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Oct. 19, 2023 - Epoch Times
18:26
New 'Project 2025' to Dismantle the Administrative State
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Unbeknownst to most people, outside of all these different talking points, well, right now, there is a real serious initiative being pushed forward to help dismantle the administrative state.
This initiative is known as Project 2025, and if it actually comes to fruition, it'll have massive consequences on the type of country that our kids will actually inherit.
Although, to explain why that is, I need to back up for a quick moment and set the stage for you properly.
Right now, with the presidential election starting to really kick into high gear, we're beginning to see the frontrunners of the Republican Party coalesce around a certain type of promise.
That's because whether it's President Trump, Governor DeSantis, or Vivek Ramaswamy, the current three frontrunners, they have all, in some way, shape, or form, promised to gut the deep state, otherwise known as the administrative state.
And as a campaign promise, that's all well and good.
Many people across the country support it.
However...
Let's just assume for a super quick moment that a Republican candidate does go on to win the general election and becomes the 47th president of the country.
Then what?
Simply winning the White House does not necessarily mean that there will be broad changes to administrative policies, especially when you have an entrenched bureaucracy numbering in the hundreds of thousands that has formed over the last 100 plus years.
And this administrative state, it has a clear liberal slant.
In fact, according to data from the Federal Elections Commission, quote, A stunning 95% of political donations from federal employees went to Democratic liberal candidates.
95%.
And so, with the massive growth of the federal government over the past 100 plus years, this has resulted in what some people refer to as the fourth branch of government, the bureaucratic branch, which is now dominated by liberal ideology.
And this branch is large.
Here's in fact how it's described over in the pages of the National Affairs magazine.
It is fitting that we refer to the administrative state as a state, for it has become a sovereign power unto itself, an imperium, an imperio, regulating virtually every dimension of our lives.
Its nearly 450 agencies are manned by legions of bureaucrats, now numbering almost 2.7 million.
And so, millions of liberal bureaucrats, entrenched within the federal government, irrespective of who actually resides in the White House.
And it's exactly this scenario, which has led to the birth of something called the Project 2025 Initiative.
This is a very, very large-scale project that was launched by the Heritage Foundation, which, for your reference, is a conservative policy think tank.
And Project 2025, otherwise known as the Presidential Transition Project, it aims to gut the federal government of its current progressive bureaucrats and replace them with conservative bureaucrats.
And this initiative, which just for your reference, is already well into full swing, it aims to do most of the heavy lifting prior to the actual election, such that if a Republican were to in fact get elected into the White House, they would have a database of conservative personnel to essentially deconstruct the administrative state starting on day one, as well they would have a database of conservative personnel to essentially deconstruct the administrative state starting on day one, as well as have in place And so, in order to get a better idea of how Project 2025 will work in practice, we took the opportunity to speak with Mr. Spencer
Spencer Kradian, who is the Associate Director of the project over at the Heritage Foundation.
And he broke down for us exactly what they're doing to dismantle the administrative state, as well as what people across America can do if they wish to get involved.
And so, take a super quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons and take a listen.
Spencer, thank you so much for joining us.
Maybe to start with, for the audience members who aren't aware of what it is, can you give sort of a high-level overview of what Project 2025 is?
Sure.
So, Project 2025, or the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, that's the full name, it really is the conservative movement's effort to get ready for the next conservative president.
It feels like, in Washington, D.C., we're always playing an away game.
We are always at a deficit compared to how the left is so good at going into government.
So what this project is, it's four pillars.
The first pillar is our policy book called Mandate for Leadership.
This outlines what a conservative success looks like at each federal agency.
We have a second pillar, which is our presidential personnel database.
We're doing the work ahead of time and recruiting people ahead of time to come to Washington and work for the next conservative president.
The third pillar is our presidential administration academy.
That is training people up ahead of time so that we are ready to hit the ground running when we come to Washington with the next conservative president in 2025.
