A Sense of Doubt blog post #3531 - Project 2025 Must Be Stopped
I don't know about you, but I don't believe Trump for a second when he says he doesn't know anything about Project 2025 and disagrees with much of what's in it (which contradicts the first thing: if he disagrees, then he knows about it).
- Project 2025 is a conservative coalition's plan for a future Republican U.S. presidential administration. If voters elect the party's presumed nominee, Donald Trump, over Democrat Joe Biden in November 2024, the coalition hopes the new president will implement the plan immediately.
- The sweeping effort centers on a roughly 1,000-page document that gives the executive branch more power, reverses Biden-era policies and specifies numerous department-level changes.
- People across the political spectrum fear such actions are precursors to authoritarianism and have voiced concerns over the proposal's recommendations to reverse protections for LGBTQ+ people, limit abortion access, stop federal efforts to mitigate climate change — and more.
- The Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank operated by many of Trump's current and former political allies — is leading the initiative. President Kevin Roberts once said the project's main goals are "institutionalizing Trumpism" and getting rid of unelected bureaucrats who he believes wield too much political influence.
- The Trump campaign's goals and proposals within Project 2025 overlap. However, the former president has attempted to distance himself from the initiative. In a July 5, 2024, post on Truth Social, he wrote: "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."
- In other words, it's unknown if, or to what extent, Trump's campaign is talking to leaders of the initiative. Many political analysts and the Biden administration believe Project 2025 is a good indication of Trump's vision for a second term.
Trump Says He Has “Nothing to Do” With Project 2025. Here Are His Connections to It.
First of all, his running mate, Sen J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), wrote the forward of a forthcoming book from the leader of the initiative.
Former President Donald Trump has spent much of this week freaking out about Project 2025, the initiative that produced the 900-page extremist right-wing guidebook for the next conservative administration.
This weekend, at a rally in Michigan, Trump derided Project 2025 as a product of “some on the severe right” and said unnamed proposals included in it as “seriously extreme.” On Wednesday, he wrote on Truth Social: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!” The same day, his campaign put out an update claiming, “Project 2025 is not President Trump’s agenda” and insisting that the GOP platform is the document that people should understand as his agenda. In a live call-in to Fox and Friends on Thursday, Trump told the hosts the document was written by a group of “very, very conservative people,” adding: “I have nothing to do with the document. I’ve never seen the document…it doesn’t speak for me.”
But there’s a problem with those claims: Many of the “very conservative people” behind the initiative—which is led by dozens of right-wing groups and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation—have close ties to Trump.
Trump did not always seek to distance himself from the group behind Project 2025 as much as he is now. As NBC News pointed out, back in 2022 Trump spoke at a Heritage Foundation event as the group began working on the initiative, praising Heritage as “a great group” that was “going to lay the groundwork” and “detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Notably, it turns out Trump’s newly named running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), wrote the foreword of a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and leader of Project 2025. According to publisher HarperCollins, the book—titled Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America and set to publish in September—”identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.” (It turns out this is not the only far-right book Vance has endorsed recently, as my colleague David Corn wrote today.)
While Vance’s forward does not yet appear to be publicly available, his endorsement for the book is: “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” he writes. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.” So much for “turning down the temperature,” as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called for after the attempted assassination of Trump.
Spokespeople for Vance’s office and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones about Vance writing the forward of Roberts’ book or which Project 2025 policies the candidates explicitly endorse or disavow.
As Media Matters points out, Roberts also said on a podcast this month that there’s an overlap between Project 2025 and the GOP platform on “all of the priority issues that the American people care about.” Roberts told the New York Times last year that the Heritage Foundation had briefed Trump on their plans, shutting down the ex-president’s claims he knows “nothing about” it.
CNN reported earlier this month that their review found that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration were involved with Project 2025, including six of his former Cabinet secretaries. One of those people, Russell Vought, Trump’s former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote a chapter of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” which focused on how the president should wield power in office. Vought was also appointed by the Republican National Committee and the Trump Campaign to be the policy director of the committee that wrote the new GOP platform.
