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- [00:00]
David Graham
There was Barbenheimer Summer, then Bratz Summer. What will this season bring? Maybe it's the season of actual good superhero movies like the Fantastic Four, Superman. For a guide to the movies and tv, we're most excited about this summer, listen to the Pop Culture Happy hour podcast from NPR.
- [00:17]
Dave Davies
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Democratic attacks on Donald Trump often cited Project 2025, a policy blueprint for his second term developed by the conservative Heritage Democrats, targeted many proposals from the plan, such as replacing thousands of civil servants in the government with Trump loyalists and abolishing the Department of Education. In response, candidate Trump sought to distance himself from the effort. I have nothing to do with Project.
- [00:49]
David Graham
2025 that's out there. I haven't read it.
- [00:53]
Dave Davies
I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it. But once in office, Trump pursued many of the initiatives outlined in the project. An analysis by the publication Bloomberg government found that 37 of the 47 executive actions taken in Trump's first few days in office directly or partially matched recommendations from Project 2025. Our guest journalist David Graham, has a new book about the origins, authors and policy proposals of the more than 900 page report the project produced. Graham writes that the project's vision of America is that of an avowedly Christian nation, but following a very specific, narrow strain of Christianity. In many ways, he writes, it resembles the 1950s. While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families. Graham observes that some proposals made in pursuit of that vision may be harder to implement with deep cuts to government programs inflicted by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. David Graham is a staff writer at the Atlantic. His coverage of the 2020 presidential election won the 2021 Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political he previously reported for Newsweek, the Daily Beast, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. His new book is the how Project 2025 is reshaping America. Well, David Graham, welcome to FRESH AIR.
- [02:16]
David Graham
Oh, thank you for having me.
- [02:18]
Dave Davies
I want to begin by sort of what drove this project. I mean, this was years in the making, well in advance of the 2024 election. And there was a sense of emergency in those who were getting this project going. I think Russell Vogt said that we are in the last stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country. Stakes are really high here for these people, weren't they?
- [02:43]
David Graham
Yeah, they had a sense that the country was falling away from them as they had come to love it, that the America they knew was disappearing and they also came out of a sense of frustration with the first Trump term in which many of them had served. And they felt like this was really their chance to save the country and save the vision of the country that they wanted to implement.
- [03:04]
Dave Davies
You know, you cite an article in 2016 in the Claremont Review of Books. It was anonymous at the time, although the author was later revealed called the Flight 93 election. What was the message here?
- [03:17]
David Graham
This is a piece in a kind of Trump friendly but longstanding conservative opinion journal, the Claremont Review. And the writer used a Latin pseudonym, and he said that this is the Flight 93 election and that conservatives needed to charge the cockpit or they would die. He said, you might die anyway, but this is the only option. And he says, to compound the metaphor, a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian roulette with a semi auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances. So you can see this kind of apocalyptic sense that they had. I think that sense continued throughout the first Trump term, and it definitely imbues Project 2025 as well. And the writer, Michael Anton, became one of the contributors to Project 2025. He's now a prominent figure in the Trump administration and in fact is leading technical talks with Iran on a new nuclear deal just coming up.
- [04:09]
Dave Davies
Wow. Now, the main document that was presented was called Mandate for Leadership, which is actually kind of a reboot of a 1980 Reagan era doc about. I guess you say that this is a disorienting read. Why?
- [04:24]
David Graham
Because the mix of things that you get in it. I mean, at one time there are these very dry descriptions of the way, for example, the White House operates, of the way Pentagon budgeting operates. And then right by that there will be these outlandish policy ideas, really kind of radical stuff. Sometimes these are one paragraph after another. And so you see all these things right in one place, and you see them putting these, I think, fairly radical schemes out in a document that they published online 18 months before the election. You know, it's not like some sort of secret cabal. It's a very public document.
- [04:58]
Dave Davies
Right, right. You can find it online. 30 chapters on every government agency from the Commerce Department to the intelligent community and so on. You write that one prong of this project 2025, a playbook for the first six months of the administration, was never made public. Still not public.
- [05:16]
David Graham
It still isn't public, although I think we have a pretty good sense of what it is by triangulating. It was a 100 day playbook with a series of drafted executive orders and when we look at what Trump has done in his first roughly hundred days, there's a really strong connection between what is in Mandate for Leadership and the executive orders. So I think we can guess pretty effectively that what was in that plan or the executive orders that we have seen.
- [05:40]
Dave Davies
Yeah, there were a few major players that really organized this project. You want to just mention two or three and tell us who they are?
