Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: Shaping Future Conservative Policies

Date Posted: 2024-11-11 19:09:32 | Video Duration: 00:13:08

Project 2025: A Conservative Vision for the Future

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is designed to guide the next U.S. administration with conservative policy and personnel strategies, focusing on decentralizing power away from elite institutions. The initiative has faced criticism from the left, with an emphasis on federalism and strengthening local economies being among its key components.

Discussion on Project 2025 in a Potential Trump Administration

• 0:00 | Most importantly, the forgotten ordinary American has won.
• 0:03 | Because what really won was an emphasis on common sense solutions to problems.
• 0:08 | And really not that at Heritage we feel either entitled or defensive about
• 0:13 | Project 2025. We just are resolute because it’s now a
• 0:17 | policy making season. This is something that we’ve done for 44
• 0:20 | years, since 1980 with Ronald Reagan. We understand that, of course, President
• 0:24 | elect Trump and Vice President elect Vance will make all the decisions.
• 0:27 | Having said that, Project 2025 is the single greatest, biggest scope of
• 0:34 | personnel and policy work that’s ever happened.
• 0:36 | And we’re very proud of it. It represents several dozen million
• 0:39 | Americans. If you think about the 110 organizations who are part of it.
• 0:42 | Once again, totally up to the president elect and vice president elect. We operate in service to them and to the
• 0:45 | American people. But ultimately, to get to the heart of
• 0:50 | your question, Joe, the American people have won here and we look forward to
• 0:53 | playing whatever role formally or informally, that we can to support them.
• 0:57 | Well, I just. Did you anticipate the backlash?
• 0:59 | You mentioned Ronald Reagan. The mandate for leadership was something
• 1:02 | that was actually pretty well received as a policy paper.
• 1:05 | It helped to put heritage on the map. Was this supposed to be another version
• 1:09 | of that or sort of a quiet policy paper that you would provide whatever the
• 1:14 | incoming administration would be? We wanted to insert substantive policy
• 1:19 | conversations into the political season. We did not anticipate that the radical
• 1:24 | left, which couldn’t run on its record because it’s terrible, would actually
• 1:27 | use that as the as the bogeyman and succeed in doing that.
• 1:31 | And look, we made a tactical error in not responding in the first six weeks to
• 1:35 | their total mischaracterizations. That’s on us.
• 1:38 | But ultimately, the mischaracterizations are on the radical left.
• 1:41 | That’s a tactical lesson that we’ve learned.
• 1:43 | And and we’ll never repeat that. But that doesn’t mean that the
• 1:46 | substantive part of the work, the policies, the personnel database, which
• 1:50 | has 20,000 Americans who want to serve not only in presidential
• 1:54 | administrations, but also in gubernatorial administrations, is
• 1:57 | somehow something to be ashamed of. In fact, quite the opposite.
• 2:00 | We’re very proud of it. Having said that, it is very much
• 2:03 | designed, as all of our previous projects have been designed, which is to
• 2:07 | be of service. And if I had to predict the next
• 2:11 | administration is going to be filled with excellent men and women, not just
• 2:15 | because of the work we did, but most importantly because of the great acumen
• 2:18 | of the president elect and vice president elect and the team that
• 2:21 | they’re already assembling. We learned one name just over the
• 2:25 | weekend. It’s Tom Homan, who’s going to be the
• 2:27 | border czar, as Donald Trump is referring to it.
• 2:29 | That was from a post untruth. I don’t think that’s a position that
• 2:33 | requires Senate confirmation when it comes to being a czar, whatever that is.
• 2:39 | But he was one of the authors of 2025. So is the winter over?
• 2:43 | It may be. The Tom Homan is also a visiting fellow
• 2:46 | at Heritage, is a good friend. I was texting me earlier congratulating
• 2:49 | him on that. And look, the most important thing,
• 2:51 | forget Tom’s professional affiliation. Forget that he was a project 2025
• 2:56 | author. The most important thing is that he is
• 2:59 | aligned not just with President Trump, but also with the American people who
• 3:03 | want to bring an end to the ridiculous disorder on the southern border.
