WASHINGTON (AP) — As a former and possibly future president, Donald Trump touted what would become Project 2025 as a road map for “exactly what our movement will do” with a new crack in the White House.
When the blueprint for a sharp turn to the right in America became an issue during the 2024 campaign, Trump reversed course. He denied knowing anything about the “ridiculous and terrible” plans written in part by his aides and first-term allies.
Now, after being elected the 47th president on Nov. 5, Trump is equipping his second administration with key figures in the detailed efforts he temporarily eschewed. Most notably, Trump has tapped Russell Vought for an encore role as director of the Office of Management and Budget; Tom Homan, his former immigration chief, as “border czar”; and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as deputy chief policy officer.
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The moves have accelerated criticism from Democrats who warn that Trump’s election hands the reins of government to movement conservatives who have spent years imagining how to concentrate power in the West Wing and impose a stark rightward shift on the American government and society.
Trump and his aides claim he has been given a mandate to reform Washington. But they claim the details are his alone.
“President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “All nominees and appointments to President Trump’s Cabinet are wholeheartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not to the agenda of outside groups.”
Here’s a look at what some of Trump’s choices mean for his second presidency.
As budget head, Vought envisions a huge, powerful position
The director of the Office of Management and Budget, a role Vought previously held under Trump and which requires Senate confirmation, prepares the president’s proposed budget and is generally responsible for implementing the administration’s agenda at all agencies.
The job is influential, but Vought, as author of a Project 2025 chapter on presidential authority, made clear that he wants the post to wield more direct power.
“The director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approach to the president’s mind,” Vought wrote. The OMB, he wrote, “is the president’s air traffic control system” and should be “involved in all aspects of the White House policy process,” and “become powerful enough to override executive branch bureaucracies.” ”
Trump did not go into such details in naming Vought, but implicitly supported aggressive action. Vought, the president-elect said, “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State” — Trump’s catch-all term for the federal bureaucracy — and would help “restore financial sanity.”
In June, Vought addressed the potential tension on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast: “We’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation.”
Vought could help Musk and Trump reshape the role and scope of government
The strategy to further concentrate federal authority in the presidency has permeated Project 2025 and Trump’s campaign proposals. Vought’s vision is especially striking when combined with Trump’s proposals to dramatically expand the president’s control over federal employees and government finances — ideas that are intertwined with the president-elect’s tapping of megabillionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to to lead a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’. .”
Trump attempted to reshape the federal civil service in his first term by reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service employees — who enjoy job protections through administration changes — as political appointees, making them easier to fire and replace with loyalists. Currently, only about 4,000 of the federal government’s roughly 2 million employees are politically appointed. President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s changes. Trump can fix them now.
Meanwhile, Trump’s sweeping “efficiency” mandates from Musk and Ramaswamy could invoke an old, defunct constitutional theory that the president — not Congress — is the real gatekeeper of federal spending. In his “Agenda 47,” Trump supported so-called “impoundment,” which means that when lawmakers pass appropriations bills, they simply set a spending ceiling, but not a floor. According to the theory, the president can simply decide not to spend money on something he deems unnecessary.
Vought didn’t venture into seizure in its Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote, “The President must use every tool possible to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything less than that would amount to an abject failure.”
Trump’s choice led to an immediate backlash.
“Russ Vought is a far-right ideologue who has tried to break the law to give President Trump the unilateral authority he does not possess to override Congress’ spending decisions (and) who has and will fight again to give Trump the ability to summarily fire tens of thousands of state employees,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat and outgoing Senate Appropriations Chairman.
Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, leading Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said Vought wants to “dismantle the skilled federal workforce” at the expense of Americans who rely on everything from veterans’ health care to Social Security Benefits.
“Pain itself is the agenda,” they said.
Homan and Miller reflect Trump and Project 2025’s immigration overlap
Trump’s protests about Project 2025 always glossed over the overlaps in the two agendas. Both want to reintroduce Trump-era immigration restrictions. Project 2025 includes a litany of detailed proposals for various U.S. immigration statutes, executive branch rules, and agreements with other countries — for example, reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients, and asylum seekers.
Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving advisers and an architect of his immigration ideas, including his promise of the largest deportation force in American history. As deputy policy chief, which does not require Senate confirmation, Miller would remain in the inner circle of Trump’s West Wing.
“America is only for Americans and Americans,” Miller said Oct. 27 at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.
“America First Legal,” Miller’s organization founded as an ideological counterbalance to the American Civil Liberties Union, was listed as an advisory group for Project 2025 until Miller asked for the name to be removed due to negative attention.
Homan, a Project 2025 employee, served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first presidency and played a key role in what became known as Trump’s “family separation policy.”
Previewing Trump 2.0 earlier this year, Homan said: “No one is off the table. If you are here illegally, you better look over your shoulder.”
Project 2025 contributors slated for heads of CIA and Federal Communications
John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, previously served as one of Trump’s directors of national intelligence. He is a contributor to Project 2025. The document’s chapter on US intelligence was written by Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe’s chief of staff during the first Trump administration.
Reflecting Ratcliffe and Trump’s approach, Carmack stated that the intelligence community was being too cautious. Ratcliffe, like the chapter attributed to Carmack, is aggressive towards China. The Project 2025 document portrays Beijing as an American adversary that cannot be trusted.
Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the FCC’s chapter of Project 2025 and is now Trump’s pick to chair the panel. Carr wrote that the FCC chairman is “empowered with significant powers that are not shared” with other FCC members. He called on the FCC to “address the threats to individual liberty posed by companies that abuse dominant positions in the marketplace,” especially “Big Tech and its efforts to push diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” ‘
He called for stricter transparency rules for social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube and “allow consumers to choose their own content filters and eventual fact-checkers.”
Carr and Ratcliffe would need Senate confirmation for their posts.
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