- [05:47]
David Graham
Yeah, I guess we can start with Kevin Roberts, who is the head of the Heritage Foundation. And Heritage is, of course, a long running conservative institution. But Roberts was a relatively new leader. Heritage had gone through a sort of tumultuous period. They hired a new head, he left, formed a new organization. His replacement clashed with the Trump administration. And so when Roberts came in, he was sort of trying to reboot the organization, and this was a big part of that. The person he brought in to lead Project 2025 is a man named Paul Danz. And Danz is a longtime lawyer, and he had been in the Federalist Society since he was in law school, but had not served in politics until the first Trump administration. And he was a big fan of Trump from very early on. He wanted Trump to run for office in 2011, when he was pushing the birther lie. And he finally managed to kick his way into the White House late in the first Trump administration, working in the personnel office.
- [06:44]
Dave Davies
And then there's Russell Vogt.
- [06:46]
David Graham
Yes. And Vogt is kind of the inside man, if Dan's is the outsider. Vogt came up through Capitol Hill circles, working for very conservative, fiscally conservative members of Congress like Phil Graham and Jeb Hensarling. And then he served in the Office of Management and Budget during Trump's first term in office. And he is the man who I think has thought most about how government works and how and how to achieve the things they want to do. He's really about the sort of operations and levers of power.
- [07:13]
Dave Davies
And he sort of openly embraces the notion of Christian nationalism.
- [07:17]
David Graham
That's right. You know, he gave a really interesting interview to Charlie Kirk a couple years ago, the conservative podcaster, and he said, you know, the left is always saying, using these pejorative names for us, but when they say Christian nationalist, you know, I think that's accurate. I'm a Christian and I'm a nationalist. That's not a pejorative for me. And he thinks that America was founded as a Christian nation and it needs to return to those roots.
- [07:39]
Dave Davies
You know, a lot of our listeners, I'm sure, have heard of Project 2025, a lot of people have, and I think it's thought of as a policy document, you know, with ideas that they hoped Trump would embrace. And it is that. But it's not just that. It was an organization. I mean, the project wasn't just a document. It was an organization with a lot of people, and part of it was a personnel recruitment and training operation. And I gather that's because a lot of the people running this project, some of them had served in Trump's first term and felt it was not effective because it was undermined by those running the government, both career civil servants and even some political appointees. What were their complaints about those they saw who failed to implement Trump's agenda?
- [08:27]
David Graham
Well, obviously, we've heard a lot from Trump about the deep state, and you get some of that kind of attack on the civil service. There's a frustration that civil servants are, at worst, liberals who are there to kind of implement their policy vision and are going to slow walk anything that the president wants to do. At best, they're kind of lazy. You know, they're there to clock in and clock out, and they're just. They're not trying. They're not on board. And that's a problem if you're trying to move the government in another direction, which they were trying to do. But they have almost as much frustration, maybe even more frustration, with the political appointees with whom they worked in the first Trump administration. I mean, I think the anger is really striking. They saw these people coming in, and they were either out for themselves, they thought, or they were lazy, or they were holdovers from the George W. Bush Republican Party who were there to stop Trump or to moderate some of his impulses. And, you know, I think for Dan, this is very personal. He thought he was going to get a great job in the Justice Department, you know, at the beginning of 2017. And instead, he felt like his path was blocked by these Bush people.
- [09:29]
Dave Davies
That's Paul Daniel, one of the organizers of this thing. Yeah, go ahead.
- [09:32]
David Graham
Right. And so they wanted to, you know, come in on the first day of a new Republican administration with a team of political appointees who were vetted already, who had been trained, trained in what their departments do, trained in the way the federal government works, and on board with Trump so that they would be working all in concert.
- [09:51]
Dave Davies
Right. So they developed a list of as many as 10,000 people who they thought would be good candidates for working in the second Trump administration. What kind of folks were these?
- [10:03]
David Graham
You know, this is all kinds of people. They wanted people who they Said, you know, had run for local school board meetings. They wanted people who had been thrown out of organizations for being too loyal to Trump. They wanted the people who were kind of the rejects, but rejects who had skills and could sort of the raw talent that could be trained to work in the government.
- [10:22]
Dave Davies
Right. I think Paul Dan's used this phrase, people who figuratively given blood for the movement. That's to say they've paid a price, they've been canceled online or punished in some way for their beliefs.
- [10:34]
David Graham
Exactly, yeah.
- [10:36]
Dave Davies
So they established a lot of training for these folks, and you can see on the website some of the main topics. What did this training consist of?
- [10:45]
David Graham
You know, some of these things are just very basic. Like, here is how you deal with public records in the government. Here's what you need to know about public records. Here's what you need to know about the structure of government. It's like Schoolhouse Rock on a very high level. And some of them are a little bit more specific. All of them are maybe, you know, 30, 60 minutes long, roughly. So to give people a basic grounding so they weren't coming in and learning how their offices worked only when they got their badge and got their HR training.
- [11:13]
Dave Davies
These are online videos in the main, right?
- [11:15]
David Graham
Correct. You had to sign up for them. You could register and sign up, and then you'd get a certificate at the end saying that you had completed the training.
- [11:21]
Dave Davies
Did you get to look at any of these?
- [11:23]
David Graham
I've seen some of them. A lot of them are available online, and you can watch them. And they're. I mean, some of them are just much more boring than you would expect, which is kind of intriguing.
