Donald Trump has tried to claim that he has no ties to Project 2025, the dystopian policy agenda authored by the Heritage Foundation that seeks to drastically reorganize and destroy large parts of the federal government. However, a newly leaked video shows one of the plan’s key architects telling undercover journalists that Trump has provided funding for the project and is “very supportive” of its unhinged agenda. The plan would have broad impacts on American culture, including drastic shifts in science and tech policy.
Undercover journalists with the Centre for Climate Reporting recently used a sophisticated operation involving hidden cameras to capture a private conversation with Russell Vought, one of the leading minds behind Project 2025. Vought is also the President of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think-tank dedicated to turning “back the tide of progressive liberalism” in the U.S. In their conversation, the journalists got Vought to admit that, despite his public rhetoric, Trump still supports the Project 2025 policy agenda.
“He’s been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it,” Vought said, of Trump. He added that the former President is “very supportive of what we do,” despite Trump’s public denials. “I expect to hear ten more times…the President distancing himself from the left’s bogeyman of Project 2025—I’m not worried about that,” Vought said. Vought further claimed that his organization was quietly drafting hundreds of executive orders and legal memos that could be used by a future Trump administration. Midway through his first term in office, The Heritage Foundation bragged that 64 percent of its policy prescriptions were “included in Trump’s budget, implemented through regulatory guidance, or under consideration for action in accordance with The Heritage Foundation’s original proposals.”
“President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” a campaign spokesperson told CNN.
Vought, like many other people associated with Project 2025, has deep ties to Trump. In addition to being a regular guest on Trump acolyte Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Vought also played a major role in the first Trump administration, acting as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that role, Vought was tasked with executing, as he has put it, “deregulatory agendas across the Executive Branch.” A CNN review found that, like Vought, as many as 140 people who formerly worked for Trump have been involved in the project’s policy formulations.
The list of disturbing policies that Project 2024 has advocated for is long. The initiative’s 900-plus page manifesto, Mandate for Leadership, is rife with passages that seem like they’d be more at home in a pamphlet handed out by a crackpot on a street corner rather than a policy agenda published by a major think-tank. Most notoriously, the project has stated that it is in favor of outlawing pornography nationwide. In an unhinged passage that equates porn with transgender identity and pedophilia, Project 2025 can’t help but reveal the rightwing radicalism at the heart of its crusade to remake the American government:
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
In addition to outlawing something that a vast majority of Americans regularly indulge in, Project 2025 has set its sights on mangling U.S. environmental policy beyond all recognition. In a series of recent leaks, ProPublica recently demonstrated that the project would seek to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” barring officials throughout the government from using the term. That’s small beans, however, with the project’s other designs on environmental policy, as it also advocates for the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency.
We previously noted that the project would seek to eliminate public funding for a number of scientific agencies, including the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Such drastic moves would have downstream impacts on consumers—like ending free weather reports, which are sourced from such agencies. Presumably, in Project 2025’s perfect world, weather science would be privatized, and Americans would be forced to pay to know their weekly weather outlook.
At the same time, Project 2025 would go balls-to-the-wall when it comes to dumber uses of technology, like the weaponization of outer space. The project has said that when it comes to the U.S. Space Force, the interplanetary military wing that emerged during the Trump administration, it is necessary to reverse “the Biden Administration’s defensive posture” and reestablish “offensive capabilities to guarantee a favorable balance of forces, efficiently manage the full deterrence spectrum, and seriously complicate enemy calculations of a successful first strike against U.S. space assets.”
Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, has equivalently bizarre ideas about how the federal government should handle tech issues. While some of the think-tank’s positions seem almost reasonable (its anti-monopoly efforts, for instance, are fine), many are plainly nuts. This April, the organization filed an amicus brief in a legal effort to eradicate the FCC’s funding of wifi services on public school buses. At the time, the organization argued that such funding was not, as you might imagine, a matter of the government stepping up to make sure that school children have access to the internet but, instead, a “ploy by the leftwing FCC Chair” to “subsidize big tech and brainwash kids with government-funded wifi.” At the same time, the organization has sought to repeal Section 230, the law that gives broad legal immunity to internet platforms for the content they host. That policy is largely credited with keeping the internet from getting sued out of existence.
Gizmodo reached out to the Trump campaign, the Center for Renewing America, and the Heritage Foundation but did not receive an immediate response.
