“If I’m elected president, we are going to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.,” vowed Donald Trump – in 2016.
Eight years later, in his quest for a second, non-consecutive term, “drain the swamp” – meaning to rid government of those who impose policy but are unaccountable to the president – is still a key Trump campaign slogan. If the Republican is victorious in November, he will have a detailed playbook for placing the entire federal bureaucracy under his direct control.
What is essentially a manual for how to swing a wrecking ball at the administrative apparatus of government, which Trump has decried as the “deep state,” has been written with the cooperation of more than 100 conservative organizations. The 922-page handbook, known as Project 2025, was organized and published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
“Project 2025 is a plan to execute what amounts to a comprehensive authoritarian takeover of American government,” wrote Thomas Zimmer, a Georgetown University visiting professor, in his Democracy Americana blog.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless — if the left allows it to be,” said Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts in a recent appearance on a right-wing podcast, The War Room with Stephen K. Bannon.
After Roberts’ incendiary comment, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, in a somewhat contradictory posting on his Truth Social platform. He asserted that while he knew “nothing” about Project 2025 and its authors, “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying.”
Many of those who wrote Project 2025’s chapters, however, were key appointees in Trump’s administration. Some are reportedly assisting the Trump re-election effort behind the scenes.
Several have also popped up in a recruitment video for Project 2025’s online “Presidential Administration Academy,” which is recruiting and training loyalists. The plan calls for restoring Schedule F, which briefly existed at the end of the Trump administration, a classification that made positions in the civil service more easily filled by loyalists to the president.
Tens of thousands of appointees could then fan out across government agencies to implement far-right priorities, such as detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, dismantling social safety nets, infusing Christian values and ethics into government policy, eliminating LGBTQ+ rights, directing the Justice Department to prosecute anti-white racism and banning pornography.
On reproductive rights, including abortion, Project 2025 outlines far stricter restrictions than even Trump or the platform for next week’s Republican National Convention is advocating.
The plan’s proponents characterize it as restoring “self-governance to everyday Americans.” The project’s head, Paul Dans, appearing on C-SPAN, left no doubt Trump’s words and ideas were the inspiration.
“He was president for four years, so many of the ideas are carry-ons from his original work. So, I would like to think a lot of it does spring from that first term of Trump,” Dans said.
'Full Trumpian' document
VOA requested an interview with the Heritage Foundation for this story. The think tank said it could not make anyone available to discuss Project 2025. It did email a statement stressing that Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate, and that if Trump was re-elected, it would be up to him to decide which recommendations to implement.
“It's a full Trumpian sort of document with an angry and highly polarizing tone” is how Progressive Policy Institute President Will Marshall characterized Project 2025.
It seeks to eliminate the checks and balances that writers of the Constitution, such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, guaranteed through dividing power among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government, according to Marshall.
“Madison and Jefferson ought to be spinning in their graves when they see how much power they want to concentrate in the next president's hands. And if that president happens to be Donald Trump, then it's a kind of a nightmare for the country, given the way he's misused power in the past,” Marshall told VOA.
The sweeping document is in line with Trump’s stances. It calls for placing big tariffs on imported goods and ending America’s “blind support for international organizations.”
“That would really endanger our prosperity and undercut our leadership and influence in the world,” Marshall said.
President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has made Project 2025 a key target.
“Trump’s advisers have created a 900-page blueprint — called Project 2025 — detailing everything else they plan to do in a second term, including a plan to cut Social Security, repeal our $35 cap on insulin, eliminate the Department of Education and end programs like Head Start [which provides early education, health benefits and nutrition to pre-school children],” Vice President Kamala Harris said during a campaign appearance Tuesday at a Las Vegas hotel/casino.
The plan also calls for slashing government funding for renewable energy and climate change mitigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation would be overhauled top to bottom, as would the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the Voice of America. VOA, whose news content is independent of higher government control, should — according to Project 2025 — be supervised by either the National Security Council or the State Department.