- [11:33]
Dave Davies
You know, it's interesting that the Authors of Project 2025 couch it as a defense of the Constitution, and they say that Congress has abdicated too much power to the executive branch, which I think would surprise a lot of people, because I think that what they see Trump is doing is expanding executive power. Is there a contradiction here?
- [11:54]
David Graham
I think there is. And, you know, the diagnosis that they make, I think, is quite persuasive and shared by a lot of people across the political spectrum. Congress has, over the last decades and years, yielded more and more power to the president. They've delegated things to executive agencies. You know, they've allowed the White House basically to take over the war power. They can't pass a budget. All of these things are true. And I think we, you know, we don't need to mince words about that. But the question is what you're going to do about that. And I think their answer is to give more power to the president. It doesn't make a great deal of sense, and they don't really manage to reconcile how that's going to solve the problem, other than making the president more able to implement his own will.
- [12:35]
Dave Davies
Right. Well, I guess the question is, which president is in power? One of the things that they advocate is use of impoundment. This is a term some people will know to explain this.
- [12:45]
David Graham
Impoundment is basically not spending all of the money that Congress has allocated. Everyone knows from their, you know, junior high school civics class that Congress has the power of the purse. And presidents have often wanted to not spend money for whatever reason. And that was something that they did on and off for much of American history until the Nixon administration, when Nixon simply went overboard, as he did in many things. And Congress passed a law saying that a president could only impound money after a specific request. And with Congress's permission, the people around Trump, and particularly Vote, believe that that law is unconstitutional. They think that the president should have power to do that. He has jobs to execute the budget, and anything else is a limit on that. Trump tried this, actually, in his first administration, infamously when he attempted to impound funds that had been allocated to Ukraine for defense when he was trying to get an investigation of Hunter Biden out of the Ukrainian government. And he was impeached for that, of course. And we think about that impeachment as about abuse of power and about, you know, use of the presidency for political purposes. But one of the major issues there was also the fact that he was.
- [13:55]
Dave Davies
Trying to impound funds, another expansion of presidential power that is conceived of in the plan and I guess in the reality we've seen so far in the Trump administration is treating the Justice Department and the FBI not really as independent investigative and prosecuting agencies, but as tools of the president's will. That's explicit in Project 2025.
- [14:21]
David Graham
It is. I mean, they make the point that the Justice Department is kind of a weird creation because the attorney general is appointed by the president and serves at the president's will. But we've also had a division between the president and the Justice Department on some issues because of some egregious abuses in the past. They believe that's also unconstitutional, and it's a danger to democracy if there's somebody like the attorney general who's unelected sort of acting on their own will. Same goes for the FBI director. And so we've seen the Trump administration already acting on this we see them, for example, firing line prosecutors, you know, career Justice Department officials. We see directing an investigation into ActBlue, the major Democratic donor platform that happened just last week. So they've started to move forward on making the Justice Department a wing of the executive branch or a wing of the presidency that they can use to enforce their will and enforce the things that they talk about elsewhere in the plan.
- [15:16]
Dave Davies
There's also the matter of civil servants and the government. You know, civil service is an institution that's what, close to 100, I guess, more than 100 years old. Right. The idea being that you want people to be hired not before their political connections, but for their qualifications, and that their actions in government should be to serve the public and not politicians, and they are protected in that way. President Trump had this idea of changing that with something called Schedule F in the first Trump term, which I gather he did issue an executive order about, but it wasn't really effective. You want to explain what that was supposed to do and why it didn't work?
- [15:54]
David Graham
Yeah. So Schedule F is the idea that there are a lot of employees who are civil servants who should be converted to political appointees. A civil servant has a lot of protections. They can challenge any firing. They have to be fired for cause. They can go through a long review process, and often if there's not cause, they will get their firing overturned or they'll get some sort of payout. But the president doesn't want people who are going to be slow to respond. He wants them to be doing exactly what he wants. So if you convert them to political appointees, political appointees can be fired at any time for any reason by the president who appointed them. This is another Russell Vogt idea, who's the head of Office of Management and Budget and was in the first Trump administration on either end of his time at Project 2025. So they issued an executive order along these lines at the tail end of the first Trump administration. And then as soon as Joe Biden took office, he withdrew the order. And so it was kind of dead there, but it was something that the Trump administration has now started pursuing once again.
- [16:52]
Dave Davies
Right. And, you know, it's a little strange because, you know, civil service is not just a notion. Right. It's a policy established by acts of Congress. What made Those in Project 2025 think the President has the authority to sweep away this protection from thousands of employees just within executive Order?