And then the fourth pillar is what we call the playbook.
That's a transition plan for each federal agency so that we'll be ready to hit the ground running.
And all of these are available at project2025.org.
That's how folks can get involved.
I should mention that Project 2025 is organized by the Heritage Foundation, but it includes more than 70 partner organizations on our advisory board, all of whom are working together to get ready for the next president.
Spencer, let me ask you this.
Out of the current Republican nominees, and let's say out of the three or four frontrunners, have any of them signaled support for this project?
Yes, we are working with various presidential candidates and their staff, and I think what has been heartening to us at Project 2025 is to see so many of the candidates talking about the importance of deconstructing the administrative state and defeating the permanent bureaucracy that exists in Washington, D.C. You see the various candidates talking about that.
We've made it the number one issue in this race.
And it's not just Republicans either.
You know, we'll work with anybody who is, any candidate who wants to deconstruct the administrative state is welcome at Project 2025.
So Spencer, my next question is, sorry.
Hello?
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I think a lot of people watching this interview are probably of the mindset that getting rid of the bureaucrats who exist from administration to administration to administration and are really running things and can really hamper an administration if they so choose to is a good thing.
But on the flip side, I imagine that it would be difficult To do away with, let's say, tens of thousands, 50,000 positions.
Let's say in the Department of Energy, for instance, if you're going to have a huge amount of turnover, I imagine a lot of institutional knowledge will just go away and maybe you'll have a transition process where the lights maybe have a hard time staying on.
How would you respond to that sort of criticism where some of the institutional knowledge might be lost in this transition process?
It's a good question.
So what people need to remember is that you have 2.2 million full-time non-military federal employees.
You have between 16 million and 20 million federal contractors.
And traditionally, only between 3,000 and 4,000 people work for the president.
Those are the political appointees who can be hired and fired by the president.
We need more political appointees.
We need more who come from outside Washington, D.C. With respect to the number that you mentioned, what the vision is of Project 2025, and you see various presidential candidates talking about this as well, is that for those federal employees who hold policy-making positions, Those positions should be reportable to the president.
We're not necessarily planning to get rid of one person.
What this is, is to reassert political control of the bureaucracy.
And the president is entitled to a supportive staff.
The president is the commander-in-chief.
He's the chief executive officer.
And the executive branch should be working to implement the president's vision.
So that's what this is about.
And folks should know that the conservative movement is ready and determined To bring about political control of the bureaucracy in addition to reforming the civil service, making sure that, you know, the federal workforce operates more like the private sector where you can dismiss poor performers rather than giving them, you know, basically lifetime tenure that they have now.
Just to circle back to that question, though, I mean, in terms of the institutional knowledge, you're saying that you would be focusing more on the policy makers within a department versus the individual people who are at the more ground level who have the actual technical knowledge.
Is that correct?
That's right.
I mean, we need institutional knowledge within the bureaucracy.
In fact, we've had many federal employees, current federal employees, reach out to Project 2025 to help us, which we really appreciate.
And we appreciate the good work that many federal civil servants do each day.
Schedule F, which has been talked about a lot in the media, is something that would make it so that if you hold a policy-making position, that becomes a position that is reportable to the president.
That's the way it was always supposed to be.
And what we have now, what the bureaucracy has become, is an unaccountable fourth branch of the government that is impervious to election results and conservative presidents have a tough time navigating it.
So that's what we're trying to address.
So you mentioned earlier that you have a presidential personnel database.
How many people do you already have?
We have more than the traditional number of political appointees in Washington.
That's that three to four thousand that I mentioned.
We're getting more every day.
We have said we want not just three to four thousand, but ten or twenty thousand people to come into this database and get ready to come to Washington and work for the next conservative president.
And it continues to grow every day.
We're taking our project on the road.
You know, we're visiting people where they are.
Last month we were at the Iowa State Fair.
We've been to a couple of colleges and universities, participated in conservative events, spoken at conservative meetings.
