After Trump’s Project 2025 Rejection, He Is Using Authors and Influencers for Key Roles

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former and future president Donald Trump has hailed Project 2025 as a roadmap for “exactly what our movement will do,” sparking yet another rift in the White House.

When America’s blueprint for a far-right shift came into question during the 2024 campaign, Trump changed course. He denied knowing anything about the “stupid and poor” plan, which was drawn up in part by his first-term aides and allies.

Now, Trump is putting key people in his second administration to work on the detailed efforts he had temporarily avoided since being elected as the 47th president on November 5. In particular, Trump appointed Russell Vought as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. His former head of immigration, Tom Homan, was called the “border czar.” And immigration hardliner Stephen Miller took over as deputy policy director.

The move has met criticism from Democrats who warn that Trump’s election would concentrate power in the West Wing and hand the reins of government to a conservative movement that has spent years plotting how to force a sharp rightward shift throughout the U.S. government and society at large. Accelerated.

Trump and his aides claim he has the power to reorganize Washington. But they insist the specifics are up to him.

“President Trump has nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump spokeswoman Caroline Levitt said in a statement. “All of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees and appointments are fully committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”

Here’s a look at what Trump’s choice means for a second presidency.

The director of the Office of Management and Budget, a role Vought held under President Trump and which requires Senate confirmation, is responsible for preparing the president’s proposed budget and generally implementing the administration’s agenda across multiple agencies.

The position is influential, but Vought, as the author of the Project 2025 chapter on presidential powers, has made clear that he wants the position to exercise more direct power.

“The Director must regard his duties as those that best and most comprehensively approximate the heart of the President,” Vought wrote. He wrote that OMB is “the President’s air traffic control system” and must be “participating in all aspects of the White House policy process” and “powerful enough to override the bureaucracy of executive agencies.”

Trump did not mention those details when naming Vought, but he implicitly supported the aggressive actions. President-elect Bott said Trump “knows exactly how to dismantle the deep state” that encompasses the federal bureaucracy and will help “restore fiscal health.”

Speaking on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast last June, Vought entertained the potential tension. “We’re not going to be able to save our country without a little confrontation.”

The strategy to further centralize federal power in the presidency permeates Project 2025 and Trump’s campaign proposals. Vought’s vision is especially impressive when paired with Trump’s proposals to dramatically expand the president’s control over federal workers and government funding. The idea of ​​the future president-elect tangling with billionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the ‘Ministry of Government Efficiency’ is intertwined. .”

During his first term, Trump sought to overhaul the federal civil service through executive changes by reclassifying tens of thousands of federal employees with job protections as political appointees, making it easier for them to be fired and replaced with loyalists. Currently, only about 4,000 of the federal government’s roughly 2 million employees are political appointees. President Joe Biden rolled back Trump’s changes. Trump can now restore them.

Meanwhile, Trump’s sweeping “efficiency” mandate from Musk and Ramaswamy could overturn the long-gone constitutional theory that the president, not Congress, is the true gatekeeper of federal spending. In his “Agenda 47,” President Trump supported the so-called “seizure,” which would simply set spending limits and not floors when lawmakers pass appropriations bills. The theory is that a president can decide not to spend money on things he deems unnecessary.

Vought did not attempt incarceration in Chapter 2025 of Project. But he wrote, “The president must use every tool available to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government.” Anything short of that would be an abject failure.”

“Russ Bott is a far-right ideologue who sought to break the law to give President Trump unilateral power to override Congressional spending decisions. He has fought and will fight again to give Trump the ability to fire him on the spot. There are tens of thousands of public servants,” said Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat and outgoing Senate Appropriations chair.

Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, the Democratic leaders on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said Vought would “dismantle the federal professional workforce” to control everything from veterans’ health care to health care. He said he wanted to harm Americans who depend on him. Social Security Benefits.

“Pain itself is the agenda,” they said.

Trump’s protests against Project 2025 have always glossed over the overlap of the two agendas. Both want to reimpose Trump-era immigration restrictions. Project 2025 includes detailed proposals for a variety of U.S. immigration laws, executive branch rules, and agreements with other countries, including reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients, and asylum seekers.

Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving advisers and one of the architects of his immigration ideas, including his promise of the largest deportation force in U.S. history. As deputy policy director and not subject to Senate confirmation, Miller will remain in Trump’s West Wing inner circle.

“America is for Americans and Americans only,” Miller said at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27.

Miller’s organization, “America First Legal,” founded as an ideological counter to the American Civil Liberties Union, was listed as an advisory group to Project 2025 until Miller requested that its name be removed due to negative attention.

Homan, who was named a Project 2025 contributor, served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term as president and played a key role in what became known as Trump’s “family separation policy.”

Homan, who previewed Trump 2.0 earlier this year, said: “No one is off the table. If you’re here illegally, you’d better look over your shoulder.”

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s choice to lead the CIA, was previously one of Trump’s Directors of National Intelligence. He is a Project 2025 contributor. The document’s chapter on U.S. intelligence was written by Dustin Carmack, who was Ratcliffe’s chief of staff in Trump’s first administration.

Mirroring Ratcliffe and Trump’s approach, Carmack declared the intelligence community was being too cautious. Like Carmack’s chief, Ratcliffe is also hawkish on China. Throughout the Project 2025 document, China is portrayed as an unreliable enemy of the United States.

Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the FCC’s chapter of Project 2025 and has now been chosen by President Trump to chair the panel. Carr wrote that the FCC chairman “is granted significant powers that are not shared” with other FCC members. He called on the FCC to address “the threat to individual freedom posed by companies abusing their dominant positions in the marketplace,” especially “Big Tech and its attempts to draw out diverse political viewpoints in the digital town square.”

He called for stricter transparency rules for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube and said they “must empower consumers to choose their own content filters and fact-checking tools.”

Carr and Ratcliffe seek Senate confirmation for their posts.