How Pres. Trump Is Using Project 2025 to Reshape America

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, we return to the United States where President Trump is deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C. While he says his administration aims to crack down on crime and homelessness, some are asking if this move is part of a Project 2025, that almost 8,000 pages long, it is an ambitious and controversial right-wing blueprint for transforming executive power. And just over 200 days into Trump’s second term, one online tracker says the agency is nearly halfway through completion. Journalist David Graham joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what this means for everyday Americans and the country’s foreign policy.

 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. David Graham, thanks so much for joining us. Your book is titled The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. So set the table a little bit for our audience, especially the folks overseas who might be a little unfamiliar with it. Here in the United States, during the campaign season, we heard about this thousand-page long report that was written by a conservative think tank. But, you know, for people who haven’t been paying attention, what was the goal of this project?

 

DAVID GRAHAM: So the goal of Project 2025 was basically to have an agenda in place for the next conservative president, whoever that would be. So the, the Heritage Foundation, a long running conservative think tank, gathered a bunch of writers and thinkers from across the right and the Trump-friendly right, to put this together. And their attitude was that the first Trump presidency had underachieved because of poor staffing and, and poor ideas. And so they wanted to put in place both a plan for how to achieve policies, and then a list of the policies they would want on a pretty granular level across basically every department of the government. So that a new president, whether that was Trump or somebody else, could hit the ground running on January 20th 2025.

 

SREENIVASAN: Now, the president throughout the campaign kind of disavowed and distanced himself from the project itself, right? But he, he said, quote, “I have no idea who is behind it,” calling the ideas “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” yet three out of four of the authors that are in this were people who served in his first administration.

 

GRAHAM: That’s right. The, the author list is full of former aides. And you think about somebody like Russell Vought who I think is a perfect example. Russell Vought was the head of the Office of Management and Budget at the end of Trump’s first term. Then he went to work on Project 2025 and, and sort of designed the executive takeover portions of this. He served as the head of the policy platform committee for the Republican National Convention appointed by Trump in 2024. And now he is in place as the head of Office of Management and Budget, once again. And he’s been an important driver for many of these Project 2025 priorities. So I think the proof is really in what Trump is doing and in who he has appointed to these top roles.

 

SREENIVASAN: So when you look at this document, you describe this as a, a, a skeleton key for understanding how this second Trump presidency is gonna work. How, how should we look at it?

 

GRAHAM: Well, I think the first few months, maybe the first five, six months of the presidency were really about taking over the executive branch. So, we saw, for example, attempts to close the education department, fire tens of thousands of civil servants, or take over independent regulatory agencies, such as the alphabet soup agencies. They traditionally have had some sort of independence from the president, but we’ve seen Trump, you know, acting to hire and fire leaders of those agencies. 

All these part — are part of getting the power they need to do the things they want. And as we move into a second phase, you see the administration, I think, starting to work through a lot of the policy goals that  were laid out in the document. Those were hard to do when they didn’t have power and they didn’t have people in place. But now that they’re starting to get a team in all the top offices, they’re, they’re doing those things.

 

SREENIVASAN: So what is the vision of America that project 2025 is harkening back to forward to, I mean, in an ideal world, America would look like blank in terms of social vision?

 

GRAHAM: They would like to see a traditional family, nuclear families with fathers working. And mothers mostly caring for children. And very much fathers and mothers. It’s a very heterosexual vision. They want to write trans people literally out of the language of government by saying they don’t exist. And they believe there’s a sort of epidemic of gender ideology, as they call it. They would like to see more religiosity in schools. They would like to see abortion banned. Sort of across the board, they want to use — they, they wanna bring about this vision. And it’s not exactly returning to any one thing in particular, but it is a kind of idealized vision of what maybe they, they wish the past had been like.

 

SREENIVASAN: The president announced that he is going to place the DC police under direct federal control and roll out the National Guard in his efforts, he says, to try and decrease crime. Is this an idea that you would find in Project 2025?

 

GRAHAM: So, the specific idea of DC is not something you’d see in Project 2025, but I think there are several places where this dovetails closely with it. One of them is, you know, the idea that federal troops are a really useful way to enforce the laws. So there’s a strong advocacy in Project 2025 for using federal troops — particularly at the border — but also in places where there’s high crime. Second of all, you have a sort of a war on cities and states. An idea that the federal government should force cities and states to do what the president wants and, and to use whatever means are at the White House’s disposal to do that. And I’d say third, this is of a piece with a general idea that the president should have, if not quite unfettered power, very broad power to do kind of what he wants. And, and we see Trump doing that using emergency powers with this DC declaration.

 

SREENIVASAN: Assess the influence of this project on, say, for example, immigration — where we’ve seen not just a flurry of executive actions, but we’ve seen restructuring of entire parts of the government and, and kind of new authorities. Lots of things that seem like they’re, they come from different parts of this plan.

