Donald Trump has tried to say he has no ties to Project 2025, a dystopian policy agenda endorsed by the Heritage Foundation that seeks to dramatically restructure and destroy large parts of the federal government. However, a newly leaked video shows one of the project’s key architects telling undercover reporters that Trump has provided funding for the project and is “very supportive” of its radical agenda. This program will have far-reaching effects on American culture, including major changes in science and technology policy.
Undercover reporters with the Center for Climate Reporting recently used a sophisticated operation involving hidden cameras to capture a private interview with Russell Vought, one of the leading minds behind Project 2025. Vought is also the President of the right-wing Center for American Renewal. a think-tank dedicated to restoring the “wave of progressive freedom” in the US In their interview, reporters found Vought to admit that, despite his public speaking, Trump still supports the policy agenda of Project 2025.
“He was in our organization, he raised money for our organization, he blessed it,” Vought said of Trump. He added that the former President is “very supportive of what we’re doing,” despite Trump’s public denials. “I expect to hear ten more times…the President distancing himself from the left of Project 2025—I’m not worried about that,” Vought said. Vought went on to say that his organization was quietly drafting hundreds of executive orders and executive memos that could be used by a future Trump administration. Midway through his first term in office, The Heritage Foundation boasted that 64 percent of its policy goals were “included in Trump’s budget, implemented through legislation, or considered for action consistent with The Heritage Foundation’s original proposals.”
“President Trump’s campaign has made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, NOT any other organization or former staff, are advocating for second-term policies,” a campaign spokesperson told CNN.
Vought, like many other people associated with Project 2025, has deep ties to Trump. In addition to being a frequent guest on Trump acolyte Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Vought has also played a major role in the Trump administration, serving as director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that role, Vought was tasked with implementing, as he put it, “de-regulation agendas in the Executive Branch.” A CNN review found that, like Vought, about 140 former Trump staffers were involved in the project’s policy formulation.
The list of disruptive policies promoted by Project 2024 is long. A manifesto of 900 pages and more, Authority of Leadershipit’s full of passages that seem like they’d be more at home in a pamphlet handed out by a street corner crackpot than a policy agenda published by a major think tank. Most famously, the project has expressed its support for banning pornography across the country. In a consistent role equating pornography with transgender identity and pedophilia, Project 2025 can’t help but reveal the exact radicalism at the heart of its battle to remake American government:
Pornography, seen today in the ubiquity of transgender stereotypes and the sexualization of children, for example, is not a political Gordian knot that inextricably binds different claims about freedom of speech, property rights, sexual freedom, and child welfare. It has no claim to first amendment protection. Its providers are child predators and hateful exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illegal drug and as damaging to the mind as any crime. Pornography should be banned. The people who produce and distribute it should be arrested. Teachers and librarians who check should be considered registered sex offenders. And the telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shut down.
In addition to breaking the law, something that most Americans indulge in, Project 2025 has set its sights on consolidating US environmental policy beyond all recognition. In the latest in a series of leaks, ProPublica recently revealed that the project would seek to “eliminate climate change references everywhere,” preventing officials across the government from using the term. That’s small beans, however, with the other projects of the environmental policy project, as it also promotes the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.
We previously noted that the project would seek to end public funding for many science agencies, including the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Such a drastic move could have a downstream effect on consumers—like eliminating free weather reports, sourced from such agencies. Presumably, in the perfect world of Project 2025, climate science will be privatized, and Americans will be forced to pay to know their weekly weather forecast.
At the same time, Project 2025 will hit a wall when it comes to dumber uses of technology, such as the use of weapons in space. The project said that when it comes to the US Space Force, the interplanetary military unit that emerged during the Trump administration, it is necessary to change the “defense posture of the Biden Administration” and reposition “the offensive force to ensure a good balance of power, to effectively manage the full spectrum of deterrence, and to be It is very difficult for the enemy to calculate a successful first strike against US space assets.”
Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, has similarly ambivalent views about how the federal government should handle technology issues. While some of the think-tank’s positions seem reasonable (its anti-monopoly efforts, for example, are fair), many are plain nuts. This April, the organization filed a brief in a legal effort to end the FCC’s funding of wifi services on public school buses. At the time, the agency argued that such funding was not, as you might think, a case of the government stepping up to ensure that school children have access to the Internet but, instead, “a ploy by the leftist FCC Chairman” “We subsidized the big tech kids and and brains with government-sponsored wifi.” At the same time, the organization has sought to repeal Section 230, a law that gives broad legal protections to online platforms for the content they host. That policy is widely regarded as keeping the Internet from being sued.
Gizmodo reached out to the Trump campaign, the Center for Renewing America, and the Heritage Foundation but did not immediately receive a response.
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