During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump emphatically denied any connection to or knowledge of Project 2025, the Christian nationalist game plan for transforming the U.S. into a conservative theocracy.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he said in a July social media post. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Brendan Carr (screencap)
Since winning the election, however, Trump has essentially endorsed the rightwing blueprint by appointing to office some of the very people who helped shape Project 2025, including Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission, Pete Hoekstra to serve as ambassador to Canada, Tom Homan to manage the border and immigration, and John Radcliff to lead the CIA.
But the most disturbing to many observers was the Nov. 22 selection of Russell T. Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
“Not only did he write the chapter for the OMB for Project 2025, it is our understanding that he was the brains behind the operation and helped to bring together the vast Trump loyalists and conservative community to put that document together,” said U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M.
In that chapter, Vought described OMB as the key to dismantling federal agencies, minimizing the role of Congress and consolidating power in the office of the president.
“Properly understood, it (OMB) is a president’s air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course,” he wrote.
And that means he, if confirmed for the position, will be hands-on with every budgetary, management and personnel decision in every aspect of the federal government including national security, education, energy, justice and commerce.
The man who wrote the chapter on how conservative Christians could take over the federal government has been nominated to be the gatekeeper on policy and funding in the Trump administration.
“OMB cannot perform its role on behalf of the president effectively if it is not intimately involved in all aspects of the White House policy process and lacks knowledge of what the agencies are doing,” Vought wrote in the document.
Russell Vought (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
Vought is no stranger to Washington, Republican politics or to Christian nationalism. He served as OMB director during Trump’s first term and previously worked as policy director for the House Republican Conference, executive director of the Republican Study Committee and as a legislative assistant under U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm. He also worked with conservative grassroots groups, including a stint as vice president of Heritage Action for America.
In 2021, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank dedicated to the vision of “a consensus of America as a nation under God” by reversing the failures of the conservative movement to diminish “the academy, the media, the entertainment industry, elite opinion, etc.”
Going forward, a newly constituted conservative White House will help lead that fight, Vought said in Project 2025. “The great challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people.”
But much of the federal system must be reorganized for that centralized power to be effective, he added. “The president must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch. Sadly, however, a president today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
Carr is another Project 2025 author picked to run the same agency he wrote about in the blueprint. His chapter on the FCC outlines plans to go after “Big Tech” companies and Chinese media influences that threaten national security.
“President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025.”
“Today, a handful of corporations can shape everything from the information we consume to the places we shop,” he wrote. “These corporate behemoths are not merely exercising market power; they are abusing dominant positions. They are not simply prevailing in the free market; they are taking advantage of a landscape that has been skewed — in many cases by the government — to favor their business models over those of their competitors.”
TikTok will be squarely in the sights of an FCC under the Trump administration, said Carr, an attorney and FCC commissioner appointed by Trump in 2017.
“As law enforcement officials have made clear, TikTok poses a serious and unacceptable risk to America’s national security,” he said. “It also provides Beijing with an opportunity to run a foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans.”
Despite his nominees’ ties to Project 2025, Trump maintains he is not beholden to its architects.
“President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to the Associated Press. “All of President Trump’s cabinet nominees and appointments are wholeheartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”
But at least 140 former Trump administration staffers have been connected to Project 2025 and the president-elect himself heaped praise on the Heritage Foundation in 2022: “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate.”
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