing their hair out' trying to contain 'radioactive' Project 2025

Staffers at the Heritage Foundation are reportedly feeling the heat for their work on Project 2025, the highly controversial right-wing blueprint for governance under a second Trump administration.

NOTUS reports that "Republicans have been tearing their hair out over the best way to handle the Project 2025 controversy," which the publication writes has become "politically radioactive."

The fear about Project 2025 became more acute in recent weeks when former President Donald Trump tried to completely distance himself from it, despite the fact that the 900-plus page policy document was written by many of his own former administration officials.

Now one source tells NOTUS that Trump may be so angry about Project 2025 that they fear it will harm the Heritage Foundation's ability to influence policy in a second Trump White House.

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“There came a point at which people realized, ‘Oh, you might have actually done something that jeopardizes Heritage’s influence in the next administration,'" this source explained. "People are legitimately worried."

Brian Darling, a GOP operative and former Heritage director of government relations, was struck by how stridently Trump has tried to shield himself from the project.

“I was not surprised that he didn’t want to be associated with it,” he said. “But I didn’t understand why the tone was so harsh and over the top.”

NOTUS notes that Democrats have also succeeded in putting Republicans on the defensive on the project, which calls for eliminating executive agencies' independence and putting them under the direct control of the president, among other controversial measures.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) told NOTUS that making Project 2025 politically toxic with voters has been a breeze because they don't have to exaggerate anything about the document's radical proposals, such as having the Food and Drug Administration rescind authorization of the abortion drug mifepristone.

“We’re not trying to mislead anyone,” Huffman further explained. “We’re showing them the 920-page radical blueprint that these guys were stupid enough to publish.”