 

GRAHAM: That’s right. And obviously, you know, immigration has been a focus of President Trump for a long time. What Project 2025 does is think about how to use the, the government’s powers, existing powers more effectively. So it’s not simply that they want to crack down on illegal immigration, including using, for example, National Guard or other federal troops at the border. But it’s also, they want to reduce legal immigration. And that’s something that you’ve seen the administration doing as well, whether that is you know, cutting down on the student visas, making it harder for international students to study here, talk of a $15,000 fee for a tourist visa, for example. They wanna reduce the number of visas that are available and the kinds of visas that are available. Because they envision, you know, a country that is much more shut off from the rest of the world and has basically the population that exists now rather than with a lot of immigrants coming in.

 

SREENIVASAN: In, in terms of foreign policy. Where do you see the impacts already of ideas that were expressed in Project 2025? Whether it’s about our place in the world, what kind of aid we should be giving?

 

GRAHAM: It’s interesting, ’cause Project 2025 has a, a kind of flat vision of the world. In their view, China is the major threat to the United States. It’s an intellectual threat, it’s an economic threat, and it’s ultimately a military threat. And they want to reorient the world around taking China on.

Everything else is kind of an afterthought including the Middle East. Now, they do envision taking a lot of the existing humanitarian apparatus and converting that into more of a tool of power, directly pushing American goals. So the dismantlement of USAID is a little bit of an example of that, although the authors of Project 2025 don’t go that far. But they also wanna create coalitions to take on China. And I think Trump’s actions to levy tariffs, including on a lot of allies, has pushed some allies away and makes it a little bit harder to create the coalition that they envision to take China on.

 

SREENIVASAN: Just recently the EPA announced that it’s going to roll back the Obama-era regulations on emissions. And I wonder is that consistent with some of Project 2025’s recommendations on what to do with the environment, their views on climate science?

 

GRAHAM: Very much so. So Project 2025 is that the view that climate science should be largely eliminated from the federal government. It doesn’t deny the climate is changing, but it says that it’s a problem to be solved by private industry, and they would like to see more oil and gas drilling. In fact, they treat the Interior Department largely as a sort of oil and gas extraction department. They wanna close down a lot of tracking of weather, and they wanna reduce a lot of regulation. That includes on things like pollution, carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases. It includes also things like forever chemicals, PFAS. And their view is that — you know, they tell a story that one time, you know, that water was dirty the air was smoggy in the 1970s, but we’ve made good progress from then, then and environmentalists are holding us back. And if we want to prosper as a nation, we need to get rid of these regulations.

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, you, you mentioned privatization as one of the solutions. In the Project, what do the authors envision? What kinds of agencies, what kinds of work that the federal government does today, does the project and the, the authors think should be privatized?

 

GRAHAM: I think the, the best example is climate science. You know, they, they would like to see large parts of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration privatized. They’d like to move a lot of other research into the private sector. They’d also like to see, for example, the federal government start to move out of the business of education — moving those things to the private sector, moving student loans to the private sector. Even if you look at something like the Federal Reserve, they would like to see the Federal Reserve eliminated, ultimately, and to move to a system more to like what we had in the early 19th century where banks can issue their own currencies and move the federal government out of that business.

 

SREENIVASAN: How successful were these ideas in being implemented? I mean, we’re just, what, six, seven months into this now, into this administration. But when you look at this thousand-page document, how much of that has already been set in motion or already come to pass?

 

GRAHAM: I think it’s really hard to quantify, and there’s so many policy goals, some of which are, are really granular and specific, and some of which are very sweeping. So I, I think it’s hard to say for sure. We’ve seen a lot of progress, particularly I think, on things, things like the environment. But in terms of the, the goal of taking executive power and transforming the way the presidency works — which I think is essential to getting so many of these policies done — they’ve made a huge amount of progress, I think maybe more than they anticipated. Elon Musk’s DOGE was really helpful to them in getting some of those things done. And one of the leaders of Project 2025 said this spring that Project 2025 had already succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. So whatever happens now, it depends on the president having the power that they have managed to accrue for him. And, you know, we, we see already the Supreme Court could be ruling on other things that might give Trump even more power. So that’s the focus so far, I believe.

 

SREENIVASAN: Has the Supreme Court made any kind of indications on which way it might rule about these things? I mean, we’ve got you know, the firing of thousands of civil servants. We’ve got the dismantling of the Department of Education. There’s other court cases that are gonna wind up in front of the justices.

 

GRAHAM: What we’ve seen is the court is declining to block things — whether it is those firings, the education department, or the ability to fire the heads of these independent agencies, which stood under a precedent from 1935. Now, we don’t know how the court will rule, but the fact that they have decided not to block them seems like an indication they were at least somewhat sympathetic to Trump’s arguments and may rule in favor of him and allow him to, to take these powers.

 

SREENIVASAN: One of the tenets inside the Project that, around the traditional family and the social values that the Project is is — wants to see in America, was a decidedly anti-abortion stance. And I wonder, are you surprised that the administration really hasn’t taken nearly as many steps in that realm as it has in so many others?

 

GRAHAM: I am a little surprised, and I think there’s a couple of things going on there. One is that Trump himself seems to have backed away from abortion politics. I think he concluded that after the overturning of Roe, he had gotten the political punch out of that, that he could get and to go any further might risk political backlash. 