• 3:07 | Tom is going to do a great job there. In other words, Joe, neither today nor a
• 3:11 | year from today am I going to be sitting in my office at Heritage, sort of
• 3:15 | keeping score about who’s in the administration and not?
• 3:17 | That’s not why we do what we do. We exist every day to be of service to
• 3:21 | the American people and to the administration, for that matter.
• 3:24 | If the Democrats had won, and although it would have been very surprising for
• 3:28 | them to have called us and say, you’ve got a name for so-and-so agency, we
• 3:31 | would have done that too, to this. This is the whole point about the work
• 3:34 | that has understood us. Understood.
• 3:36 | Although we had heard from the transition team that no one from Project
• 3:38 | 2025 was invited. Now we’ve got home and that apparently
• 3:42 | was not the case. Have you talked to Donald Trump since he
• 3:44 | won? We’ve not spoken yet, but I anticipate
• 3:47 | that we will. I mean, he’s got to be pretty keyed up
• 3:49 | on what Heritage is offering here. He was on the record when the team was
• 3:55 | trying to distance itself from you. I have no idea who is behind it.
• 3:59 | He put on X. I disagree with some of the things
• 4:01 | they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous
• 4:05 | and abysmal. Do you have a sense of what he likes or
• 4:08 | doesn’t like here? I think the key thing is that President
• 4:12 | Trump saw the branding as a liability in the political season.
• 4:16 | But I also would anticipate moving forward that the president elect and
• 4:21 | vice president elect, with whom we maintain great relationships, will also
• 4:25 | understand that it’s the policy making season, that Heritage and all of the
• 4:29 | other groups are a part of our project are built for.
• 4:32 | And if they’re looking, for example, as President Trump said this morning, to
• 4:35 | dismantle the US Department of Education, we know exactly where you can
• 4:39 | go for that plan. Totally up to him about whether he uses
• 4:42 | the plan. Yeah, but that’s that’s what I’m talking
• 4:44 | about, Joe. When I mention that great ideas and
• 4:46 | great people rise to the top, the all of the political calculations of the last
• 4:51 | few months, which were very understandable and about which we have
• 4:55 | no hard feelings are in the past. We’re now in the policymaking season.
• 4:59 | We think that. This is the beginning of a golden era of
• 5:01 | conservative reform. I will say that because the work of
• 5:05 | Project 2025 represents the conservative movement, it would be very difficult for
• 5:11 | anybody to implement policies on education, on the border, on taxation,
• 5:17 | without at least consulting those ideas and people.
• 5:20 | That’s not some arrogant or hubristic comment on our part.
• 5:23 | That’s just the nature of how policymaking works.
• 5:25 | Well, so you’re back and you’re back with a new book, Dawn’s Early Light.
• 5:28 | It was originally supposed to release in September.
• 5:32 | Was it your decision to postpone the release?
• 5:34 | What went into that? 100%.
• 5:35 | My decision. And that was because as president of the
• 5:37 | Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America, I’m a busy guy like a lot
• 5:42 | of people are. You can relate to that yourself.
• 5:44 | And at Heritage Action for America, which is our 501 C4 and more political
• 5:48 | arm. We were busy registering almost 100,000
• 5:50 | voters in Arizona and Georgia, doing the appropriate ballot, chasing to get them
• 5:54 | to the polls and succeeded in doing that.
• 5:56 | And we just thought it would be better in terms of using my time for me to be
• 6:00 | zealously focused on getting conservative policy makers in a position
• 6:04 | to have a good conversation and and delay the release of the book until this
• 6:09 | month. So you didn’t think it would jeopardize
• 6:10 | Donald Trump’s chances of being elected or other Republicans based on what you
• 6:14 | were hearing about 2025? No.