Another is Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025 and an editor of the “Mandate for Leadership,” who told a right-wing radio host last year that “Trump’s very bought in with this.”
It’s no surprise Trump has sought to feign ignorance about Project 2025, given the extreme policies laid out in it, including a nationwide ban on medication abortion, eliminating the Department of Education, and abolishing climate protections. Democrats, and especially the all-but-certain new presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, have been campaigning on the threats posed if Trump is reelected, and using Project 2025 as a document of the potential administration’s plans. At her first official campaign rally this week, Harris said Project 2025 would “weaken the middle class” through its cuts to the social safety net, adding, “Can you believe they put that thing in writing?”
On Fox and Friends today, speaking about the policy proposals outlined in the document, Trump said, “They wrote something that I disagree with in many cases, and in some cases you agree, but it’s like a group of radical left people that write something, and you know, people get angry by it.”
Why Project 2025 Caught On
There’s finally a simple, ominous name for the dangerous future Trump represents.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/project-2025/
For the entirety of his political life, Trump has deployed a strategy of pumping endless toxic content into the political ecosystem, leaving the press and his opponents scrambling to keep up. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign marveled at all of Trump’s disqualifying ravings—until they realized she was drowning in them. With another outrageous tweet always coming, nothing stuck to him, as each controversy was forgotten when Trump tossed his next shiny object. Trump defined his opponent, and no one could land a punch on him.
Over the years, several commentators have analogized the situation to a classic episode of The Simpsons in which local villain Montgomery Burns is diagnosed with literally every disease. But rather than do him in, the illnesses crowd each other out, preventing any single one from taking hold. Being that sick, it turns out, made Burns invincible.
Project 2025 has done what Democrats tried to for years: tie Trump to unpopular MAGA policies.
Similarly, this election cycle, Democrats deployed multiple attack lines to try to disqualify Trump. They’ve called him a threat to democracy, since he tried to overturn the last election. They’ve called him a felon, after he was found guilty of 34 felonies in New York.
But it turns out the political attack that is catching, finally, is one that Trump’s own allies came up with. It is Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump presidency, that has finally broken through. In 922 pages, the project, helmed by the staunchly conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, outlines a radical restructuring of the federal government that combines the authoritarian goals of the MAGA movement with the deregulatory dreams of America’s plutocrats.
For Trump opponents, the problem “has never been a lack of abhorrent things,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “It’s been the inability to communicate them, because there are so many. It’s hard to find the needle in a haystack, it’s also hard to communicate the entire haystack…until they boiled it down into a 920-page instruction manual.”
Data shows how fears of Project 2025 are catching on. In June, less than 30 percent of Americans said they knew about it, according to the progressive polling outfit Navigator Research. A month later, 54 percent said they did—and 45 percent believed that it accurately describes Trump’s goals.
In an indication of the project’s growing prominence, when Navigator asked people to name negative things they had heard about Trump off the top of their head, Project 2025 was one of the top responses. And in an indication voters know the effort is tied to the former president, when respondents were then asked to name negative things they had heard about Project 2025, his name came up the most.
Project 2025 has done what Democrats tried to do for years: tie Trump to the unpopular policies of the MAGA coalition, from the Christian nationalists trying to ban abortion and IVF to the mega-rich trying to give themselves more tax breaks. “If you’re a person who is deeply upset by Roe being overturned in 2022, this is a roadmap of everything that can be done to further curtail reproductive rights,” says Bryan Bennett, a pollster at the progressive Hub Project, which works alongside Navigator on its surveys. “If you are an advocate for a more fair economy, this is a roadmap for raising tax on the middle class and working class while giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. If you are a healthcare advocate, this goes into excruciating detail about how to roll back and undermine things like the Affordable Care Act.”
