CSPAN - Washington Journal Paul Dans
Aired: 2025-02-20
Duration: 13:57


=== Project 2025: Trump's Legacy (13:51) ===

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[00:01:15]  This afternoon, White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt will speak to reporters about the Trump administration agenda.
[00:01:22]  She's also likely to face questions about the president's position on the Russia-Ukraine war after recently calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator.
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[00:01:44]  Paul Dance is back at our desk.
[00:01:46]  Mr. Dance, the last time you're here was June of 2024.
[00:01:50]  You were serving as the director of Project 2025, the presidential transition effort at the Heritage Foundation.
[00:01:57]  Can you just walk us through what happened with you and with Project 2025 in the months since then?
[00:02:04]  Well, you know, Project 2025 was a two-and-a-half-year effort.
[00:02:07]  We started back in the spring of 2022.
[00:02:10]  It was really a coming together of citizens all over the country.
[00:02:14]  We ultimately became 110 groups, all focused on helping the next conservative president be ready to hit the ground running day one.
[00:02:23]  So what's happened, you know, we got a lot of work done and made a contribution.
[00:02:29]  And very happy to see that these ideas have entered the bloodstream.
[00:02:34]  And what President Trump and his team is accomplishing right now is miraculous.
[00:02:40]  I stepped down from the project in the end of summer 2024.
[00:02:44]  But, you know, what's going on, we have basically wrapped our work by then.
[00:02:49]  And I should say I no longer work at the Heritage Foundation, so the ideas today are my own.
[00:02:55]  But it's been fantastic to watch President Trump really move like Greece Lightning right now.
[00:03:01]  How much of Project 2025 is evident in today being the first month of the Trump administration, the second Trump administration?
[00:03:10]  Well, this is all Donald Trump.
[00:03:13]  If a man didn't get up and say fight, fight, fight, none of this would be happening.
[00:03:17]  So, you know, it's really the indomitable spirit of one man, but that's the essence of leadership.
[00:03:24]  Many of the ideas that we brought in Project 2025 are common sense.
[00:03:29]  They're ultimately about bringing people back into our own government.
[00:03:32]  It's a government of, by, and for the people.
[00:03:35]  And that was the central postulate of Project 2025, that we needed to deconstruct this unaccountable administrative state.
[00:03:44]  How do you deconstruct it?
[00:03:46]  Well, you start by making it transparent.
[00:03:49]  And you have to show the rest of the country what's been actually happening here in Washington.
[00:03:53]  And that's part of the genius of Donald Trump and working with new folks like Elon Musk to really bring to the fore what we've all kind of suspected.
[00:04:04]  But what's being unearthed now is earth-shattering, really.
[00:04:10]  And we're seeing, we have a $2 trillion structural deficit in this country going on $50 trillion of debt.
[00:04:18]  Anybody who claims that the status quo defends the status quo and says this thing's working is either in on it or completely confused.
[00:04:29]  I guess the question is, is what we're seeing now Project 2025 in action?
[00:04:33]  Well, it's common sense.
[00:04:35]  There's a lot of commonality in the sense that what we put forward were in the main a lot of Trump ideas from term one.
[00:04:45]  So I think what you're seeing is aspirational hopes as well.
[00:04:48]  Things that people like I, I served in term one, hoped could have been done, but we didn't quite have the political will to do it yet.
[00:04:56]  We had a Democrat Congress at the latter half there, the House.
[00:05:02]  And, you know, these were ideas in the main that have percolated through the conservative movement and really just center right for decades.
[00:05:12]  Remind people what was in Project 2025 was a Department of Government efficiency in Project 2025.
[00:05:19]  The whole thing was about efficiency.
[00:05:21]  You know, there wasn't per se a department, but the idea with Project 2025 was that the conservatives had to be ready to help the next president govern.
[00:05:33]  That, you know, as particularly independent streak that we all have in us, the conservatives have never come together as a group.
[00:05:41]  And it was really important that we put aside the petty differences and support the next president.
[00:05:46]  So what we did with standing up Project 2025 was a first of its kind, really looking at our friends on the left, looking how they always get ready and saying to the entire country, like, be ready, be prepared.
