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Hello hello! Welcome to the first edition of The Preamble, my brand new newsletter that will help you feel more confident in your knowledge about how government and politics work in the United States.
Why write a newsletter? For starters, because y’all have been asking me to for years. The Preamble is a place for more in depth information on topics that are important to you. Unlike social media, the content will be archived and searchable so you can come back to it and share it with your friends and family. My goal is to give you history and context about things that matter, so you can think critically about them and make educated choices for yourself.
On weekdays, this newsletter will land in your inbox. Feel free to forward it to someone who might be interested, and join the community to share your thoughts – I want to hear from you!
Let’s dive in.
Is it my job to scare you about Project 2025?
According to one person I interviewed, it is. Because a scary headline makes you click. It makes you pay attention. It makes you subscribe so you don’t miss out on the next piece of bad news.
My inaugural newsletter is about a topic you’ve been clamoring for, one that has caused significant alarm bells to sound in the minds of many Americans. Should I be worried about Project 2025? Is this the end of American democracy? These are the questions I’ve fielded many thousands of times over the past few months.
So here you are: an in-depth look at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, complete with interviews with contributors.
Project 2025 is a presidential transition project, referring to Jan 20, 2025, when the architects of the project hope Donald Trump will retake the White House. While the project doesn’t have Trump’s name on it, the director of Project 2025 specifically named Trump as the person who will be in charge of implementing (or not) the objectives outlined in the project’s nearly 1,000 page public document.
The project is a collaboration between hundreds of right-leaning groups and scholars hoping to implement their vision for what a new conservative president will do.
It builds on four pillars, including a policy plan, a personnel database, kind of like a conservative LinkedIn, an online academy that people can take classes from, and a playbook for the first 180 days of a conservative president’s term.
To talk more about the specifics of what this project entails, I called Donald Devine, a senior consultant on the project, and Paul Dans, the Director of Project 2025, who spoke to me for nearly an hour each.
What I learned might surprise you.
The project begins with four promises.
The first promise is to “restore the family” and “protect our children.”
To accomplish this, they want to remove anything related to gender, including the terms “gender identity, gender equality, gender equity,” and more, from any federal rules or laws.
The same goes for “abortion, reproductive health, [and] reproductive rights,” – those terms and concepts should be taken out of every “regulation… and piece of legislation that exists.”
Project 2025 also aims to ban pornography and imprison anyone who makes it. They say teachers and librarians who give porn to children should be classified as sex offenders. (It is already illegal to give children pornography, by the way – it’s a felony in most places.)
Additionally, the project calls on the president and lawmakers to push for state and federal abortion bans.
The second promise is to “dismantle the administrative state.”
The current Congress is the least effective Congress in US history, in terms of legislation passed. They have spent more time choosing a Speaker of the House than they have working on meaningful pursuits on behalf of the American public.
And Project 2025 calls that out. They say that Congress is more interested in being famous than doing important things, and that they pawn off their rulemaking authority to executive departments (what they call the “Administrative State”) like the Department of Education or the Environmental Protection Agency, instead of doing their jobs.
For example, Project 2025 says that “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms,” and “Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists.”
The power to make rules should not lie with the unelected executive branch, they argue. It should reside with Congress and the president.
To accomplish this, they have a plan for how to “fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats,” and how to “muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government.”
The third promise is about national security. But it mostly focuses on immigration and China.
Project 2025 says that “economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.” This would be a radical reshaping of the US economy, which is heavily dependent on Chinese-made goods.
It says that environmentalism is “anti-human,” and that it’s a “pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.”
They say that “pro-open border elites” want a constant flow of illegal immigration to suppress the “wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys.”
Illegal immigration should not be curbed, it should be stopped completely, the document says.
The fourth promise is about securing God-given individual rights.
“Ultimately,” Project 2025 says, “The Left does not believe that all men are created equal – they think they are special.”
“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right… Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”
This is, they say, the last opportunity to save our republic.
These ideas have been called “the right’s dystopian nightmare” by some.
When I spoke to Don Devine, one of Project 2025’s senior contributors, we joked about life near the Washington DC Beltway, where we both used to live.
I now live on a dirt road in rural Minnesota. He can see the sailboats on the Chesapeake Bay while out for a stroll.
“You have to understand,” I said to Devine, “that when people hear the word ‘dismantle,’ they think that means to completely tear down.”
Don is in his late 80s now, and spent much of his career working in personnel for the Reagan administration, as an academic at places like the University of Maryland, and now at the nonprofit Fund for American Studies.
He is affable. Articulate. He’s still working.
“Some Americans hear the language in this project and the alarm bells for dictatorship go off,” I tell him. “The idea that an incoming president – in 2025 or some date in the future – could come in, make ‘un-fireable’ civil servants who are not political appointees suddenly fireable, replace approximately 50,000 federal workers with political sycophants, and surround themselves with yes-men who will do their bidding, that idea is terrifying to millions of Americans.”
Don is quiet for a moment.
And then he said, “I’m not confident any of this will happen. I don’t think any of this will happen,” he says.
The this he is referring to are the proposed reforms of Project 2025.
He went on to tell me that the administrative state in fact cannot be dismantled as it stands. “The Democrats can’t change it because of the unions, and the Republicans can’t do it because they don’t understand how the process works,” he said.
He told me about how his own college professor was the architect of civil service reform under Jimmy Carter, and one of the founders of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which today is the primary HR department of the federal government.
Devine said that the idea that anyone can make the un-fireable fireable is “egregiously wrong,” and that even if Congress and the president wanted to make a certain subset of federal employees able to be removed from their jobs. “They can’t be fired,” Devine said. “They still have their civil service protection, they can only be moved.”
He told me a story of when he was working in the federal government, he had an incompetent underling, and he moved him to a new role in which he thrived, and everyone was better off.
Devine, whose experience in federal personnel matters goes back to the 1970s, is considered the conservative expert on the federal executive workforce. He told me, “The problems we have are very fundamental. But I don’t see any big changes, no matter who wins.”
So… is Project 2025 all bark and no bite? Is this all bluster meant at creating a fictitious crisis that no one actually believes is at hand? Are they trying to scare you into paying attention to them?
I will have more on Project 2025 in my next newsletter, including my conversation with the director Paul Dans, and exactly what Don Devine said will happen if Biden wins reelection. Which, he said, is a very real possibility.
Don’t take my word for it, read more about Project 2025 directly from the Heritage Foundation, here.