- [17:13]
David Graham
You know, it falls down to this idea of a unitary executive. They see things like civil servants who can't be fired by the president. And they think it is abhorrent to the Constitution because if the president is in charge of the executive branch, he should be able to do what he wants with the executive branch. And so when you see a civil servant who can't do that, they think that that that violates the Constitution. And it just makes it very hard for a president to do what he wants. We obviously saw Trump really struggling during his first term in office to do a lot of the things he'd promised to do and to do a lot of things he was trying to do. And for them, a lot of that blame came down to civil servants who tried to block it by, you know, following rules or regulations, maybe working specifically to the rule, rather than trying to get things done.
- [17:55]
Dave Davies
Right now, we should note that there were thousands of employees in the government that are not in civil service jobs that serve at the will of the president and his appointees. So there is an idea here that policymakers should have some flexibility to change things if they want. And so a lot of jobs at the top aren't civil service. I gather one of the things in the first Trump administration was that some of those went vacant either because they weren't kind of didn't have it together to appoint them all or wanted to save money.
- [18:25]
David Graham
Yeah, they wanted to save money. And, you know, they point out that you can save money in an immediate term and actually cost money and cost yourself effectiveness in the long term. Something maybe we're seeing with Elon Musk's Doge. They also just didn't have people trained. There were so many people who did not want to serve in the first Trump administration that they simply could not fill jobs with qualified people. And sometimes when they tried to appoint people who were not qualified, Congress would not confirm them. And that's another one of the motivations for the big training of people and vetting of people for these jobs that Project 2025 did.
- [19:00]
Dave Davies
Yeah. So do we have any idea how many of these 10,000 people in the Project 2025 database actually got jobs in the Trump administration?
- [19:09]
David Graham
We don't. That database hasn't been made public. And we can look at a lot of the people who are contributors to Project 2025 and how they have come into top positions. But many of the people we're talking about are not names that I think would be household names and not in jobs that most people would think about or encounter. They're in these low ranking positions where they can make a lot of difference to the way regulations are written and the way they're implemented, but they're not going to be in the public spotlight almost ever.
- [19:35]
Dave Davies
Does it seem that this Trump administration has been more effective in filling those jobs, those non civil service jobs with Trump supporters?
- [19:43]
David Graham
Trump is doing better in this term than he did in his first term, and he's doing better than Joe Biden did in getting people appointed into political jobs.
- [19:53]
Dave Davies
All right. Let's take another break here, then we'll talk some more. We are speaking with David Graham. He's a staff writer for the Atlantic. His new book is the how Project 2025 is reshaping America. He'll be back to talk more after the short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
- [20:10]
David Graham
At Planet Money, we'll take you from a race to make rum in the Caribbean. Our rum from a quality standpoint is the best in the world. To the labs dreaming up the most advanced microchips. It's very rare for people to go inside to the back rooms of New York's Diamond District. What are you looking for? The stupid guy here.
- [20:28]
Dave Davies
They're all smart.
- [20:29]
David Graham
Don't worry about Planet Money from npr. We go to the Story and take you along with us wherever you get your podcasts. At NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we sort through a lot of television and we've found some recent TV comedies we really like that you don't want to miss. And we'll tell you where to watch them in one handy guide. Listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from npr. These days there is a lot of news. It can be hard to keep up with what it means for you, your family and your community. Consider this From NPR is a podcast that helps you make sense of the news. Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a story and provide the context, backstory and analysis you need to understand our rapidly changing world. Listen to the Consider this podcast from npr. On the Sunday story from Up First, a whistleblower inside the federal government says.
- [21:22]
C
DOGE employees may have taken sensitive data from government systems and covered their tracks.
- [21:29]
David Graham
There's really no way to tell what or where that data is. Now listen now to the Sunday Story.
- [21:36]
C
On the up first podcast from NPR.
- [21:41]
Dave Davies
You write that the number one priority of Project 2025 is to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. As I mentioned in the introduction, you say this is a vision of an avowedly Christian nation, but one that kind of resembles the 1950s. While fathers work and moms stay at home with larger families, how does the project suggest moving the country in this direction.
- [22:07]
David Graham
I think all of the things that they're interested in, including taking over so much power for the executive branch, are fundamentally in service of this social goal. So these are folks who have a very Christian and conservative view of the world, and they want to use all of the levers of government to do that. And so they're looking at how the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of labor, the Department of Education, or its functions can all be oriented around this. The Department of Justice. So, for example, they want to track student outcomes in schools based on family structure so they can encourage family structure. They want to use the Labor Department to implement rules that will encourage people to stay home if they need to, to pay people to stay home caring for children, presumably mothers or grandmothers, and to encourage people to be able to do work and support a family on a single income. A lot of this comes through the Department of Health and Human Services, which they'd like to use to ban abortion. They'd also like to use things like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which is welfare in common parlance, to encourage marriage, to encourage abstinence, and to incentivize people to get married in order to get better benefits.
- [23:18]
Dave Davies
Right. I mean, you mentioned that they would want these government agencies to track data on, for example, for folks who receive Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, what people typically call welfare, which families are married, which ones aren't, and how they do. The Labor Department is supposed to produce monthly data on the state of the American family. And you mentioned school performance would be tracked and measured against the family structure. Did I get that right? Well, you know, local school boards typically do that. Right. I mean, they don't do that. I mean, the local school boards govern education, but the idea was that the. That what, the Department of Education would make local school boards do this or what?