[00:06:00]  And, you know, Project, to the extent that there's a reflection of Project 2025 and what's being done by President Trump now, it's that his team is ready to roll.
[00:06:09]  And they really wanted to be prepared to hit the ground day one.
[00:06:12]  What do you think the reputation of Project 2025 was by the end of the 2024 election?
[00:06:19]  Well, you know, I think the ideas of Project 2025 and what you see now are extremely popular at base.
[00:06:25]  What the Democrats had done was probably one of the great electoral failures of all time.
[00:06:30]  That was they put $300 million, reportedly, into castigating Project 2025 and really a two-part misinformation play.
[00:06:40]  One, that it had anything to do with President Trump, and two, that many of these, their so-called ideas were reflected in Project 2025.
[00:06:48]  At the end of the day, it just showed a great contempt for their own base.
[00:06:52]  And it ultimately, you know, it's the law of unintended consequences.
[00:06:56]  What you're seeing now is Project 2025, you know, on a whole nother plane, another order of magnitude.
[00:07:05]  During the election, President Trump and Candidate Trump felt the need to respond to his connection to Project 2025.
[00:07:13]  This is about 30 seconds during a campaign stop in July.
[00:07:18]  Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25, and I don't even know.
[00:07:26]  I mean, some of them, I know who they are, but they're very, very conservative, just like you have, they're sort of the opposite of the radical left, okay?
[00:07:34]  You have the radical left and you have the radical right, and they come up with this project, I don't know what the hell it is, it's Project 25.
[00:07:41]  He's involved in Project, and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme.
[00:07:46]  I mean, they're seriously extreme.
[00:07:48]  But I don't know anything about it.
[00:07:50]  I don't want to know anything about it.
[00:07:53]  Extreme came up by the radical right.
[00:07:56]  I don't know anything about it.
[00:07:57]  What was your estimation of those comments?
[00:07:59]  Well, there's no person on earth who's been more attacked by fake news than President Trump.
[00:08:04]  So he has much leeway.
[00:08:06]  I mean, look, he is a genius at politics, and what he said there is true.
[00:08:11]  He didn't have anything to do with this.
[00:08:14]  You know, the left, though, had taken a lot of effort to misframe Project 2025.
[00:08:20]  And at base, I think he's also made statements subsequent to that that say that many of the ideas are very good.
[00:08:26]  You know, some of the bad ideas actually are not even in Project 2025.
[00:08:30]  They were completely grafted on.
[00:08:32]  For example, the IVF contingent.
[00:08:34]  There's not a word about IVF, but the Democrats and their allies spent millions of dollars trying to say Project 2025 was going to stop IVF.
[00:08:44]  Fake news.
[00:08:44]  Was shutting down or folding in USAID into the State Department, was that, did that come out of Project 2025?
[00:08:54]  Well, Project 2025 does a very good treatment on USAID and really going at the heart of how this operation has been running counter to U.S. foreign interests for decades now.
[00:09:08]  It's a sieve for unaccountable money.
[00:09:11]  So what I think that they've done is really take it to another level.
[00:09:15]  It certainly flagged the issue and talked about bringing it under the aegis of the State Department.
[00:09:21]  So that's being done.
[00:09:22]  There's going to be a vote today on Linda McMahon for Education Secretary to move her nomination out of committee to the full Senate, but a lot of discussion in her nomination hearing about reductions to the Department of Education.
[00:09:38]  Democrats concerned about shutting down the Department of Education.
[00:09:42]  What does Project 2025 say about the Department of Education?
[00:09:46]  Well, what I would say, Secretary, soon to be, I hope, Secretary McMahon, is one of the dynamic figures of modern life.
[00:09:52]  She's extremely accomplished businesswoman and former cabinet secretary.
[00:09:57]  So I fully commend what she's going to do.
[00:10:01]  You know, with the Department of Education, the Heritage Foundation put out the mandate for leadership in 1980 for President Reagan.
[00:10:10]  AT THAT STAGE, FOUR YEARS INTO IT, THE BOOK WAS ALREADY CALLING FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE DEPARTMENT.
