Newly leaked training videos confirm how the staffing initiative of Project 2025, the controversial rightwing plan for the next Republican presidency, is gearing up for a major effort to replace non-partisan civil servants with conservative loyalists, and is being led by many former Trump administration officials.
The videos, created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy and published over the weekend by ProPublica and Documented, expose part of the Heritage Foundation thinktank’s plan to recruit and train political appointees on behalf of a future conservative administration.
A major aim of Project 2025 – running alongside its controversial policy proposals – is to replace thousands of government employees, most of whom work in career positions for administrations on both sides of the political aisle, with partisan Republican loyalists.
Of the 36 featured speakers, 29 previously worked for former US president Donald Trump in some capacity.
The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation of the group’s director two weeks ago, reportedly due to “pressure from Trump campaign leadership”. Trump has recently attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 amid intense criticism and backlash regarding the group’s extreme policy proposals. As well as calling for the replacement of civil servants with Trump loyalists, those plans include eliminating the education department, shrinking environmental protections, and reducing LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.
In the 23 training videos, totaling more than 14 hours, former Trump administration officials gave advice to future appointees on governing and how to best advance their conservative policies.
In one video, Rick Dearborn, who was a part of Trump’s 2016 transition team and served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, admitted that during the Trump administration it was “tough” to fill all the positions at first.
The recruiting and training that Project 2025 is doing right now, Dearborn said, is “going to be so important to the next president, because establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now” is a “luxury” that the Trump administration did not have in 2016.
In another video, Bethany Kozma, the former deputy chief of staff at the US Agency for International Development during the the Trump administration, said that the climate change movement is part of a goal by the government to “control people”.
“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma said. The training video was titled “Left-Wing Code Words and Language.”
In the same video, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the justice department under Trump, criticized the Joe Biden administration’s creation of gender adviser positions in the federal government.
Sullivan called for the position to be “eradicated” as well as “all the task forces”, “the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites” and a “complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications”.
In other videos, several speakers suggested that future conservative political appointees should be prepared to expect a hostility from the mainstream media, from within the federal government, and also from people in Washington DC.
The capital city is a place that “does not share your conservative values”, Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at the US Agency for International Development during the Trump administration, told future appointees.
Primorac told viewers not to let “career bureaucrats hinder you from advancing the president’s agenda”, adding that “they’re hostile to it because you’re here to to do something that’s not in their interest.”
“You’re here to cut government, you’re here to cut spending, you’re here to cut regulations.”
Speakers also encouraged the future appointees to focus their attention and time on conservative media outlets, as those are the only ones trusted by conservative voters.
Other speakers advised future appointees to avoid creating a paper trail of sensitive communications that could be obtained by the Freedom of Information Act or by Congress.
In a statement sent to ProPublica after the videos were released, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign said that Trump’s only official policy agenda is Agenda 47.
Last month, after Project 2025 director Paul Dans stepped down, the Heritage Foundation said that while the organization would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels – federal, state and local – will continue”.
As Trump has tried to distance himself from the controversial plan – claiming last month to “know nothing about Project 2025” and to have “no idea who is behind it” – the Washington Post reported last week that Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, told the paper that he had personally talked to Trump about it. “My role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me,” he said.
Photos were also published of Trump with Roberts on a private plane in 2022, and Trump gave a keynote speech to the foundation’s annual conference.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