Essentially, the Heritage Foundation took all the unlikeable goals of the MAGA movement, put them in one place, and gave it an ominous title. To help make these goals into reality, the project also created an action plan covering the first 180-days of a new administration, a database of personnel ready to replace career civil servants, and a training program to prepare them for this massive restructuring.
Heritage took all of MAGA’s unlikeable goals, put them in one place, and gave it an ominous title.
The document was crafted by people in Trump’s orbit—many who were in his last administration and who plan to work for him again—and proscribes dismantling most agencies’ core work: HHS would be used to end abortion access; DOJ would be used to prosecute Trump’s enemies; pollution would skyrocket after an EPA overhaul; and the Department of Education would be shuttered. Together, the sheer volume of information in Project 2025 is easily distilled into something easy to comprehend and sinister: it’s a takeover.
What happened in about a three week period to make Project 2025 go viral? Bennett thinks President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27 was a catalyst. As Trump became the strong favorite overnight, a natural question arose: What would really happen in a new Trump administration? Project 2025 was there to answer and was online for anyone to read. Organically, it began to get traction on TikTok, with Navigator finding, in a focus group of voters under 30, that most had heard about the project from online sharing platforms. “I’ve only seen it a lot on social media,” one focus group participant, a Democrat, said in July. “From what it sounds like, it doesn’t sound good.”
Democrats have also benefited from a ratchet effect: the more Trump has tried to distance himself from the plan, the more the media has exposed his ties to the project. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he posted on social media, kicking off a round of news stories covering Trump allies who worked on Project 2025: by CNN’s count, over 140 of his former administration officials helped write the plan. Former Trump cabinet secretary Russ Vought, for example, helped oversee Project 2025 and also ran the 2024 Republican National Convention’s platform committee. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Trump discussed Project 2025 while on a private plane flight with Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, on the way to a 2022 conference hosted by the organization. After they arrived, Trump gave a speech boasting that the think tank would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Trump gave the story another foothold when he selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. Ideologically, Vance has aligned himself with the far-right social policies of the Project 2025 coalition and the revolutionary rhetoric of Roberts. Vance has called for “fir[ing] every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”—just as Project 2025 urges. After he was tapped, attention focused on how he had had written the foreword to Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book. Some outlets obtained copies, and began publishing excerpts. Roberts then delayed publication of his book until after the election, a move that suggested they somehow wanted to hide it, fueling yet more interest. “If Project 2025 could manifest itself as a human being,” says Ferguson, “it would manifest JD Vance.”
Polling shows that Project 2025 has the promise to define Trump’s campaign if it stays in the public eye. But Trump, by returning to his old tricks, may be able to push Project 2025 out of the spotlight.
On Thursday, he gave a freewheeling, hour-long press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He said many things that are imprudent for a presidential nominee to say. It was vintage Trump: insulting, untrue, and narcissistic. He demeaned Jewish people, lied about the 2020 election transition being peaceful, and falsely claimed his rally crowd on January 6 was larger than the one that turned out to see Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington (it wasn’t). On and on he went. Just like in 2016, it appeared that an avalanche of gold was falling on Democrats. Look at all the crazy stuff he is saying!
But avalanches kill—and Trump has demonstrated he knows how to bury his opponents while all the muck slides off of him.
Aug 5, 2024 6:30 AM
How Project 2025 Would Put US Elections at Risk
Experts say the “nonsensical” policy proposal, which
largely aligns with Donald Trump’s agenda, would weaken the US agency tasked
with protecting election integrity, critical infrastructure, and more.
The winner of the 2024 US presidential election will confront complicated questions about whether the government is doing enough to protect the country from cyber threats. But one leading conservative group is sidestepping those questions and pushing to shrink the government’s main cyber agency, calling it a bastion of far-left tyranny.
Project 2025, a widely circulated playbook from the influential right-leaning Heritage Foundation, takes aim at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on several fronts, especially its efforts to reduce dangerous online misinformation. If former president Donald Trump wins the election and appoints officials who follow the playbook’s recommendations for CISA, the five-year-old agency could face an unprecedented crisis.