[00:10:18]  I THINK WHAT WE'VE UNFORTUNATELY SEEN...
[00:10:20]  WHAT'S THE BOOK?
[00:10:21]  The book was the mandate for leadership circa 1980.
[00:10:24]  This was published.
[00:10:25]  This was published by the Heritage Foundation.
[00:10:27]  This was the original mandate for leadership.
[00:10:29]  So fast forward 40 years later, we're making the same appeal.
[00:10:35]  Look, I went to public schools K through 12.
[00:10:38]  I went on to MIT, undergrad, and graduate degrees in MIT in the University of Virginia.
[00:10:43]  My mom was a public school teacher.
[00:10:44]  My mother-in-law is a public school teacher.
[00:10:46]  You're not going to find someone who more believes in the public school system.
[00:10:50]  But I really feel it's broken.
[00:10:51]  I have four kids, and we're now having to homeschool two of them because this great system that I wouldn't be where I am today were it not for those public school teachers.
[00:11:03]  I saw so much dedication from my own mother doing this work, but the system is not working.
[00:11:08]  It needs to be put back in the control of states and localities, and the federal mandate needs to kind of relax and be much more accountable to the parents.
[00:11:19]  What is your role today?
[00:11:20]  Do you have a role in the second Trump administration?
[00:11:22]  No, right now I'm on the outside.
[00:11:25]  I am very supportive of the work they're doing.
[00:11:28]  I just, I'm, you know, every day we wake up, it's Christmas morning.
[00:11:32]  I'm down in South Carolina.
[00:11:34]  I'm a proud citizen of South Carolina.
[00:11:36]  And I'm happy to say that there's a great buoyancy among, I think, just regular everyday Americans that President Trump is delivering on the promises.
[00:11:46]  Only a Trump, he's an iconic class.
[00:11:49]  And then when he gets into this tremendous kind of tag team duo with Elon Musk cutting through in a way that the deep state never really saw, I think it's just exciting.
[00:12:01]  And every day brings a new revelation.
[00:12:03]  Would you like to go back into the administration, if offered?
[00:12:06]  Would you go back in?
[00:12:07]  Well, it's always my honor to serve President Trump and the administration.
[00:12:11]  What did you do in the first term?
[00:12:12]  I first started at HUD.
[00:12:15]  I had been a longtime Trump supporter.
[00:12:17]  I worked on the campaign, but I was a New York attorney in white-shoe law firms.
[00:12:23]  So I hadn't known Washington and how to navigate it.
[00:12:26]  What's a white-shoe law firm?
[00:12:28]  A white-shoe law firm are the guys who build $2,000 an hour.
[00:12:31]  And many of them are now suing the Trump administration.
[00:12:35]  But they're essentially high-end corporate firms.
[00:12:38]  They work for a lot of corporate America, defending them, going through regulations.
[00:12:44]  There's a big mass of them here on K-Street.
[00:12:47]  That's not to say that these are some of the most talented lawyers, but they're expensive.
[00:12:53]  And that's where I grew up in New York.
[00:12:56]  You come out of law school, you have a tremendous debt.
[00:12:58]  You really don't have much of a choice.
[00:13:00]  I didn't come from means myself.
[00:13:02]  So I basically kind of followed that trajectory.
[00:13:05]  That said, it took me two years to get into the Trump administration.
[00:13:10]  And I started at HUD in the community planning and development under Dr. Carson, which was an honor to serve.
[00:13:18]  I got a quick taste of bureaucracy and the stifling of Dr. Carson and President Trump's homelessness initiatives.
[00:13:25]  And then I moved on to the Office of Personal Management, where I was White House liaison and then chief of staff.
[00:13:31]  Russ Vogt now heading OPM these days?
[00:13:34]  OMB.
[00:13:35]  OMB, sorry.
[00:13:38]  Explain who Russ Vogt is and did you work with him?
[00:13:42]  Yes, Russ Vogt's one of the most talented men in the movement.
[00:13:45]  He was formerly director of OMB in the end of Trump 1 and now has been confirmed to be director again.
[00:13:54]  He is really Office of Management and Budget.