As the 2024 presidential election has ramped up, Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from a plan laid out by a group of right-wing organizations to gut the federal government of thousands of officials believed to stand in the way of a Republican agenda and replace them with conservative loyalists.
Although Project 2025, as the plan is known, dovetails closely with Trump’s own statements about abolishing the “deep state,” the former president has repudiated the scheme as Democrats have ramped up their attacks against it. In a post on Truth Social earlier this month, Trump said he knew nothing about the project and called some of its policies “ridiculous and abysmal.”
But even though Trump’s public statements have turned frosty, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank leading Project 2025, is thrilled with the new nominee for vice president.
On a 2021 podcast appearance while he was campaigning for the Senate, J.D. Vance predicted that Trump would run again—and win—in 2024, and said if he could give the former president one piece of advice it would be to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state.”
“Replace them with our people,” Vance said. “And when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
During the Republican National Convention, the Heritage Foundation was holding a nearby event called “Policy Fest.” Kevin Roberts reacted to the news of Vance’s nomination enthusiastically, and told reporters that “privately, we were really rooting for him,” according to New York Times reporter Nick Corasaniti.
The news of the Vance pick came as Dr. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, was talking to reporters. He reacted to the news “with a broad smile on my face” and said that “privately, we were really rooting for him.”
— Nick Corasaniti (@NYTnickc) July 15, 2024
The Conservative playbook known as Project 2025 goes far beyond the bureaucracy in its aims for reshaping America. The plan, outlined in a nearly 1,000-page document, includes recommendations on issues ranging from immigration to abortion. But at its core, Project 2025 hinges on a $22 million transition operation that will have civil servants in place on the first day of a new administration, ready to carry out Trump’s agenda. It includes a plan to build a database of 20,000 potential officials who would be conservative loyalists. Paul Dans, the director of the project, said its aim was to “flood the zone with conservatives.”
Trump himself has been among the loudest voices calling for a restructuring of the federal government. The former president has made it clear that one of the first actions he would take upon regaining the White House would be reinstating Schedule F, the executive order signed at the end of his term that reclassified thousands of federal employees as political appointees.
At a 2023 speech delivered at the organization’s 50th anniversary summit, Vance said the Heritage Foundation would “play a major role in helping us figure out how to govern, at the White House, at the Senate, at the House and all across our great country,” and thanked the group for “50 years of incredible work on conservative policy.”
The official manifesto to Project 2025 wasn’t released until the day after Vance’s speech last year, but the outline of the foundation’s plan to build a staffing database for the transition team was already in place—long before Trump was certain to be the Republican nominee.
In the past week, Vance has followed Trump’s example and tried to distance himself—and a new Republican administration—from the project, but did not go as far as the former president in critiquing it. Speaking with conservative talk show host Rob Shmitt, Vance said most Americans “couldn’t care less about Project 2025.”
“I’ve reviewed a lot of it,” Vance said. “There’s some good ideas in there Rob, there’s some things that I disagree with, but most importantly, it has no affiliation with the Trump campaign.”