We're going to continue to do that and really branch out from outside Washington to get people into this system.
Are you seeing any difficulty in the sense that people who are more conservative are not as keen on moving to Washington, D.C., which is, at least according to the voting record, something like 94-95% Democrat?
You have identified a significant problem, and that is that the politics of the D.C. area are not favorable to us.
That's why it always feels like we're playing an away game.
And that's why the federal workforce, you can look at how federal employees make their political contributions, go look it up on the Federal Election Commission website, and it's pretty staggering the number that are going to progressive candidates.
But at the same time, we need conservatives to come to Washington, and we're seeing a real interest in Project 2025, not only because the conservative movement has never done this before, but also because people are beginning to understand just how big the deep state is, just how big the bureaucracy is, and they want to be a part of something that can come help the next president fight and win battles on behalf of the American people.
Who put him or her there.
And in terms of the academy that you have, this is something that you do online.
You don't have to travel to Washington, D.C. It's something that you're sort of preemptively doing.
Is it sort of an online academy?
Yes, it is.
It's at project2025.org.
You can click on training and apply.
It only takes a few minutes.
And what we're doing is we're hosting lectures, online courses, for people who want to come to Washington or who are just interested in what it's like to work for the president, what the political hiring process is like.
Where are your kids going to go to school in Washington, D.C.? You know, we've got 17 lectures, 17 courses that are currently live.
We have more than 40 that will be live by the end of 2023.
And then we do hope to move to hosting some in-person ones in 2024.
But anyone is welcome.
It's project2025.org.
And this is, you know, this is our attempt to demystify serving in government for conservatives and get people ready ahead of time so that we're ready to hit the ground running on day one and we don't spend our first year in office, you know, trying to find the bathroom at the federal agencies.
But that's interesting.
So the academy, I was thinking it's more technical, but I guess the people already need to have those technical skills to fill that position.
This is more like practical, like, you know, this is where your kids would go to school, like you mentioned.
This is the neighborhoods to avoid.
This is how the political process works, right?
It's more like technical like that.
It's all of the above, really.
It is everything from how to work with the media to what to expect when you start working for the president, security clearances, financial disclosures, all of the things that you need to be thinking about if you're going to be a political appointee who works for the president of the United States.
You have a section in the guidebook, and you mention in there that the Trump administration appointed fewer political appointees in their first few months of office than any other recent president that wound up leaving career employees in charge of many different sections of the bureaucracy.
Can you actually give any examples of how this negatively impacted Trump's presidency in a concrete way?
Sure.
Well, that's a good question.
So one thing is it took the Trump administration longer to get the cabinet confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The last Trump cabinet member was confirmed by the Senate at the end of April 2017.
By contrast, the Biden administration had their entire cabinet confirmed by the middle of March of 2021, and that was with fewer senators than Republicans had during the Trump administration.
So some of the problem is we...
We need to work better with the Senate to confirm our people on time.
The other thing I would say is that, yes, President Trump was an outsider.
He did many great things for the country.
But one of the things that we left on the table during the Trump administration was really to get a hold of how to run the bureaucracy, how to manage the bureaucracy.
And so you did have, in various different contexts, you had either Obama holdovers or you had career federal employees running entire agencies or offices.
And that did hamstring the president's ability to implement his agenda throughout the executive branch.
So that's one of the things that we are looking at through Project 2025 so that we're able to get our folks in more quickly.
With those holdovers from the Obama administration and just career bureaucrats, do you have a concrete example of Trump's agenda being stymied or stifled?
Sure.
Well, you could look at the first 10 days of the Trump administration when Sally Yates was the acting attorney general.
She was the Obama deputy attorney general.
And she publicly humiliated the president and refused to defend a lawful executive order in court.
And that was an early sign of how tough the resistance was going to be within the deep state.
If you'd like to learn more about Project 2025, I'll throw some resources down into the description box below this video for you to peruse at your own leisure.
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