I also think that by appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, he’s put in place somebody who, one has a kind of murky stance on abortion, but two isn’t focused on it. He’s much more interested in the kind of MAHA agenda we’ve seen.

I also don’t think it’s something though that is going to go away quietly because for the people involved in Project 2025 who are now scattered throughout the government in a lot of important positions, this is a really essential moral question. (24:38): It’s one of their most fundamental beliefs. So I think we will see them continue to work on this. 

And there’s a lot of levers that they can pull short of a national ban on abortion. You know, they’re interested in tracking abortion at the state level and creating kind of a, a surveillance apparatus around that, or in preventing the mailing of abortion drugs, or attempting to withdraw FDA approval for medical abortion drugs. So there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of levers for them to pull, and for them it’s a long run. Obviously the pro-life right was willing to work for decades to overturn Roe, and I think they’re continuing to work forward for a full ban nationally if they can achieve it.

 

SREENIVASAN: Is there a countermovement? I mean, we have had these kind of soul-searching conversations from the Democratic Party to say, Okay, well, we’re gonna have our own project three years out, four years out, here’s what we would like to do.

 

GRAHAM: You know, the Democrats have been talking about a sort of Project 2029, and you hear a need for it. You know, I, I think there’s a couple ways it, it doesn’t match up. One of them is Democrats are talking about which voters to target. And Project 2025 is avowedly not a political project. You know, in fact, the authors say, It’s somebody else’s job to get a president elected. We’re just providing the policy platform. They start with a worldview and they work to policies from there. And so some Democrats seem to be a you know, attacking this from the opposite direction. 

But I also think that if your concern is a president who’s too powerful. One place to focus is the role of Congress. And I don’t see anybody really talking about how Congress can serve as an effective counterweight to a strengthen executive.

 

SREENIVASAN: In your conversations with either the authors or doing the research and obviously just reading through, were you surprised at, I guess, the tone or tenor in addition to the policy prescriptions, the way that some of these grievances that they had were being described? I’m thinking there’s a, there’s a phrase, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” I mean, that that is, you know, sort of sets policy aside for a second, but that’s, that seems personal.

 

GRAHAM: That’s right. I think there’s a, a real vitriol in a lot of it. You’ve heard Russell Vought say things like, We are in the final stages of a Marxist takeover. Kevin Roberts, the head of Heritage, said last summer that, We were in the midst of a second American revolution, which would remain bloodless if the left allowed it to be. So there’s a real personalization, there’s a real grudge against people in the government. And I think at the heart of that is a fear that America, as they know and love it, is disappearing. And if they don’t take drastic action, radical action, to protect that, they’re going to lose, lose grip of that. And that gives them a, a feeling that they can and should do whatever it takes to hold onto power.

 

SREENIVASAN: When, when you start to change the structure of an institution and you increase the potential power held by the president, I mean, the authors have to know that eventually a president could be elected into office that is counter to all of their own interests, right? But that power and that infrastructure now still remains.

 

GRAHAM: That’s right. I, I think it’s an interesting sort of flaw in their, their arguments. Now, they phrase a lot of these things, and I think fairly, you know, straightforward constitutional terms. For example, they argue that the executive branch should be more under the power of the president because that’s the way the Constitution is written. And, and they think that the law is on their side, or rather the constitution is on their side. It is difficult to know how they would respond if, if a Democratic president was using a lot of these powers that Trump is using. I, I think that part of it is about their desperation to save what they see. And part of it is the idea that they are working on a very long timeline. So they’re doing things now — you know, they were working for the first few months of the Trump administration — they’re working for the first two years before the midterms. They’re working for the four years of his presidency. But they’re also trying to shift the way the government works and the way American society works much longer down the road, so on a, a decade’s timeline. And so when you’re working on that kind of timeline you’re less concerned about what the next president will work look like and more concerned about where things will be in 40 or 50 years.

 

SREENIVASAN: So David, we talked a little bit about the different areas that we’ve already seen an impact of Project 2025, whether it’s foreign aid, or immigration, or the Department of Education. What, what are you watching for in the next six months?

 

GRAHAM: You know, one of the things I’m interested in is the battle over federal funds. We’ve seen the executive branch insisting that they can impound funds, which is basically to refuse to spend things that have already been appropriated by Congress. We’ve seen Russell Vought talking about pocket rescissions, which is simply not spending the money before the year is up. And we saw the White House come to Congress with a bill on rescissions. So I think funding and whether the, the presidency is using the funds Congress has, has laid out, I think is a really important question. 

And then I’m just looking across the government at a range of possible policy areas. Recently, for example, we saw Trump taking on banks accusing them of discrimination for their business practices. The idea that the federal government should be investigating the choices businesses make of, of who they serve is something that is really important in Project 2025. Not a traditional conservative view, but certainly one that I think we’re going to see more of. You’ll likely see it in climate science, you’ll see it in family policy across the board. You know, there’s so many ideas in so many places for Project 2025 to be trying to make a new impact.

 

SREENIVASAN: The book is called The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America, author David Graham, thanks so much for joining us.

 

GRAHAM: Thank you.