WASHINGTON– As a former and potentially future president, Donald Trump hailed what would become Project 2025 as a road map for “exactly what our movement will do” with another crack at the White House.

As the plan because a shift to the right in America has become a handicap during the 2024 campaign, Trump made an about-face. He denied having any knowledge of the “ridiculous and appalling” plans drawn up in part by his collaborators and allies from the first term.

Now, after being elected the 47th president on Nov. 5, Trump is outfitting his second administration with key players in a detailed effort he temporarily avoided. Most notably, Trump exploited Russell Vought for recall as director of the Office of Management and Budget; Tom Homan, his former head of immigration, as well as “border tsar”; and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, deputy head of policy.

The moves have accelerated criticism from Democrats who warn that Trump’s election hands the reins of government to the conservative movement that has spent years imagining how to concentrate power in the West Wing and force a radical shift to the right within of American government and society.

Trump and his aides say he has a mandate for reform from Washington. But they maintain the details are his alone.

“President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “All of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees and appointments are fully committed to President Trump’s agenda, not that of outside groups.”

Here’s a look at what some of Trump’s picks portend for his second presidency.

The director of the Office of Management and Budget, a role Vought previously held under Trump and which requires Senate confirmation, prepares the president’s proposed budget and is generally responsible for implementing the administration’s agenda in all agencies.

The position is influential, but Vought has made clear, as author of a Project 2025 chapter on presidential authority, that he wants the position to exercise more direct power.

“The director must view his work as the best and most complete approximation of the mind of the President,” Vought wrote. The OMB, he writes, “is the president’s air traffic control system” and should be “involved in all aspects of the White House policy process,” becoming “powerful enough to override agency bureaucracies.” execution “.

Trump did not go into such detail in naming Vought, but implicitly endorsed aggressive action. Vought, the president-elect said, “knows exactly how to dismantle the deep state” — Trump’s catch-all for the federal bureaucracy — and would help “restore fiscal sanity.”

In June, speaking on former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Vought relished the potential tension: “We’re not going to save our country without a little confrontation.” »

The strategy of further concentrating federal authority within the presidency permeates Project 2025 and Trump’s campaign proposals. Vought’s vision is particularly striking when paired with Trump’s proposals to dramatically expand the president’s control over federal workers and government purse strings — ideas tied to what the president-elect has done calling on megabillionaire Elon Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy. run a “Department of Government Effectiveness”.

During his first term, Trump sought to remake the federal civil service by reclassifying tens of thousands of federal workers – who enjoy job protections through changes in administration – into political appointees, making them makes it easier to fire and replace with loyalists. Currently, only about 4,000 of the federal government’s approximately 2 million workers are political appointees. President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s changes. Trump can now reinstate them.

Meanwhile, Trump’s broad “efficiency” mandates for Musk and Ramaswamy may rely on an old, defunct constitutional theory that the president — not Congress — is the true gatekeeper of federal spending. In his “Agenda 47,” Trump endorsed so-called “impounds,” whereby when lawmakers pass appropriations bills, they simply set a spending cap, but not a floor. According to the theory, the president can simply decide not to spend money on anything he deems unnecessary.

Vought did not venture into impoundment in its Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote, “the president should use every tool possible to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government.” Anything less than that would be an abject failure.

Trump’s choice immediately sparked negative reactions.

“Russ Vought is a far-right ideologue who attempted to break the law to give President Trump the unilateral authority he does not possess to overturn Congressional spending decisions (and) who fought and will still fight to give Trump the ability to summarily fire tens of thousands of public employees,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat and the outgoing Senate Appropriations chair.

Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, top Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said Vought wants to “dismantle the expert federal workforce” at the expense of Americans who depend on everything from veterans’ health care to Social Security benefits.

“Pain itself is the order of the day,” they said.

Trump’s protests regarding the 2025 project still go unmentioned overlaps in the two agendas. Both want to reimpose Trump-era immigration limits. Blueprint 2025 includes a litany of detailed proposals for various U.S. immigration laws, executive branch rules, and agreements with other countries—for example, reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients, and job applicants. ‘asylum.

Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving advisers and the architect of his ideas on immigration, including his promise to establish the largest deportation force in U.S. history. As deputy policy chief, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, Miller would remain in Trump’s West Wing inner circle.

“America is for Americans and only for Americans,” Miller said at the Trump conference. Rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27.

“America First Legal”, Miller’s organization founded to ideologically counter the American Civil Liberties Union, was listed as Project 2025’s advisory group until Miller requested that the name be removed due to increased attention. negative.

Homan, a named contributor to Project 2025, was acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first presidency, playing a key role in what became known as Trump. “family separation policy”.

Introducing Trump 2.0 earlier this year, Homan said, “No one is excluded. If you’re here illegally, you better look over your shoulder.

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s chosen to lead the CIAwas previously one of Trump’s directors of national intelligence. He is a contributor to Project 2025. The document’s chapter on U.S. intelligence was written by Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe’s chief of staff in the first Trump administration.

Mirroring Ratcliffe and Trump’s approach, Carmack said intelligence agencies were being too cautious. Ratcliffe, like the chapter attributed to Carmack, is hawkish toward China. Throughout the Project 2025 document, Beijing is presented as an American adversary that cannot be trusted.

Brendan Carr, the top Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025 and is now Trump’s choice to chair the panel. Carr wrote that the FCC chairman “is endowed with significant authority that is not shared” with other FCC members. He called on the FCC to address “threats to individual liberty posed by companies that abuse their dominant market positions,” particularly “big tech and their attempts to alienate diverse political viewpoints from the digital public square”.

He called for stricter transparency rules for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube and “allowing consumers to choose their own content filters and fact-checkers where appropriate.”

Carr and Ratcliffe would need Senate confirmation for their positions.

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