Project 2025 Training Videos Released
"Equity must be eradicated."
Welcome to our 7th installment in our investigation of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to reshape the US government in radical ways.
The firestorm surrounding this project has crescendoed, resulting in the resignation of the director of the project and national polling data indicating only an 11% favorability among both Democrats and Republicans. Vice Presidential hopeful JD Vance has written the foreword for a new book coming out by Heritage Foundation director Kevin Roberts, the man who recently said that we are in the midst of a second American revolution, “that will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”
Seeing how unpopular it is, Donald Trump has also tried to publicly distance himself from the project, but his attempts to do so have largely been discredited: the majority of the people working on it are former Trump administration staffers who are likely to be rehired should he take office again.
And hiring is one of the pillars of the project. When Trump took office the first time, he found that there were more than 1,000 political appointee positions that he could not fill. Project 2025 seeks to create a Conservative LinkedIn to staff a future Trump administration.
And to create a cadre of hopeful political appointees, the project has created an online academy of sorts, with a bevy of training videos that people can sign up for. Now, those training videos have been made public by ProPublica, a nonprofit media organization.
We watched some of the videos (and are still digging through others). And one of the biggest takeaways is: future administration employees must serve a higher purpose. And that higher purpose is to fundamentally change how the government works.
In one training video, Katie Sullivan, Trump’s former acting assistant attorney general, and Bethany Kozma, a former deputy chief of staff at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the Trump administration, talk about how there are “monsters in Uncle Sam’s attic.”
Those monsters are “words and phrases that are used” by liberals “which may look like one thing, but absolutely mean another.” For example, they say that “social justice and equity” mean the same thing as “Marxism.”
Kozma spends a lot of time discussing climate change during this video, saying the issue has “infiltrated every part of the federal government,” and climate change is being used as an excuse to “control people.”
She goes on to say anyone hired to work in the federal government will have to “look for climate change language and get rid of it.”
A lot of the training videos also give advice on how to avoid being held back by career employees from enforcing the president’s agenda.
(As a brief reminder: when a president takes office, they must fill about 4,000 political appointee positions. These people serve at the pleasure of the president. They usually come and go with the current administration — you serve under a conservative president and a liberal president wins, it's expected that you lose your job, and vice versa.
The rest of the federal bureaucracy, more than two million workers, and tens of millions of people who work for federal contractors, do not fall under this “pleasure of the president” category, and are career employees. They generally stay regardless of who is in the White House.)
In a similar vein, some of the videos talk about how to avoid working with liberals. “Taking the Reins: How Conservatives Can Win the Regulations Game,” outlines how “the Left” is going to try to block new rules and therefore, new hires “cannot make a technical mistake in the regulatory process.”
Roger Severino, vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation and the former director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration, says, “This is a game of 3D chess. You have to be always anticipating what the left is going to do to try to throw sand in the gears and trip you up and block your rule.”
And Alexei Woltornist, who is a priest in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church and a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, encourages trainees to avoid talking to mainstream news outlets, because people on the right will automatically believe what they’re saying is false.
And though Trump has said he does not know anything about Project 2025 or the people behind it, he has worked with more than 80% of the people who appear in the videos, and they are likely to serve again.
The videos also show that Project 2025, and the people behind it, are prepared to avoid making the same mistakes they did the last time Trump was in office, like how long it took them to fill key positions or how certain regulatory efforts they were making were delayed or tossed out by courts due to failure to follow federal procedures — instead, they are ready to hit the ground running under a new conservative president.
This is incredibly disturbing. At one point, she quotes “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.” Although meant as an attack on the left, I feel like this ironically epitomizes the former president’s administration, the disastrous transition of power in 2021 (leading up to and including Jan 6), and his current campaign strategy. As a physician, I still haven’t recovered from the lies he told the public at the beginning of the pandemic, and the subsequent public health chaos he ignited. This election is so important.
I choked on my coffee at "equity must be eradicated." And social justice as well, apparently? I genuinely don't understand how those concepts are seen as bad words to some. Isn't justice a pillar to a functioning democratic republic to prevent the abuse of power? Didn't our beloved constitution set forth that "all men are created equal" (despite consistently being loosely interpreted) from day one? I'm so deeply confused.