- [23:58]
David Graham
Right. The Education Department can mandate local school boards to report certain data. And so they want to orient so much of the data that the federal government is taking in around family structure. Again, from. That's not just education, but also the way the Labor Department approaches their things so that they can gather this data and make a case. They also want to do more research that encourages marriage, that encourages biblically based family structure, they say, and they're interested in using all of these welfare programs. Then once you have the data to push people in that direction.
- [24:35]
Dave Davies
Yeah. How do you push people in that direction? Is that clear?
- [24:38]
David Graham
You know, some of it is making more generous benefits and also making it harder to acquire benefits. So, for example, you have Ben Carson, the former Republican presidential candidate and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, saying that housing assistance has tended to push people towards multifamily living and it's tended to encourage a culture of dependency. And so what they want to do is pull back on those benefits to encourage people to live in other situations that they think will lead to more stability and lead to better outcomes.
- [25:07]
Dave Davies
Another proposal is having the Department of Health and Human Services enlist churches and faith based organizations in providing guidance for low income fathers.
- [25:17]
David Graham
Right. And we've, you know, this is in some ways connected to the kind of faith based push that we saw in the Bush administration. I think what sets it aside is both the, the scale, the way they want to use so many different departments of the government to do this, and the way they're willing to use a kind of coercive force of government in a way that conservatives in the past have found unacceptable.
- [25:39]
Dave Davies
What's an example of the coercive force of government employed here?
- [25:43]
David Graham
Making benefits dependent on family structure and forcing people into these faith based programs in order to receive their benefits are good examples of that.
- [25:52]
Dave Davies
And the family structure we're talking about, I assume is not same sex couples. It is not trans couples. It's a man and a woman. Right?
- [26:00]
David Graham
Yeah. You know, they're a little bit shy talking about same sex couples, although they say incorrectly that same sex couples have a higher divorce rate. It's certainly not trans and non binary people. And as we've seen, they want to rewrite the language of government to write these people out of the way we talk about them. Trans people do not exist in their vision. And they think that the left has been pushing what they call gender ideology. And that needs to be taken out of schools, it needs to be taken out of the language of government. It needs to be taken out of the way. For example, the Department of, or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission works, for example.
- [26:34]
Dave Davies
Yeah. A lot of this stuff, of course, requires affirmative steps by a government implementing a policy which kind of goes against the grain of the classical conservative notion that less government is better. And it also is in conflict with a lot of these really deep cuts inflicted by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. Have these folks, I don't know, what do they say about that?
- [27:00]
David Graham
I think they're willing to acknowledge that it's not a traditional conservative approach to government and it's more of a question of means versus ends. They're willing to use the government and this, this more muscular government to achieve the end they want, which they see as being freer. I think there's a real conflict with the things that Musk and Doge are doing because they're. They've been cutting so aggressively and without consideration. What you're finding is they're cutting into the very things that they will need to implement these things. You can't have the Education Department gathering data if you have laid off all of the workers who know how to do that. And so there's a conflict there that I think we're going to see, but that hasn't yet become so public or become prominent.
- [27:42]
Dave Davies
You say that they're paying an enormous attention to trans people, who are, of course, a small fraction of the population. But it's been a very politically important issue for the right in culture wars. Why so much of an issue? A focus on trans folks in the 2025 project?
- [28:00]
David Graham
You know, it's politically effective, is a lot of it. There's a growing social consensus in favor of same sex marriage, for example. There's opposition to discrimination in the workplace and a need for protection for those. But trans rights are much more conflicted. And Republican candidates have discovered in the last few years that it's a really good wedge issue. It's not just something that motivates the right, but it motivates the center and even some parts of the left, too. We saw Trump's famous, you know, Trump is for you, Kamala is for they them ad. And this is a place where I think the project 2025 people find a place where they can bind themselves to Trump, because Trump doesn't seem to care a great deal a lot about these things. He is obviously not a great avatar for traditional family structure, but he does care a lot about trans issues for political reasons. And it becomes kind of the tip of the spear to get into more traditional values on a bunch of other things, whether that's abortion, whether that's mothers staying home by first talking about something that is unpopular.
- [28:57]
Dave Davies
You know, abortion is now in the hands of the state after the Supreme Court ruling. What does the plan envision for future policy on abortion?
- [29:05]
David Graham
They don't want it to be in the hands of the state. Their first choice would be to have a full federal ban on abortion. And they understand that probably isn't something that would happen immediately, but they see a series of steps for how to fight that. In the meantime, that includes, you know, removing FDA approval for medical abortion drugs using the 1873 Comstock act to prevent them from being sent through the mail. And it means tracking much more aggressively what's going on at the state level. So they want as much data as they can on where abortions are taking place, where the mothers are coming from to track things like interstate abortion, which has become a new focus for the Republican Party in the last couple years.
