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- [00:01]
Host
Before we dive in, just a reminder that this is the free version of Master Plan, but our paid subscribers get episodes early and ad free and you get bonus content, interviews, documents and videos. More importantly, if you become a paid subscriber, you'll help fund this show and the investigative journalism we do at the Lever. Right now we're offering a huge 50% off forever discount on a paid subscription. If you want bonus content and if you want to support our journalism, please go right now to lever news.com/50 that's lever news.com/50 to get the deal. Right now. Again, that's lever news.com/5 0. Now onto the episode.
- [00:48]
Donald Trump
The Lever.
- [00:54]
Host
In the months leading up to the 2024 election, you probably heard about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for a potential second Trump term. Now, with the looming reality of another Trump administration, it's worth taking a closer look at this 900 page policy playbook and the alarming changes it proposes for the federal government. Today, we're sharing the first part of a deep dive on Project 2025, produced by Arjun Singh for Levertime. If you followed our Master Plan series, you'll recognize some familiar organizations and figures along with new insights. To hear the full episode, called Project 2025, is even more radical than you think. Search for LeverTime in your podcast app and be sure to subscribe to Lever Time in your podcast app. It's our weekly news podcast. Okay, here's the episode the core of.
- [01:52]
Arjun Singh
Project 2025 really is personnel. I think the Democrats did a very good job in recent months making it sound as if Project 2025 is all about policy. It is all about these radicalite proposals that are in that big book that they put out. But that book, the Mandate for Leadership, it's only one of the four parts of Project 2025, and the other three parts are really the more relevant ones because they're much more about personnel and how they're going to make sure that they can get enough true MAGA people in the federal government come next January.
- [02:26]
Alec McGillis
Alec McGillis is a reporter for the investigative news out ProPublica. A couple weeks ago, I called him up because I wanted to learn more about Project 2025. Project 2025 is a policy manifesto released by the conservative think tank the Heritage foundation, and it's over 900 pages long. Inside of it are plans for mass deportation, dismantling the Department of Education, even privatizing the National Weather Service. But when I sat down with Alec, he told me that one of Project 2025's most radical plans is one that's little discussed.
- [02:56]
Arjun Singh
Schedule F. The idea with Schedule F is that you take tens of thousands of slots in the government that are now held by career employees. Federal government is like 4 million career employees total. We take, say, 50,000 of the most important career slots, the ones that are what they call policy shaping, policymaking slots that actually have an effect over policy. And you switch them to a new category called Schedule F, where, quite simply, they are much easier to fire. Right now, it's not easy to fire a career employee. They can appeal. There's a lot of hoops to jump through. But if you create this new Schedule F, it'll be much easier to fire those people and replace them with other people. And so the idea is that they will immediately reinstate Schedule F if Trump wins. There will be some core challenges to it, but everything I've been told is that in due course, Schedule F would be able to stand. And the way that the Trump folks talk about it, and they're very candid about this, is that they don't really think they would need to fire 50,000 people. They would just need to fire a few thousand people and thereby put the fear of God into everyone else across the federal government to send the signal that if you do resist us, this is what's going to happen to you. So just put the heads on pikes, and that'll send the message.
- [04:21]
Alec McGillis
As president, Trump would usually rail against something he called the deep state, the federal bureaucracy that he claims tried to thwart him. In 2016, Trump ran on the idea of, quote, draining the swamp. But this time around, he's looking for revenge.
- [04:34]
Donald Trump
We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left's political enemies, which they're doing now at a level that nobody can believe.
- [04:59]
Alec McGillis
What Trump characterized as resistance, though, may have actually just been incompetence on the part of his administration. The federal government is a complicated system, and one of the reasons it leans on career civil servants is to be able to implement a president's vision in his first term. Some within the administration realized that, so they begin to conceptualize a means to install civil servants who would be loyal to Trump above anything else.
- [05:22]
Arjun Singh
It's their recognition that to really get stuff done, to really implement the agenda, you need to change who's in these jobs, you need to bring in a whole new cohort of people. And so to that extent, it really is the most radical part of the agenda of Project 2025 is, in a way, the most boring seeming part of it, which is, which is the personnel, which is. It's this database that they filled of all these people that are ready to go. But that really is, in a sense, more important and more radical than a lot of the wild seeming proposals in the book, because it's something that they were actually going to do and that will allow them to do more things.
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Alec McGillis
And once news about Project 2025 broke out, Trump tried to distance himself from it.
