SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Back in April 2023, without a whole lot of fanfare, a conservative political operative named Paul Dans laid out what was basically a political battle plan.
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PAUL DANS: What we're doing is systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.
DETROW: It was called Project 2025, a 900-plus-page blueprint for a future conservative president - because it's worth flagging that at this point, President Trump had not yet locked down the Republican nomination - to hit the ground running on Day 1. It outlined a suite of very conservative policies that would, for example, outlaw the mailing of abortion pills and abolish the Department of Education. It even suggests a return to the gold standard. Democrats saw this as a vulnerability for Trump in the 2024 campaign, and so we saw social media videos like this one from then-President and then-candidate Joe Biden.
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JOE BIDEN: Project 2025 will destroy America. Look it up.
DETROW: We saw "Saturday Night Live's" Kenan Thompson on the stage at the Democratic National Convention, holding up a giant bound copy of the plan.
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KENAN THOMPSON: You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?
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DETROW: After the plan became a Democratic talking point, Trump repeatedly disavowed Project 2025. Here he is on Fox News.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I have no idea what it is. It's a group of extremely conservative people got together and wrote up a wish list of things, many of which I disagree with entirely. They're too severe.
DETROW: But now that Trump is in office releasing his own detailed plans, a lot of them are strikingly similar to the ones laid out in Project 2025. And one of its chief architects was just confirmed to head the critical Office of Management and Budget. Here's Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
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CHUCK SCHUMER: And make no mistake about it - Russell Vaught is Project 2025 incarnate.
DETROW: Politico has been looking into where Project 2025's ideas are showing up in Trump's early executive orders. And this past week, they published a breakdown of 37 different examples. Megan Messerly covers the White House for Politico and joins me now. Welcome.
MEGAN MESSERLY: Thank you.
DETROW: So let's start with that list. What are some of the areas where we have seen the clearest echoes of Project 2025 in the action of the White House?
MESSERLY: The biggest category is in the area of social issues, and that's obviously a broad bucket of things like school choice and banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs, prohibiting transgender troops from serving in the military. But we've really seen this cover a broad swath of policy areas from social issues to immigration and government staffing, energy, foreign affairs, the economy. Like, it really touches every area of President Trump's executive orders so far.
DETROW: And it wasn't just a policy plan, though, as well. This was a database of potential administration staffers. This was a conservative bench of people who are motivated to quickly dismantle big chunks of the government that they don't like. Have you seen that play out in the first few weeks of this administration?
MESSERLY: Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the list in Project 2025, there's this lengthy list of folks who contributed to the project, and there is significant overlap between this list and the folks who are now joining President Trump's administration. Many of them are, you know, former administration officials themselves, and we're seeing them go back in for Trump 2.0. Some of them are even joining his cabinet - Russ Vaught, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, his pick for CIA, John Ratcliffe, his border czar Tom Homan.
DETROW: And it is fair to say that Vaught did write a big chunk of this plan.
MESSERLY: Absolutely. He authored a whole chapter, in fact, on the executive office of the president. You know, Vaught is known for sort of being really in the weeds, these nitty-gritty details of really how to use executive branch authority to the fullest extent and even press that in terms of some separation of powers issues. He has this whole belief about impoundment - this idea that the president doesn't actually have to spend the dollars that Congress allows the federal government to spend.
DETROW: I want to stick on that for a moment because this seems like this is going to be a big fight of the Trump administration. We saw this proposed freeze on federal funding. It got a lot of attention. It was challenged in court immediately. The administration eventually walked it back, at least for now, but they made it clear - we want to do this again. You're saying that Vaught has written about this, has talked about this - this idea that Congress appropriates the money, the executive branch, in his view and clearly in the view of many people in the Trump administration, doesn't necessarily have to spend it, can choose not to spend it. This is something that was in the plan?
MESSERLY: So if you look at the plan, he sort of lays out this theory of the case. I will say he doesn't go quite as far in Project 2025 as he has in other writings in sort of fully laying out his legal theory here on impoundment, but he makes very clear in Project 2025 that he believes that Congress has delegated far too much authority to what he refers to as the fourth branch of government, sort of the administrative state, the career bureaucrats. And so that's reflected in the federal funding freeze that we saw. A lot of folks I talked to, though, say the rollout of that freeze obviously threw Washington into chaos before the White House sort of walked that back. But folks now close to Vaught, you know, are telling me that they expect him to sort of find a clear-cut case where this can actually go to court and potentially make its way up to the Supreme Court to determine whether or not they agree with the argument that Vaught has made - that the president does have this authority to say no to congressional spending edicts.
DETROW: What is the White House saying right now? - because as we laid out, there was such a clear disavowal of this during the campaign, and as you have reported, yet so much of it is actually part of the action plan.
MESSERLY: Exactly. You know, when we've asked them specifically about, you know, the overlap between many of these executive orders and Project 2025, you know, we haven't gotten a lot of, you know, direct response. But in general, the argument that we're hearing now from the White House is this idea that, you know, if you look at Project 2025, a lot of these are sort of just longstanding conservative ideas or things that President Trump himself did do during his first term. And so I think the argument there is, OK, yes, these ideas may be in Project 2025, but these are also just reflective of President Trump's priorities.
DETROW: Have you - it's still early. Democrats are clearly struggling with how to respond politically to all of this. Democrats seem to think this was a powerful argument during the campaign. Perhaps it wasn't - because they lost. Have you seen - have you come across this? Have you looked at this at all? Are Democrats focusing in on this again in this moment?
MESSERLY: You know, they are. I think it's to be determined what the impact of that is. I mean, I think a lot of the American public - this label of Project 2025 did stick in their minds. When I was on the campaign trail, people were, you know, bringing it up to me of their own volition. So clearly, that messaging really broke through, and that's why Democrats were leading so heavily on it. You know, on the other hand, President Trump is moving forward. He is now elected. You know, so if there are any concerns about Project 2025 from Democrats, from members of the American public, those aren't the folks that hold the levers of power right now. And so it's sort of full steam ahead from the Trump administration.
DETROW: That's Megan Messerly, White House reporter for Politico. Thank you so much.
MESSERLY: Thanks for having me.
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