- [29:46]
Dave Davies
And does Project 2025 have a coherent policy on health care? I mean, for a long time, abolishing the Affordable Care was a goal of conservatives. Not so much lately. Where's the is Project 2025 on health care policy?
- [30:00]
David Graham
They don't call for abolishing the Affordable Care act, but they want to roll back some of the provisions of it and they want to move things back closer towards the private insurance market that we've seen. It's interesting they point out that private insurance market has real flaws, that depending on employers is not a good system, and yet they don't really offer an alternative. They'd like to reduce Medicaid by turning into block grants to states which can then spend the money as they want, but only up to a certain amount. That's something we've heard from the right before. They don't really offer much else along those lines. They want to also push Medicare more towards privatization. So they're fond of the Medicare Advantage program, which is a kind of hybrid program for Medicare. Medicare Advantage does not save taxpayers any money. In fact, it often costs more and there's not a measurable difference in outcomes. But in general, it's part of an ideology of moving things towards privatization and away from government running them.
- [30:59]
Dave Davies
Let's take another break here and then we'll talk some more. We are speaking with David Graham. He's a staff writer for the Atlantic. His new book is the how Project 2025 is reshaping America. We'll talk more after this break. This is FRESH air.
- [31:13]
David Graham
First impressions are always important. That's not just for dates or for your in laws. At the NPR Politics podcast, we know that first impressions are important for any presidential term, too. So all this month we're reviewing the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second stint, what's been done, what's to come and what might change. Politics may not always make sense, but we'll sort it out for you over on the NPR Politics podcast on the next through line from npr. For the presidency, I'm indebted to Almighty God. I'm in charge of the country, and I need to serve all the American.
- [31:48]
C
People and not just the political machine.
- [31:52]
David Graham
The origins of the modern civil service.
- [31:55]
Dave Davies
Listen to throughline wherever you get your.
- [31:58]
David Graham
Podcasts.
- [32:02]
Dave Davies
You know, it's interesting. There's so many policy areas that are addressed in Project 2025. And there are moments where it seems that the authors are torn between advocating for traditional conservative policies and those in some cases that President Trump has articulated. They're not quite sure what to say. One of these is trade policy, right?
- [32:26]
David Graham
That's right. And there are places where you can see how either they're trying to co opt Trump or where Trump has co opted the traditional gop. The trade is one place where that conflict is still going on and where the sort of traditional free trade conservatives who have inhabited the right wing think tank sphere are not yet ready to give up. So rather than come to a single position on trade, the Mandate for Leadership document actually just publishes two chapters, one of which is by Peter Navarro, who is one of Trump's advisors on tariffs right now and is driving a lot of the train there. And the other is by a guy named Kent Lastman, who is the head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is more of an old school free trade think tank on the right. And you see them debating which one of these would be better. And Lastman saying, look, tariffs are a bad idea. They will not achieve greater prosperity for Americans. It's going to make people poorer. It's not going to help. Juan Navarro says the only way to take on the existential threat of China is to use tariffs.
- [33:27]
Dave Davies
So this, you know, the project advocates for a more aggressive use of executive power, but in this case, not quite sure what it should do with it.
- [33:36]
David Graham
That's exactly right.
- [33:38]
Dave Davies
What about foreign policy and national security? I mean, issues like the war in Ukraine and the European alliances, you know.
- [33:46]
David Graham
Ukraine is another place where you can see a little bit of a difference with the White House. The authors here think that Ukraine is in the right and they think that America needs to stand up against Russia. That's obviously not the way we've seen Trump approach things. But generally they seem less interested in most of the world and very focused on China. They see China as this existential generational threat. And even though we've seen Trump in his first term and Biden as well, sort of pushing the US Towards a more confrontational stance with China, they still think that Americans and the government just don't really understand what a threat China is economically, culturally, and potentially militarily. And so so much of their thinking around national security is about how to confront China and how to prepare for major conflict with China a little bit to the exclusion of anything else going on in the world.
- [34:37]
Dave Davies
Right. And in some ways, they are much more aggressive towards China than Trump has been. Right. I mean, Trump often praises Xi Jinping. He has been kind of lukewarm about the defense of Taiwan. There are differences here, aren't there?
- [34:51]
David Graham
Yeah, that's right. And Trump is fond of kind of saber rattling towards China and talking tough. But we've seen from his policy is that he doesn't always do that, although he did implement tariffs. He also could have, you know, he was, for example, on Uyghurs. He had no particular strong views about them. And John Bolton said he was fine with these Uyghur concentration camps. They really do think that China is a threat and that the US Needs to be preparing to take it on.
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Dave Davies
They meaning Project 2025. Right, right, right. The other interesting thing is that I Gather Project 2025 really wants the United States to compete with China for influence around the world. I mean, China has this Belt and Road initiative where it's spending, you know, a lot of money on infrastructure projects in the developing world. They want the United States to get in there and play in that arena also.