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Donald Trump
Number one, I have nothing to do, as you know, and as she knows better than anyone, I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas, I guess, some good, some bad.
- [06:19]
Alec McGillis
But a lot of the authors, including Project 2025's director, worked in the Trump administration. And this isn't just something born out of the MAGA movement. In one way, it's a culmination of the longtime goals of the Heritage foundation to promote religious fundamentalism with a heaping dose of unrestrained free market capitalism. And if Trump can successfully pull this off, it could put the country on a completely new trajectory and make the federal government unrecognizable.
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Nancy MacLean
The Heritage foundation is the peak organization on the political right that has been working to move the Republican Party and American politics to the right since its creation in 1973. It has an enormous budget funded by many donors whose names will be familiar to your readers. Mellon, Scaife, Coors, Coke, Donors Trust, now, all the dark money ATM groups, as one journalist called them. And it's vibe is a combination of plutocrat serving and Christian nationalist.
- [07:21]
Alec McGillis
Nancy MacLean is a historian and a professor of history and public policy at Duke University. In 2017, she wrote a book called Democracy in the Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America. The Trump administration had an incredibly close relationship with the Heritage foundation, so much so that in 2018, Heritage put out a statement proudly saying that 70 of their staffers worked on Trump's transition team and that Trump had taken up more than 60% of their policy recommendations. And in return, Trump heaped praise on them. Here he is in 2022, for example.
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Donald Trump
For nearly a half a century, you have been titans in the fight to defend, promote, and preserve our great American heritage.
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Alec McGillis
For the last three years, Heritage has been led by a guy named Kevin Roberts. How many of you are ready to very steadily, calmly, peacefully take our country back? One thing that makes Heritage unique is its mission to define the United States as a Christian nation and bring it into the government. Also known as Christian nationalism. And a model for how Roberts wants to do it is the authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who's weakened democratic institutions in the name of, quote, defending Christianity, unquote.
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Nancy MacLean
Kevin Roberts at Heritage brought Orban to Heritage and convened a bunch of allies this past March and met with him for a few hours and came out saying, viktor Orban is not just a model for conservative governance, he is the model. Right? And so what they're trying to do with Project 2025 is basically undermine the capacity of civil society to reject their agenda in the same way that Orban did. And what did Orban do? He rode Christian nationalism, you know, and the backing of malevolent corporations to power. Then when he got in, he completely purged the civil service to make it loyal to him and unbending. Pur the media, change the laws, change the Constitution. And this is exactly what Heritage wants to do.
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Alec McGillis
Nancy touched on another important thing that makes Heritage unique, the fact that it blends Christian nationalism with corporate hegemony. Today, it's usually taken for granted that the GOP is comfortably home to conservative Christians who also believe in free market capitalism. But that wasn't always the case. It's actually a fairly recent phenomenon.
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Donald Trump
I suppose the more important thing that I did was to try to bring together the. What is now known as the religious right. Those people were not active in politics, and I served as sort of a coach to get them active in the political process. And today, as you know, they're an important element in electing even the President of the United States.
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Alec McGillis
This is the voice of Paul Weyrich, the co founder of the Heritage Foundation. Though he may not sound imposing, he's a colossal figure in American history.
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Nancy MacLean
Paul Weyrich is really, in many ways, the key architect of what was called for a long time the religious right, but now is really Christian nationalism that seeks to transform the entire federal government and to implant its own dogma as the law of the land. He was extremely shrewd about using particularly evangelical fundamentalist churches to build political power, not least because he understood that many of their ministerial leaders were entrepreneurs themselves, kind of religious entrepreneurs. And they also had vast power because those kinds of Congregations would pretty much do what their pastors tell them to do. So if you recruited the ministers to the, you know, religious right now, Christian nationalist cause, you would get a huge section of voters. And we saw the power of that when 81% of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
- [11:35]
Alec McGillis
Weir, first and foremost wanted to advance the Christian cause in the United states. But in 1973, you could say he made something of a devil's bargain. When Wyrick wanted to build a think tank that could rival liberal ones like the Brookings Institution, he needed funding. And that's why he partnered with Joe Coors, the grandson of the founder of the Coors Brewing Company and a very wealthy man. Coors was a prominent member of conservative circles, and around the time he co founded Heritage, he had made a big bet on a rising star in Republican politics.
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Donald Trump
I think there is a different philosophy or belief in the Republican Party today at the grassroots level and on up through the pro. I think you will find the Republican Party today is far more willing to see good in other Republicans in the interest of unity and in the interest of winning.