• 6:16 | And I understand the the question was very fair, but not at all.
• 6:20 | In fact, if you get around to reading the book, you will see the book is a
• 6:24 | reflection of of Trumpism. I mean, this is really where the
• 6:27 | conservative movement in America are going.
• 6:30 | And I think because the book is far more oriented around ideas and where we take
• 6:35 | the movement, the time for that conversation is after the election.
• 6:38 | Well, I’ll tell you, it’s really interesting because I wish I had more
• 6:42 | time with the book, but I did spend the weekend with it.
• 6:44 | And you write, For America to flourish again.
• 6:47 | The institutions you talk about don’t need to be reformed.
• 6:50 | They need to be burned. And you have a list of them, burn them
• 6:52 | to the ground. Every Ivy League college, the FBI, the
• 6:56 | New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the
• 7:00 | Department of Education, which you mentioned, 80% of Catholic higher
• 7:04 | education, BlackRock. The Loudoun County Public School system,
• 7:10 | the Boy Scouts of America, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World
• 7:12 | Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for
• 7:16 | Democracy. Do you see all of these as being on the
• 7:19 | same side of something? Is this the unit party you talk about?
• 7:23 | They are there. And what’s important context for the
• 7:27 | list you there that you have? There is the metaphor that I use of a
• 7:31 | controlled burn. So obviously, we’re talking about
• 7:33 | metaphorically regenerating these these institutions.
• 7:36 | But what all of those institutions have in common is that they have forgotten
• 7:41 | the importance of the everyday America and how so much of the work that they do
• 7:45 | is oriented around concentrating power in either Washington or New York.
• 7:49 | There are good people in some of those institutions and in Washington, in New
• 7:53 | York. But what the American people told us
• 7:55 | last week is that it’s time for power to be devolved from those elite
• 7:59 | institutions back to the states and back to the American people.
• 8:02 | My book places an emphasis on revitalizing federalism because that
• 8:06 | gives the people closest to power the opportunity to actually have a say in
• 8:10 | their government. By the way, I think that’s what we’re
• 8:12 | going to see in the next few years. BlackRock Larry Fink Sports.
• 8:15 | TRUMP Right. BlackRock and Larry Fink may have
• 8:19 | supported President Trump, but before that decision, which I would just
• 8:23 | speculators is largely political, underwrote a dramatic reorientation of
• 8:29 | capital from being focused on making profit, which I know you and me and your
• 8:33 | audience are about to a socialized idea of ESG.
• 8:38 | And I’m really glad that one of the great things that has happened in terms
• 8:41 | of policy, in fact, one of the things we talk about and project 2025 and and
• 8:45 | heritage is undermining the ridiculous work of Larry Fink in BlackRock.
• 8:50 | So it’s ESG, not China investment that turned you.
• 8:54 | It’s both when it comes to and they’re very much related as no doubt.
• 8:56 | No. Well, no, I don’t actually.
• 8:58 | Well, in fact, if you let’s just take the E and ESG and the environmental
• 9:03 | emphasis that actually favors the Chinese.
• 9:06 | I see. Understood.
• 9:09 | So here’s the thing that strikes me after spending some time with your book.
• 9:13 | You and I are from really different places.
• 9:16 | You grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, which is a great town, by the way.
• 9:19 | And I’ve been there more than once. I want you to know I’m from a place
• 9:22 | called Putnam, Connecticut. May as well be from two different
• 9:26 | planets. My town, I think, was smaller than
• 9:28 | yours, though. And while you grew up and saw the big
• 9:31 | oil bust and what happened to families and to households in Lafayette, for me
• 9:38 | it was the textile mills, right? We had all of those in these mill towns
• 9:41 | in Connecticut. They all closed when I was a kid, when
• 9:44 | the 1980s got there. Then the shopping malls opened and all
• 9:47 | the main street stores closed. Unemployment went through the roof.