- [35:40]
David Graham
Yeah. This is another gap between what Project 2025 advocates and what Trump has actually done. They see USAID is something that liberals have used mostly to push their favorite ideology.
- [35:52]
Dave Davies
And when you say usaid, you mean that that's the acronym for Agency for International Development, this tool of foreign policy. Right. And international aid.
- [35:59]
David Graham
Exactly. Well, they see it as not. It hasn't been used sufficiently as a tool of Internet of foreign policy, and they would like to see it used that way. So they think it can counter China's Belt and Road Initiative rather than simply, you know, doing humanitarian projects. They want it to be. They want it to be a weapon in the US Arsenal. And instead, Trump has mostly demolished it, sought to close it, and it appears to be on the way out.
- [36:23]
Dave Davies
Right. I believe Elon Musk's phrase was, I just put aid in the wood chipper. Let's look at some other policy areas. One is in the environment and climate change. You write in your book that Project 2025's discussion of environmental issues in energy production feels like a dispatch from an alternate world. What do you mean?
- [36:45]
David Graham
They simply don't talk a lot about the things that are actually going on. You don't see a concern for sea levels rising. You don't see a concern for more frequent extreme weather. You don't see any discussion of the catastrophic flooding that we're seeing around the world. You don't see any discussion of rising global temperatures. Instead what you see is an argument that the US Is not doing enough to drill oil and gas. It needs to free up regulation to do those things, and it needs to stop tracking climate regulations. It needs to stop doing research on climate and let private industry take over all of those things.
- [37:20]
Dave Davies
Does it try and refute climate science or argue that it's political propaganda, or.
- [37:28]
David Graham
Unlike Trump, it basically ignores it. Trump has said it's a hoax. They don't do that. They just argue in a kind of vague fashion that, you know, innovation will solve the problems of climate change insofar as they exist. And they try to paint this positive vision where, you know, in the 1970s, the air was dirty and the rivers were burning. But we've made a lot of progress since then, and now we need to let business go. And environmentalists just refuse to acknowledge that we have made this progress. And so they kind of try to ignore it. But they also want to get rid of a lot of the federal agencies that track data on climate and do the research that shows the dangers of climate change and shows where it's having effects already.
- [38:04]
Dave Davies
Does the project share Trump's hatred of wind power?
- [38:09]
David Graham
It's skeptical of wind power. They try to blame, for example, the Texas blackouts a few years ago on wind power. So they're not as well address that.
- [38:18]
Dave Davies
I mean, what did the research show about the problem with the Texas blackout?
- [38:22]
David Graham
The research on the Texas blackout shows that there were a bunch of causes, but one of the biggest ones was a failure of natural gas plants. It was not a problem of renewable energy like wind. And yet what we see in Project 2025 is an argument that we need to double or triple down on natural gas in order to make the US Energy system more resilient, in their view.
- [38:42]
Dave Davies
You know, I'm wondering how the leaders of Project 2025 view its impact on the administration. It kind of seems as if the administration has adopted its efforts to expand the power of the executive branch in very aggressive ways. Advocacy of a tough immigration crackdown. But a lot of the other policy programs are kind of not really embraced, are they?
- [39:11]
David Graham
I think that's right. I think it's very much a work in progress. Paul Danz, who led the effort, gave an interview to Politico recently, and he said that so far, the implementation had been beyond his wildest dreams. But there is so much still to do. I think they are thinking on a much longer timescale than simply 100 days or four years. They want to push the federal government as far to the right as they can as quickly as they can. So they can kind of change the terms of engagement and change the shape of the playing field for the future. So for them, the Trump administration is very important, but they're thinking beyond the Trump administration to a much longer timescale.
- [39:47]
Dave Davies
Yeah. So what is the Heritage foundation up to in the coming years? What's next?
- [39:53]
David Graham
You know, they're going to continue to work on these issues because they are the long held issues. And I think you'll see them focusing on the things where there is the greatest unity. So on trade, I think a lot of conservatives are either going to put their heads down or else they're going to see where the winds blow. But when you see things like family structure or a ban on abortion, those are not going to go away. They're going to continue to be focuses of advocacy for years and decades to come.
- [40:18]
Dave Davies
Well, David Graham, thank you so much for speaking with us.
- [40:22]
David Graham
Thank you.
- [40:23]
Dave Davies
David Graham is a staff writer for the Atlantic. His new book is the how Project 2025 is reshaping America. Coming up, David Biancooley reviews a new PBS documentary about the history and impact of our public library system and its many opponents and controversies. This is FRESH AIR.
- [40:44]
David Graham
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast.
- [40:47]
Dave Davies
With a Peabody Award, he praised it.
- [40:50]
David Graham
For its historical and moral clarity.
- [40:53]
Dave Davies
On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from npr.
- [41:07]
C
Imagine, if you will, a show from.