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Alec McGillis
That guy was Ronald Reagan. And with Coors money and Wyrick's grassroots organizing, Heritage embarked on a quest to remake the Republican coalition by marrying conservative Christian nationalism with free market capitalism. And in Reagan, they had a perfect messenger.
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Donald Trump
We will never compromise our principles and standards. We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon our belief in God.
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Alec McGillis
With Reagan in the White house throughout the 1980s, the Heritage foundation became a dominant force in Republican politics. And it would grow into a comfortable setting for rich tycoons to control the GOP. By 1994, Heritage had become so influential, its ideas formed the basis of something called the Contract with America, a legislative platform and strategy that was a grocery list of right wing goals like cutting taxes, Social Security, and welfare. Though the idea had sprung out of the Heritage foundation, its spokesman was a Georgia Republican named Newt Gingrich.
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Donald Trump
We've already told the incumbents and the candidates that if we have a majority, if the American people accept this contract, that they can expect to work five days a week in January, six days a week in February and March, and 24 hours a day around the clock towards the end, if necessary. But we are going to get to the final recorded votes in the first 100 days on every item.
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Alec McGillis
Introduced six weeks before the 1994 midterms, Gingrich used it as a rallying call for conservative revolution, and all but two Republican House members running for Congress that year signed onto it. Unified around Heritage's ideas. The Republicans gained 54 seats in the House and eight seats in the Senate. A landslide victory that flipped both chambers of Congress and put Gingrich in the Speaker's seat.
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Donald Trump
With faith and with friendship and the deepest respect, you are now my speaker. And let the great debate begin. I now have the high honor and distinct privilege to present to the House of Representatives our new speaker, the gentleman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich.
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Alec McGillis
By 1996, these religious voters were a massive force in Republican politics and they began to organize. One of the most prominent groups that came out of this was the Christian Coalition, led by a conservative Christian entrepreneur named Pat Robertson.
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Donald Trump
And now they accuse us of being a power mad and they accuse us of using stealth tactics because we go out and knock on doors of people and ask them to vote for candidates. We go out and send voter guides informing people of what the issues are in election. We actually use phone banks and that is supposed to be a secret weapon known only to a few.
- [15:20]
Alec McGillis
This was Heritage in action. And Weirich's goal of folding evangelical and other Christian voters into the Republican party became a reality. But the Heritage Coalition didn't always click. In the 1990s, the two major Republican candidates for president, George Herbert Walker Bush and Bob Dole, were seen as too business minded. For a lot of these Christian voters and ultimately in their elections, a lot of them rejected them. And for some of the wealthy donors to Heritage like Charles Koch, these Christian voters were simply seen as tools to enact their radical economic agenda. Here's Nancy McLean again.
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Nancy MacLean
It's a very cynical pairing. I mean certainly donors like, you know, Charles Koch, that I know best and many of the liver libertarians have never shown any sign of religious faith. You know, they don't go to church, they don't have a religious affiliation, but they do need foot soldiers to go to the polls to vote for the candidates that will get them the policies they want. And those policies, Arjun, are really extreme. Like extreme, you know, liberty to the point of anarchy for property holders, corporations, of course, fossil fuel corporations like Koch Industries and then a kind of totalitarianism for the rest of us where their freedom means our dominance nation. But again they know, and that's I believe this is my key finding in Democracy in Chains. They knew that the vast majority of the American people would never be persuaded to those views, would never come around to thinking that that was a good agenda for them. You know, a country with no public education, no Social Security, no Medicare, no workers rights, no environmental protections, no women's rights, et cetera. So they had to find again a source of votes to move this agenda. So again, it's an extremely cyn almost, I think diabolical at this point. Turning to these Christian nationalist voters in.
- [17:10]
Alec McGillis
The process of reporting this piece. Right here is where I plan to return to Project 2025. But then something interesting happened. I had a conversation with a journalist named Gareth Gore. Gareth lives in London and he just published a book called Opus the Cult of Dark Money Human Trafficking.
- [17:26]
Host
That was the first half of Lever times episode. Project 202025 is even more radical than you think. The full episode goes deeper into the links between Opus dei, Leonard Leo, the MAGA movement and key authors of Project 2025, many of whom may play major roles in a rebooted Trump administration. Check the show notes for a link or find the full episode in the Lever Time feed to pick up right where we left off, about 17 minutes in.