• 9:51 | Morale went down. Very similar cultural impact, even
• 9:56 | though we’re talking about massively different industries, different
• 10:00 | geography, different values, I suppose, between a New England family and
• 10:04 | Louisiana, but actually maybe more similar than you think.
• 10:07 | You have French-Canadian ancestors. I do, too.
• 10:10 | So we have the same scenario here, and there are different potential solutions,
• 10:15 | right? Joe Biden’s been talking about reshoring
• 10:17 | and friend shoring and trying to bring jobs back that way.
• 10:20 | We had the CHIPS Act. What does Project 2025 do?
• 10:24 | What will Donald Trump do to restore the local economies in communities like the
• 10:30 | ones you and I are from? I can’t tell you how much.
• 10:33 | Joe, I appreciate your question. In fact, there’s no doubt we have a lot
• 10:36 | more similarities and differences. Right?
• 10:38 | We all do, actually. And they don’t talk about it.
• 10:40 | And that’s and that’s the point of the book, too.
• 10:42 | But thank you for that, for that framing.
• 10:44 | But to the heart of your question, which I love, actually President Biden has
• 10:47 | talked about that, I think he probably could have done more in his three and a
• 10:50 | half years. I don’t I don’t say that to be a jerk.
• 10:52 | I say that that I think he could have done more.
• 10:53 | But I give him credit for saying the right things.
• 10:56 | I think the CHIPS Act is well intentioned, but there are some details
• 10:59 | we’ve got to get right going down the road.
• 11:01 | But the ultimately where the policy emphasis needs to be is a looking at the
• 11:07 | tradeoffs. When you have a globalized economy, it
• 11:10 | isn’t that globalization is bad, obviously.
• 11:12 | It’s that there are effects that are deleterious on local town or local
• 11:17 | communities. But the second is whether it’s French
• 11:20 | shoring, on shoring or providing incentives for American companies to be
• 11:24 | producing here at home for American jobs.
• 11:26 | That’s the conversation we need to have. And thirdly, because of how evil the
• 11:30 | Chinese Communist Party regime is at Heritage, we are fully supportive of
• 11:34 | tariffs on China. We are not supportive of tariffs across
• 11:37 | the board. But we do understand that that is a
• 11:40 | valid conversation for us to be having as opposed to what the political right
• 11:45 | in this country ten or 20 years ago would have said, which is you can’t even
• 11:48 | talk about it. We believe we need to look at the data.
• 11:51 | We need to look at the tax regime as a whole.
• 11:53 | And we always need to understand that a good, healthy economy flows first from a
• 11:58 | good, healthy civil society, whether it’s Putnam, Connecticut or Lafayette,
• 12:02 | Louisiana. And that’s something.
• 12:04 | Lastly, I want to ask you about personal liberties.
• 12:07 | I don’t want to do the abortion debate here on the air.
• 12:09 | We’ve been doing that for months. And I know where you stand on this.
• 12:12 | You talk about it at length. You highlighted trans as an issue in
• 12:16 | this campaign. The Republican Party did and got a lot
• 12:19 | of result from some advertising in that area.
• 12:23 | Are you focused on minors, on parents, on schools, or are you focused on an
• 12:29 | adult who says, hey, I have a different view of the world and myself
• 12:35 | than you do when it comes to things like gender dysmorphia?
• 12:37 | Should an adult be allowed to do what they want to do with their own body?
• 12:40 | From a policymaking standpoint, especially over the next few years,
• 12:44 | we’re focused on minors. But the reason that we at Heritage are
• 12:48 | so concerned about transgender ideology is because it harms any human person it
• 12:54 | touches. We love every human person.
• 12:56 | We believe in the dignity of every human person.
• 12:58 | And it’s on those grounds that we think even for adults, this is problematic.
• 13:02 | Problematic because they’re talking to kids about it or they’re going to
• 13:04 | somehow infect other adults. What’s your worry?
• 13:07 | Both.

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