- [41:09]
Dave Davies
NPR that's not like npr, a show.
- [41:12]
C
That focuses not on the important but the stupid, which features stories about people.
- [41:16]
Dave Davies
Smuggling animals in their pants, incompetent criminals.
- [41:19]
C
In ridiculous science studies, and call it.
- [41:21]
David Graham
Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, because the.
- [41:23]
Dave Davies
Good names were taken.
- [41:24]
C
Listen to NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Yes, that is what it is called.
- [41:28]
David Graham
Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [41:32]
Dave Davies
Beginning today, the PBS series Independent Lens presents a new documentary about the history and impact of our public library system and also a look at its many opponents and controversies. The program is called Free for the Public Library. Our TV critic David Biancooley has this review.
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C
The new PBS Independent Lens documentary about America's public library system arrives with a very clever two edged title. It's called Free for the Public Library. And the Free for All part refers, of course, to the beauty and generosity of the library system, which lends books for free to virtually anyone. But Free for All also refers to the many fights surrounding that idealistic institution, fights against segregated libraries, the banning and burning of books, tax cuts and local library closures, targeted reductions of federal funds and quite recently and famously, drag queen story hour. Free for all is co directed by Don Logsdon, who also narrates and Lucy Faulkner. At first it sets out as a nostalgic memoir, with Logsden explaining why and how, as a child, her parents took her on road trips traversing the entire country, always stopping at local libraries along the way. But then, like a road trip that keeps heading to new places, this documentary ends up covering all sorts of ground the historical beginnings of American libraries, with nods to Ben Franklin and Andrew Carnegie, the growth and importance of tiny branches in rural communities, fights involving segregation, book banning and political and financial pressure and at each stop, a focus on individual libraries, librarians and everyday patrons. And as we learn, some of them are everyday patrons. One librarian given a lot of airtime and due credit is Ernestine Rose, who arrived in New York City in 1904 as a newly trained librarian. The city and its inhabitants thrilled her, but also made her wonder how she could best serve such a diverse and largely illiterate immigrant population. Free for all quotes from her writings.
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Dave Davies
By the dawn of the 20th century.
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David Graham
Immigration had turned the Lower east side.
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C
Of New York into the most crowded.
- [43:55]
David Graham
Neighborhood in the world. When Ernestine Rose arrived, the neighborhood both shocked and excited the sheltered young woman.
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C
I work in a library patronized by Russian and Oriental Jews. My paperboy is Greek, my grocer is a Hollander, and my boot black is from Syria. Disappointed immigrants ask us, where is the the promise of America? If we are honest, we shall admit that the answer is yet to find. She kept looking for that answer and for ways to serve her eventual Harlem community. By 1920, Ernestine Rose was serving as the branch librarian for Harlem's 135th Street Library, thanks to the generous contribution of a collector who donated his vast personal library of books written by black authors or about black and other minority cultures. This particular library fueled what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Sculptors and painters held art classes and honed their craft in basement spaces set aside for just that purpose. Local theater productions and workshops were held in other spaces in that same basement, launching the careers of such talents as Sidney Poitiers and Harry Belafonte. And upstairs, the Harlem residents reading the library books included other future talents, such as author James Baldwin.
- [45:24]
David Graham
I went to the 135th Street Library at least three or four times a week, and I read everything there.
- [45:31]
C
I mean every single book in that library.
- [45:35]
David Graham
I read books like they were some weird kind of food. I was looking in books for a bigger world, in the world in which I lived. In some blind and instinctive way, I knew that what was happening in those books was also happening all around me, and I was trying to make a connection between the books and the life I saw and the life I lived.
- [46:06]
C
Those are just a few of the stories. Free for all tells many, many more, painting a portrait that is personal, passionate, and in the end, unapologetically supportive. By examining the value of libraries in the distant and recent past, Free for All, the public Library also makes a compelling case about their value today. It's a very informative and ultimately very persuasive documentary about the legacy and importance of the American public library system. My recommendation is that you really should check it out.
- [46:41]
Dave Davies
David Biancooli is a professor of television Studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the new PBS documentary Free for the Public Library, part of the Independent Lens series. It's also streaming on the PBS app and YouTube channel. On tomorrow's show, a once fringe movement to increase birth rates is exploding into the mainstream, but it's not just about how more babies. We'll explore the politics of pronatalism, from Elon Musk's crusade against population collapse to ideas about genetic engineering and the so called great replacement. We'll speak to NPR's Lisa Hagan and demographer Karen Guzzo. I hope you can join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram prfreshair Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Adam Stanischewski. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thaya Challoner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Sieving Esper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show for Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley. Dave I'm Dave Davies.
- [48:00]
David Graham
On the Indicator from Planet Money podcast. We're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs. It's called in game theory a trigger strategy, or sometimes called grim trigger, which sort of has a cowboy esque ring to it to what exactly a sovereign wealth fund is. For insight Every weekday, listen to NPR's the Indicator from Planet Money.