Trump has disavowed Project 2025—a 900-page document full of controversial proposals—but its authors have close ties to his former administration and his campaign, and many of its recommendations align with Trump’s agenda. If he wins a second term, Trump is likely to embrace Project 2025’s combative approach to CISA, whose director he fired for debunking his lies about the 2020 election. That makes the 2024 election an existential moment for CISA.
“If every recommendation in this proposal were accepted, this would significantly weaken CISA as an agency,” says Steve Kelly, a former special assistant to the president and senior director for cybersecurity and emerging technology at the National Security Council.
“It would essentially see CISA cease functioning as a principal element of cybersecurity,” says John Costello, a former chief of staff to the national cyber director at the White House. “It really takes out many of its central functions.”
Missing the Mark on Misinformation
No aspect of CISA’s work has sparked as much GOP ire as its efforts to combat online falsehoods destabilizing American society, and Project 2025’s most substantial recommendation for CISA concerns this work.
“Of the utmost urgency,” the plan says, “is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts.”
During the 2020 election, amid conspiracy theories and hoaxes about Covid-19 and the presidential election, CISA flagged state and local officials’ concerns about online falsehoods to social media companies. This practice, dubbed “switchboarding,” outraged conservatives, who accused CISA of suppressing their speech. House Republicans produced a report on what they called “the weaponization” of the agency, two GOP-led states sued the government (the US Supreme Court dismissed the case), and CISA and its federal partners all but froze their conversations with social media firms.
“CISA has devolved into an unconstitutional censoring and election engineering apparatus of the political Left,” Project 2025 declares. After dismissing Russian interference in the 2016 election as a “dirty trick” by Hillary Clinton’s campaign (despite it being extensively documented, including in a lengthy bipartisan Senate report), Heritage’s policy proposal recommends that the military and the intelligence community take over the responsibility of combating foreign propaganda.
CISA and its defenders maintain that the agency never pressured tech companies to delete posts, but regardless, the agency’s current counterpropaganda operation is a shell of its former self. Talks with tech firms have resumed, but in the election space, the agency is now relying solely on its “Rumor vs. Reality” fact-checking page.
Cybersecurity experts say the government needs to be debunking harmful lies, especially those spread by foreign adversaries.
“There's a role for CISA in mis- and disinformation, but they'd be wise to keep it cabined and narrow,” says Kelly, who is now the chief strategy officer at the nonprofit Institute for Security and Technology.
Costello calls Project 2025’s proposal “deeply problematic.”
The report fails to acknowledge the seriousness of adversaries’ efforts to sow chaos in the US, according to Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative-leaning think tank.
The document “appears blind to the fact that Russia, China, and Iran are weaponizing social media networks to create a false narrative that weakens US national security,” Montgomery says.
Project 2025’s leaders did not respond to inquiries for this story. Ken Cuccinelli, a top Department of Homeland Security official in the Trump administration and the author of the report’s DHS chapter, declined an interview request.
Vague and Contradictory
Most of Project 2025’s proposals for CISA are difficult to decipher and reflect what experts say is a misunderstanding of the agency’s activities.
The plan envisions CISA helping local election officials “assess whether they have good cyber hygiene,” but it warns that “CISA should not be significantly involved closer to an election” and should not engage in any “messaging” work.
“It's unclear to me what a statement like that would mean,” says Kiersten Todt, a former chief of staff to CISA’s director, “because as the elections approach, the need to ensure the safety and security of those elections is even more urgent.”
Indeed, Costello says, the run-up to Election Day is “when misinformation [and] disinformation upticks the highest” and when it’s most important to debunk lies about things like polling places and voting times. “That's when [we’re] most vulnerable. And we saw that in 2016.”
Muzzling CISA during this crucial period, Costello says, “runs the risk of creating a bubble where Russia or China or any other nation-state threat actor could have a safe space for a massive disinformation campaign.”
