This Project 2025 goal is on a fast track despite Trump and Vance distancing themselves
WASHINGTON — As the Trump-Vance ticket attempts to pivot toward the middle to try and convince independent voters they’re not as radical as portrayed, Donald Trump is doing all he can to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
But that’s just on the surface.
Dig a little deeper and you’ll find the Republican Party — including Trump and vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance — is all in on some of the proposal’s more drastic recommendations, especially when it comes to slashing the federal workforce and then reshaping it in the GOP’s own image.
“I will immediately reissue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” former President Donald Trump says in a video on his 2024 campaign website. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.”
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That move alone could turn some 50,000 nonpartisan federal jobs into Trump political appointees, even as his campaign is also pledging to ship “up to 100,000 government positions” outside of the Washington, D.C., area.
The Trump campaign has also attempted to distance Vance from Project 2025 after the senator from Ohio faced criticism for writing the foreword for a forthcoming book by the project’s lead architect, Heritage President Kevin Roberts.
But Vance was an early promoter of the spirit of Project 2025 — a sweeping conservative playbook that reimagines the government in its attempt to root out “deep state” actors and replace them with the far-too-fringe-right’s wishlist in every federal agency — even before coming to Congress.
“Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Vance argued in 2021.
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Even with Trump and Vance publicly backpedaling, ProPublica recently unearthed upward of 14 hours of Project 2025 videos that are meant to be tutorials for incoming conservative staffers if Trump nets himself a second administration.
They address various topics, including, how to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests or even on how “to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” as a former Trump staffer encourages viewers.
Dismantling government now mainstream in GOP
That thinking is now mainstream in today’s Republican Party. During the GOP presidential primary, for example, even the more moderate wing of the party was taking aim at federal workers.
Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) proposed cutting 10 percent of the federal workforce. His opponent, former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), put forward a five-year term limit for government workers.
Under #TheFreedomPlan, we won’t just have term limits for politicians—we will limit bureaucrats too. No bureaucrat should hold the same position for more than five years. https://t.co/zI3H5WqL0B
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) November 22, 2023
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) went a step further.
He promised to “start slitting throats” of federal workers, including at the three agencies he vowed to eliminate: Commerce, Education and Energy. Then-candidate — and current Trump campaign surrogate — Vivek Ramaswamy advocated for slashing the jobs of 75 percent of the current federal workforce.
Key aspects of Project 2025 remain popular among Republicans in Congress, too.
“I’ve been in a business role a lot longer than I've been in the elected position, there's no doubt in my mind at any agency in the federal government, you could line them all up and probably remove every 10th one,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) — a member of the Senate Finance Committee — told Raw Story. “There would be a substantial reduction in costs but not a substantial reduction in service.”
This is the new gospel for today’s right.
“Every single organization needs to get lean. In the period of time that corporate America has gotten leaner and leaner, we've gotten fatter and fatter,” Tillis said. “We're not seeing more productivity. We're not seeing people thrilled about their customer relationship experience. So all the indicators are going in the wrong direction, in spite of the fact that we're spending more than we ever have and we have more employees than we ever did.”
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While that’s become a top talking point, it’s not based in reality.
Under President Joe Biden, the government has shed 170,000 jobs; dropping from 3.122 million federal workers in September 2020, Trump’s last year in office, to 2.952 million in September 2023, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Even so, Republicans are itching for deep cuts to the federal government as we know it.
“If you just started with discipline, it can be very easy. And through attrition you could accomplish a lot,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) — a member of the Senate Budget Committee — told Raw Story.
“Do you think you get a lot of budget savings from cutting a lot of the federal workforce?” Raw Story pressed.
“Well, let's face it, we're spending 30 percent more than we take in. Anything we spend new, we borrow 100 percent of it. Have you heard of any other place that gets by with that or where that's a good financial plan? No,” Braun said. “So sooner or later, you've got to. Whether you, say, cut mid level bureaucrats, I say, just be sane about it. You could accomplish most of it through attrition. They’ve been living high on the hog at the expense of your generation and your kids. And that's a mountain of debt.”
Republicans who haven’t studied the specifics are open to the idea.
“Well, it might not be a bad idea,” Hawley said. “Cutting the bureaucracy might not be a bad idea. A lot of these people don't do anything.”
Hawley says he’s witnessed this first hand in Missouri with an effort to clean up nuclear waste that’s poisoned a community for half a century now.
“I've just seen this in my own state with the EPA, Department of Energy and our victims of nuclear radiation. These guys are supposed to be cleaning up that pollution that has been killing people for 50 years. They haven’t done anything. It’s leading me to say, ‘Well, maybe we don't need a lot of them then,’” Hawley said.
That has Hawley looking to use agency budgets as bludgeons.
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“They’ve visited the site multiple times. They keep saying, ‘We're gonna fix it.’ Well, gosh, maybe we should just cut your department in half, and that would concentrate the mind,” Hawley said as he snapped his fingers. “I mean, apparently, all of y'all are not necessary. So I'm generally pretty open to having fewer people collecting a government bureaucrat paycheck and more actually doing stuff.”
To Hawley and many Republicans, Vance’s idea of a partisan workforce would also make it more responsive.
“There's no question that the government bureaucracy is hugely bloated, and my concern is, it's not really responsive to anybody. Doesn't answer Congress. Doesn't really answer to the president. And yet they kind of run the country," Hawley said. “Anything we can do to fix that — where they're actually accountable — will be a good deal, but I don't know the specifics of his proposal.”
Careful what you wish for
Conservative organizations and elected officials are eager for the party to aggressively start unwinding the administrative state the second Trump takes his oath, which some see as a sort of redux of what Trump tried to do with his executive order in his first administration.
“I think that's fine,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) — who served three terms in the House before moving to the Senate in 2019 — told Raw Story. “Remember, Donald Trump sort of did that, because he didn't like those layers of bureaucracy.”
While Trump and officials at the Heritage Foundation want to revive the executive order that would make it easier to fire federal workers, Cramer warns that many of these proposals like the one Vance previously floated end up merely “empowering the swamp.”
“That said, this is a big place. So the thing I would caution about that — and J.D. didn't live through this in this town, and we did — is that when you cut out president-nominated, Senate-confirmed political appointees and nominees, if you cut out a couple of layers of those, you have just empowered the bureaucracy,” Cramer warned. “So what you don’t want to do is cut down. It may look noble on the balance sheet, but, believe me, you're just empowering the swamp.”
Dems brace for ‘creepy weirdos’
Some moderate-leaning Republicans, like they do on many issues, say they haven’t looked at what their party’s standard bearers have proposed.
“Curious your thoughts on Vance's call in the past to get rid of most mid level government bureaucrats and replace them with GOP partisans?” Raw Story asked Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
“I haven't seen the statement,” Murkowski told Raw Story ahead of Congress’ August recess. “So I'm just not gonna comment on it right now.”
Democrats say they don’t have the luxury of looking away from a proposal such as Project 2025 as they do all they can to elect newly minted presidential nominee Kamala Harris and avert a second Trump presidency.
“He's just going to have a bunch of creepy weirdos working in the White House that are intent on destroying government from the inside and pursuing their super creepy, weird political agendas,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Raw Story earlier this summer.