If Trump wins and adopts this approach, Todt worries that CISA’s locally deployed election security advisers will be pressured not to offer help in a campaign’s closing stage. CISA’s empowerment of its field force is “one of the great achievements and successes of the past few years,” she says.
Project 2025 also vaguely decries what it characterizes as CISA’s overlap with other agencies. The report says CISA “should refrain from duplicating cybersecurity functions done elsewhere at the Department of Defense, FBI, National Security Agency, and US Secret Service,” but no cyber experts consulted by WIRED could figure out what that means.
If the idea is that the military, not CISA, should be defending critical infrastructure operators from hackers, that’s “a fundamental misreading of US law … about who's allowed to do what,” Costello says. “CISA helps facilitate things domestically that DoD can't touch and NSA can't touch.” That includes direct monitoring of intrusion-detection sensors on critical infrastructure networks.
If anything, the military has impinged on CISA’s territory—not the other way around—out of exasperation with the civilian agency’s constrained resources, says Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral.
“The Department of Defense would say, ‘We're having to do things that we think CISA should be doing,’” Montgomery says, which has meant “slowly creeping outside the base fence to make sure that electrical power grids, water systems, [and] telecom systems [near bases] are properly protected in case of a crisis.”
Department of Dubious Moves
Of all the CISA proposals in Project 2025’s plan, the most ambitious one is highly unlikely to succeed: moving the agency into the Department of Transportation as part of a broader initiative to dismantle DHS.
The recommendation reflects conservatives’ desire to shrink the overall size of government, but it may also suggest a belief that moving CISA would curtail its scope and make it “a little more manageable,” says Brandon Pugh, director of the cybersecurity and emerging threats team at the center-right think tank R Street Institute. Pugh says some Republicans believe the agency “went beyond its original mandate and [has] become too bloated.”
But this idea is a virtual nonstarter because the congressional committees with oversight of CISA won’t give up their power in a rapidly growing domain. “There's no way that would ever work,” Costello says.
Apart from being infeasible, the proposal would undermine CISA’s effectiveness.
Cybersecurity fits squarely into DHS’s homeland-security portfolio, so moving CISA into a department with a different mission “doesn't make a lot of sense” and “would undermine some of the organizational logic,” Kelly says. “I don't actually understand the rationale of that.”
DHS is also better-suited to facilitate the kind of cross-government collaboration that CISA relies on for its twin missions of protecting federal computer systems and helping companies and local governments defend themselves.
“Giving CISA to Department of Transportation would reduce the cybersecurity of our national critical infrastructure for some period of time,” Montgomery says, adding that Transportation is “one of the last places” he’d put CISA and calling the proposal “nonsensical.”
Still, observers say it might be worth reviewing the structure of DHS, which has steadily accumulated functions since its post-9/11 creation and is now considered something of a Frankenstein department. But that review has to be “well thought out,” Todt says. “Reorganization of government should never be taken lightly.”
Squandering a Moment
Even as Project 2025 appears to misunderstand some aspects of CISA’s mission and focus disproportionately on others, the document also misses opportunities to recommend meaningful reforms.
Congress has spent years waiting for CISA to complete a “force structure assessment” that would better define its mission and the resources and organization needed to accomplish it. But even beyond CISA, there are serious concerns that the government as a whole isn’t coordinating well on cyber issues.
Pugh says it’s worth examining whether the system is working well. “Do we need to take a harder look at who's responsible for different leadership aspects of cyber?”
For now, though, experts agree that Project 2025 misses the mark. The document, Montgomery says, is “full of little tantrums” and “shows a lack of understanding of how federal government works.”
Costello says it’s “embarrassing” to see Project 2025 “call for essentially the hollowing out of CISA,” and he worries that its implementation could create a perilous feedback loop for the agency.
“If you were to reduce the mission scope and importance of CISA,” he says, “morale is going to drop, people are going to want to leave, and Congress is going to be less willing to fund [it].”
|
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2410.18 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3395 days ago & DAD = 051 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment