How Project 2025 Can Help Us Understand What Trump is Doing – and What’s Next
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The Trump administration moved Friday to implement the removal of job protections for career civil servants and make them easier to fire. Re-instituting so-called Schedule F was a key goal of Project 2025, and The Atlantic's David Graham has looked at how closely the administration is following the Heritage Foundation's roadmap.

He says a key goal of the project isn't getting enough attention. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. Graham explains after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. At this point, it's clear that the policy prescriptions and methods laid out in Project 2025 are being mirrored by the Trump administration, despite Donald Trump distancing himself from the more than 900-page Heritage Foundation playbook while campaigning. Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham has poured over the document. He's here to tell us what's likely coming next from Project 2025's blueprint for the administration, and also to what end.

what the authors envision for America. Quote, abortion is strictly illegal, sex is closely policed, public schools don't exist, and justice is harsh, Graham writes in his new book called The Project. And he joins me now. Welcome back to Forum, David. Thank you for having me. So we've already seen many of Project 2025's recommendations put into action by this administration. Help us understand to what degree.

You know, it's a little bit hard to quantify and believe me, I have tried because Project 2025 is such a, it's many different things. It's not just a list of policies, although it is that. It's also, you know, a broader scheme for reworking the way the federal government works and for changing the way people interact with the government and ultimately for changing the structure of American society. So,

So what I'd say is we have seen a lot of progress toward one goal, which is to create more power for the executive branch. A lot of steps, whether that's laying off civil servants or going through traditional guardrails of independence, we've seen a lot of the things to try to enhance the power of the federal government. And we've seen a lot of these specific policies put into place.

Yes, and there are plenty of trackers that try to get at the specific policy recommendations that the administration has implemented if people want to look for them. You know, one of them that comes to mind for us, of course, is ending federal funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, but also all of their recommendations around DEI and so forth.

But you're right with regard to expanding the powers of the executive office. And then the latest I mentioned being the Trump administration's Office of Personnel Management issuing a rule to reclassify 50,000 career civil servants as at-will employees to make them easier to fire. Just remind us the rationale around that for Project 2025.

So the authors of Project 2025, and I should say they come at this from the perspective of having been in the first Trump administration and having been very frustrated by their experience. You know, they felt that Trump should have achieved a lot more. And they laid the blame for that at both political appointees who they thought were lazy or in it for themselves or sort of actively sabotaging Trump. And then a civil service that was sort of sclerotic and non-responsive.

And they believe that the president should have more power to hire in fire workers for a couple of reasons. One is that they think that, you know, the existence of a federal bureaucracy that does not directly respond to the president is outside of the scope of the Constitution. And they object to it on that level. And they also think that, you know, the president needs to have more political control. And so all of these things are problems if they want to implement the agenda they want.

Yeah, one of the things I was struck by was that you write, the authors of Project 2025 don't actually want fewer federal employees, they just want fewer career employees. So they want many more federal employees?

You know, it's a little bit hard to tell. There are places where they clearly want to lay off large swaths of the workforce. It's funny, you know, the Project 2025 is arranged by department. A lot of the authors of chapters on specific departments want to cut other parts of the government, but maybe not the parts that they oversee. But a lot of it is, yeah, just converting these people to political control. That way they can be hired and fired much more easily. Now,

The flip side of that is that means they're going to turn over every four years. So rather than being chosen for expertise and promoted on that basis, they're going to come and go and they're going to respond to whatever the president wants them to do rather than whatever the imperatives of their agency is or whatever their sort of training is.

So the qualifications are really based on how ideologically similar they are, maybe to the 2025 authors or to the president himself, and less on skill and experience. For the ones who do want more government workers, why? Why do they ultimately want them? What do they want them for?

You know, I think we're focused a lot on these policy questions. We're focused a lot on the accrual of government power right now because this is what's going on. But I think it is part of a broader scheme to rework American society. And these are people who believe that America was founded as a Christian nation and it must return to being a Christian nation. They think that under liberals, you know, wokeness, which they don't define, but they talk about a lot, has taken over and it's undermining the America that they knew and loved.

And they want to get back to a more traditional society, you know, where men are breadwinners. Women are very feminine and ideally are raising lots of children. There are strict gender rules. You know, queer people and trans people are put back into the closet. And all of these are ultimately arranged around, I think, that main goal. It's to implement this very conservative vision of society from top to bottom. A very conservative vision of society. So...

As you say, just this idea, it was interesting. You had written a piece also for The Atlantic called The Top Goal of Project 2025 is Still to Come. And the images of a, you know, basically like a 1950s black and white photo of a woman at a stove. I mean, is this capturing what they're envisioning?

You know, I think there's a little bit of nuance to some of it. You know, there are a lot of high achieving women in the Trump administration. The chief of staff is a great example. The press secretary, members of the cabinet.

But there's a real focus on this traditional femininity. And there is a sense that things do need to go back to that kind of world. You know, they focus a lot on birth rates. They're focused on natalism. They're concerned about schools, public schools being too ideological. They want to return those things to more religious education. So I do think it is an attempt at this very sort of basic level to change the way Americans view the world and themselves. Yeah.

What they're talking about, though, as you say, a massive cultural shift of American society, that takes a really long time, longer than this administration, I presume. That's right. And they're working on several timescales, which I think is one thing that sets this apart from some of the other kind of wish lists of policy that we get from think tanks on both sides of the aisle every four years.

You know, they started, they had a 100-day game plan, including drafting executive orders and other things ahead of time so that when Trump reached the White House, he would have these drafts ready and could push them out. And lo and behold, you know, within the first days of the administration, there were a couple, three dozen, I believe, executive orders that closely mirrored things in Project 2025.

Second, they're sort of focused on this two-year timeline. They understand that a president gets the most done in the first two years of his term. After that, he tends to lose support in Congress. There are things that come up, and so they want to get things done there. Like midterm elections as well? Right, exactly. But in a lot of ways, they're looking at a much longer timescale. So Trump is a vessel for them to get these things done in the immediate term. But what they're looking at is restructuring society for the long run. And they have these changes to the federal government, the changes to what the

the president can do. All of these things are designed with this long timeframe in mind. I want to get into the how in a moment, a little more into that, but I want to invite listeners to join the conversation. We're

We're talking with David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, who also writes The Atlantic Daily Newsletter. He's author of a new book called The Project, how Project 2025 is reshaping America. And he says the now famous white paper has proved to be a good roadmap for what the administration has done so far.

and what may yet be on the way. So listeners, what questions do you have about what's in Project 2025? And what's driving it, the ideas and beliefs behind it? What are your reactions to how Project 2025 talks about gender and family?

I'm also curious if it influenced your vote in the presidential election. You can email forum at kqed.org. You can find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum. Or you can give us a call at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

So let's talk about some of the things that they are doing that are going to lead to this massive cultural shift. And I had not before reading your book kind of connected this purge of the federal government of employees who would not be loyal in their view to the ideologies of Donald Trump or that of Project 2025, probably more accurately, to this idea of a very –

traditional family structure. But talk about how they see this being implemented. There's one section in particular, I think, where Roger Severino is a key author. Who is Roger Severino? And what does he say are sort of the key methods to getting to this place?

Yeah. So Severino is a former Justice Department lawyer, career attorney, including in the Obama administration. Then he worked at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration. And he's very strongly pro-life. He's involved in the anti-abortion movement.

And he writes this chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, which is really a focus for these things. And it's interesting to see all the ways I think that they would like to do this. So, you know, he talks about ways to ban abortion, including, you know, withdrawing FDA approval for the for medical abortion pills, preventing it from being mailed under an 1873 law, tracking abortion at state levels insofar as it works.

remains possible. But they also talk about ways to, you know, encourage more children to be born through other methods. One of the things that I think is interesting is, and these places where there's a kind of overlap with views maybe on the left, he wants doulas to be available to all expectant mothers. You know, having these birth coaches available, something I associate maybe more with the crunchy left.

They want to make childcare more available, for example, having childcare at work or paying caregivers in families to take care of children. So these ways that they are focused on making – on incentivizing people having more babies.

They also see, you know, the school system as a way to achieve this. They both want schools to be they want to encourage private schools and religious schools, deemphasize public schools and deemphasize the federal role in them. They want the education department, though, to continue to track things like student achievement based on family structure so they can continue to argue for traditional family structures. All these things are really interrelated.

Yeah, he says something along the lines of that the government should bolster administration or organizations that maintain a biblically based social science reinforced definition of marriage and family. And it's interesting that you say that, you know, some of the policy promises and rhetoric could be pretty palatable, right? Yeah.

I think it's a lot of places where there are some suggestions that are palatable or where there are also there are a lot of places where there are diagnoses that I think are shared by a lot of people. But the question is whether the solutions that they encourage would in fact have the results that they want and whether there are results that a lot of Americans would in fact be open to. Yeah. And I think that is the question. It's like to what end though, right? Even if these are the methods that may sound appealing, the kind of –

sort of worldview that you laid out, you know, is that the end that people really want to see? That's right. And they talk about liberty being very important, but I think a lot of people would look at this and identify less liberty in their lives based on the structures that Project 2025 wants to create. Because how would they argue that this gives more liberty? Exactly.

We'll have more with David A. Graham after the break. We're talking about Project 2025, how it's informed the Trump administration's actions so far and what's ahead. Stay with us. I'm Mina Kim.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour about how Project 2025 is reshaping America, the subtitle to David Graham's new book, The Project. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that.

He's also staff writer at The Atlantic, who writes The Atlantic Daily Newsletter. And he writes about a key piece of Project 2025 that's gotten less attention, but maybe what the focus will be next. Restoring the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children is what Project 2025 says. What questions do you have, listeners, about what's in Project 2025 and what's driving it? What's your reaction to how Project 2025 talks about gender in the family?

And you can email forum at kqed.org. You can call us at 866-733-6786 with your questions or comments, or you can post on our social channels at KQED Forum. We're on Blue Sky Facebook, Instagram, or Threads. Let me go to caller Barry in San Francisco. Hi, Barry. You're on. Hey, Mina. Mina, thanks for having this program and thanks for letting me speak.

Mina, I was born and raised in Ireland, and I was born in the 60s. And Ireland was basically a theocracy. The government and the laws of the land were inspired and dominated by the Catholic Church and its teaching. So my mother was pregnant eight times in her life with two miscarriages. I, as a gay person, was persona non grata.

And I wanted to say that I've lived through that and they're not people who push this project. They're not speaking for me and my family, nor are they speaking for the majority of Americans. The last census showed that 47 percent of households were in any way could be described in America as a traditional household.

So whose household are they talking about? If they want to live their life a certain way, they can do it. But I feel so strongly about this. I feel like instead of chest beating, we collectively as American people, we need to stand up, get some balls and actually resist what they're pushing to us. It's not speaking for me. It's not speaking for the majority of Americans. I want to live in a pluralist, progressive, open...

open and accepting society. And I don't want my sisters, I don't want my brothers, I don't want my neighbors to be forced to live in the way my mother was forced to live in a miserable life. So I know I sound strongly about this, but I feel so strongly about this. We need to stand up and resist this crap. They're not speaking for us, and we don't need to bow down and be passive. We need to stand up

and get some balls and actually say, no, who do you think you're talking to, you bully? We don't want to live this way. Well, Barry, thanks for calling in and sharing that. And David, is Barry right? Is this not the way the majority of the country feels, despite the way that we saw the electorate vote based on what you are seeing in your reporting? Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd say a couple things. One is that during the election, there was some polling about Project 2025.

And what it tended to find was that people really didn't like it. If they knew about it, they had a very negative impression. But they also didn't believe that Trump would actually follow through on the policies that were in there. And so I'm curious to see as that kind of reality sinks in how people respond to it if they just simply believed he wouldn't do this.

I think the analogy to Ireland of a few decades ago is a very interesting one. And in some ways, the kind of social conservatism that we hear here is not unusual for the American right. We've been hearing these things from people, George W. Bush going further back. And for that matter, Barack Obama talked a lot about the importance of fatherhood and traditional families.

What sets this apart is the use of the government to coerce these things and the way they want to change the government to make it easier for them to coerce those things, which makes it less of a question of encouraging them and more of forcing people to live in a certain way. You know, there's an attempt to literally write trans people out of the language of the government, not just to revoke rights, but to declare that they don't exist.

Right. So talk about how this is all connected to the attack on trans people and their rights, how they see this as a galvanizing issue for people who would be on their side, the authors of Project 2025. Oh, right. I mean, so, you know, they have this very traditional gender norm idea. And that involves, you know, very traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity and trans people transphobia.

challenge that view. They take anything that is not that as they call it gender ideology. And of course, what they're offering is simply a different sort of ideology. They believe that there's male and there's female. There's nothing in between non-binary people. It's not a thing. They're skeptical of LGBT rights in general. You know, they write that gay marriage is has higher divorce rates, which I don't believe is true. I can't find any evidence to support that claim.

And I think trans rights for them is a little bit of a it's the tip of the spear, because this is something that polling shows Americans are less, less ready to move on. And we saw that Trump was able to use it as an effective wedge issue in the 2024 election. There's a famous, you know, Trump is for you, Kamala is for they, them ad.

And I think this is a way that even though Trump himself is maybe not the best front man for a vision of traditional families, given his own personal life, he also is very willing to speak about taking away trans rights. And so it's a way that they can kind of bind themselves to Trump and find common cause. Yeah. And as you say, what's so interesting.

and why we have to pay attention to this policy paper, which are often written when campaigns are happening, but don't get that much attention is the fact that they have been able to really use the levers of power in the government. Can you just talk about how, you know, the EEOC would play a strong role in essentially, you know, making sure that trans people are sort of driven into hiding? Yeah.

Right. So they want to, you know, they want to, we've already seen an order saying there would be, you know, there's only male and female. And of course, you can, you can, you can't change the way people are, but you can affect the way the government talks.

And then they also want to use bodies like the EEOC to they want to reorient them. So instead of, you know, being concerned about discrimination on the basis of sex, for example, you know, biologic, they wanted only to consider biological sex. They don't want to focus on gender identity and they want to use these bodies instead to fight wokeness. So, for example, by bringing cases of reverse discrimination, it's a little bit of a subversion of the way these departments have long been understood. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, Noel on Discord writes, it's obvious that the Trump administration doesn't want women to advance in schools or workplaces with the proposed elimination of Head Start, not to mention abortion laws. They want to strangle any vestige of successful New Deal and Great Society programs, which the majority of the American public support. Americans have to speak up, protest, and organize like never before. Similarly, another listener on Discord writes, if they want child care to be more available, why are they against Head Start and

And Susan writes, So talk about that a little bit. When you say, you know, that...

And Severino, for example, is saying, oh, we should support families more, right? Parenting more, pay them to be parents and so on and so forth. It's not like he's against any kind of supportive programs or government-based programs, right, for kids like Head Start or even necessarily, you know, programs that would help people who struggle to get child care support at all.

Right. I mean, there's some contradictions inside Project 2025, partly by virtue of the fact that there are a bunch of authors. And although they coalesce around their main points, they sometimes have disagreements about how best to implement them. But I also think that, you know, I'm so glad that the listener brought up Head Start. You know, abolishing Head Start seems to run against these. And it comes down to, you know, that's a government program. They think that these big government programs are a problem and they're instilling the wrong virtue.

So they want there to be childcare, but they want it to be provided either at home or in another setting. Do they want it to be provided through faith-based organizations? Yes. Absolutely. As much as they can, they want things through faith-based organizations. They want to run welfare administration through faith-based programs and encourage fatherhood through those things. There are many ways in which they want to drive things through faith. I mean—

And this even comes down to things like abstinence-only education, which we saw in the George W. Bush administration. It didn't work, and it's being brought back again. And they want to try that again, again through these faith-based orgs. And you said something really interesting before the break, which is that they want to essentially do studies that would support these notions of returning to a more traditional family structure. And so how would they do this?

You know, there's a couple of things. So one is gathering data. So, you know, for example, they want the education department to track student outcomes based on family structure, which, you know, they think would prove that more traditional families will have better outcomes. And I think there's a correlation and causation issue there.

There's a lot of places also where they call for the federal government to fund research, basically with a predetermined goal. So, for example, they want to fund research on the way that abortion harms women. Well, you've already stated what you want your conclusion to be. Then you're just going backwards and looking for the data that you want to do. So it's the use of the federal government where it continues to exist and where they don't lay people off to bolster the ideological aims that they have set out.

And where would they do this in the Department of Labor? Some of this would be Department of Labor. Some of it would be Department of Education. Those are the main ones, a little bit through the Department of Health and Human Services as well. So talk a little bit more about the education goals, right, and how they relate to this idea of returning to work.

a traditional family? Like what specifically, why would vouchers, for example, or why would more faith-based schools or why, you know, why would that lead to this and how would they make sure it does?

You know, in the last few years, we saw this big energy on the right around, quote unquote, parental rights. And typically that means around parental rights to determine what children are learning in schools. And that could be challenging the books in a school library or challenging the curriculum. But at heart, what they want to do is move education out of the basic public school system.

They'd like to see the federal government continue to fund education, but what they want is to give block grants to states, and then states can do whatever they want with that money for education as long as it's legal under state law. So I suspect in a lot of blue states what we'd see is a pretty similar education system, but in red states we would see the diminution and possibly abolition of public schools in favor of more faith-based schools.

or private schools of other varieties. And what that does is it allows people to instill the values they want. So if you want a school that doesn't teach evolution, for example, or if you want a school that is teaching the Bible or that is teaching strict gender roles, you can get that education through another means, but still funded by the government. Do they want to see more homeschooling and supportive homeschooling?

They encourage that where possible, but they're also open to traditional schools as long as they have some more parental rights. I mean, they believe that parental rights should be included on a level with things like the right to bear arms or the right to free speech, although it is, needless to say, not in the Bill of Rights. Yeah, I was just thinking that because it would require a parent at home. That's right. And presumably they'd want that to be the woman. Let me go to Kim in Santa Cruz. Hi, Kim, you're on.

Hi, yes. It's my understanding that the Project 2025 is what's behind it, and it was written by the right-wing Christian nationalist movement, and less than 8% of Americans support that movement.

Kim, thanks. Yeah, David, talk about that and the religious piece of this really not getting that much attention, honestly. Yeah. So there's a guy named Russell Vogt who people may or may not have heard of. He's the head of the Office of Management and Budget, and he held the same role in the first Trump administration where he was the driving force behind the Schedule F civil servant thing that we discussed earlier.

And Vogt is somebody who comes from a very religious background, attended a religious school, and he has talked throughout his career about how faith affects the way he thinks about his job. And he says, you know, I am a Christian nationalist. He says, you know, there are a lot of slurs that the left uses, but this is one that has truth. Like, I believe that we are a Christian nation. I'm a Christian and a nationalist, and I think this should be a Christian nation. And, you know, that is what I am driving toward. And that's an opinion that's shared by a lot of the people in this report, right?

And they see the government as a way to bring about the world that they want. Sue writes, what is the goal? What will our government look like? Our daily life? Is Trump trying to run the country like a corporation with himself as the chair?

It's an interesting analogy. I mean, Trump certainly wants more power for the White House, a little bit more like a corporation. And he's been frustrated by checks and balances by the courts and Congress in the past, obviously. But a lot of these things, I think, are not specifically Trump goals.

And I think the world we would see would be one where people had much, you know, the government was much more direct with them. But in some ways, they couldn't rely on the government as much. We would see Medicaid reduced. We would see reductions in the regulation of health care, pullback from government programs in general, a smaller imprint for education.

And so insofar as the government remained in people's lives, it would be a much lighter touch. It would be mediated through things like churches, and it'd be much more traditional.

You mentioned the project's goals around abortion, but we have not really seen Trump touch that too much. But it's coming. I mean, I imagine he isn't because he saw how politically inconvenient it was for him last time, but to some degree. Right. I think this is one of these interesting places where, you know, Project 2025 has a great deal of overlap with Trump, but they are not always exactly the same.

And the people involved in Project 2025 feel very strongly about banning abortion. For Trump, it seems like it was more of a political tool. And he bragged about appointing justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. But now he's talking about that a lot less, and it seems to be a political calculation.

But I think, you know, this is where it's important to think about things like Project 2025 training staff for the administration. You know, they had a sort of institute where they were identifying, vetting and training people to take positions that are not cabinet level positions, but people lower down the totem pole in jobs you won't have heard of with names you won't have heard of.

And by bringing in people who are true to, you know, they're loyal to Trump, but they're also loyal to the project. I think you're going to have staffers who want to push things like restrictions on abortion, even if it's not the White House's top priority. Yeah. So that's how they would deal with the mercurial, I guess, is the word that's been described to use.

Trump, if he isn't going exactly based on what they'd like to see. Ron writes, what does Project 2025 say about the environment and climate change? I'm glad he asked this because this was another area in your book that I was glad to read more about that I'm not sure has gotten enough attention. Here, it feels like there is a lot more overlap with Trump's views. But anyway, yeah, talk about what Project 2025 has to say about environmental policy.

It's very striking. I think along with the family stuff, it's maybe the most bracing element of the book for me.

There are a bunch of things. I mean, they view a lot of the federal government, whether that's an Interior Department, EPA, a lot of these is they need to be there. They should be rather oriented around encouraging extraction of oil and natural gas. So they see a lot of regulations that get in that way. And they want the Interior Department to focus more than anything, you know, more than on national parks or you name it on resource extraction. They want to reduce regulation on business for a lot of reasons, whether that's pollution,

or, you know, various kinds of pollution, air pollution, water pollution. They want to strike down environmental regulations around climate change. So they don't want research around climate. They don't want to create data around climate. They certainly don't want to fund efforts to fight climate change. They want to privatize NOAA, which tracks weather and turns more of that over to private business, both because there's a sort of

business opportunity and there's an ideological commitment to the private sector, but also because NOAA produces a lot of important climate data and that threatens the agenda. So, you know, across the board, we would just see the end of a great deal of research and regulation and efforts to fight climate change. Jack writes, Trump denied knowledge of Project 2025 during his campaign. Does he still try to claim distance from it and deny using it as his playbook?

You know, it's funny. He did talk about not knowing it and that he said he hadn't read it and he didn't know anything about it. And it may be that he hasn't read it. And this is a 900 page document. I think a lot of people haven't read it. But these are folks who served, you know, including in the cabinet level in his first administration. They're serving there now. Russell Vogt was head of OMB in his first term, then was the chair of his policy committee for the Republican National Convention, and now is back in the administration.

And rather than really saying anything about it, he simply just started hiring people from Project 2025 as soon as he'd won the election and started staffing up. So, you know, they say in Project 2025 that personnel is policy. And I think Trump is living that out by hiring people from Project 2025 to staff his administration. Rick writes, I have multiple disabilities and medical conditions. When I think of Project 2025, I think about how Trump wants to get rid of people like me. Does Rick have a point, David?

You know, there's a tension where I think there are a lot of people in Project 2025 who say that they care a great deal about, for example, people with disabilities, or they say they're very concerned about the black family, which is why they want to push these sort of efforts towards fatherhood. But insofar as they have that, they're not making a government that is designed to help people, help those people. It's designed to enforce the kind of worldview that they would like.

We're talking with David Graham, a staff writer who covers politics and national affairs for The Atlantic, who writes The Atlantic Daily Newsletter, and who's the author of a new book called The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation at 866-733-6786 on our social channels at KQED Forum and at our email address forum at kqed.org.

What questions do you have about what's in Project 2025 that may be new to you? Your reaction to how Project 2025 talks about gender and family and the environment. Stay with us. I'm Mina Kim. 24 chefs, 24 culinary showdowns for 24 hours straight. Which chef will outcook, outpace, outlast the competition?

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour about Project 2025 because of David Graham's new book, The Project, how Project 2025 is reshaping America. We're talking about how it's informed the Trump administration's actions, been mirrored or followed by the administration and to what extent so far, and also to key goals that have gotten less attention, including what Project 2025 says about gender and family. And you, our listeners, are joining the conversation. Let me go to Marcus on the line from San Jose. Hi, Marcus, you're on.

Hi, thank you for having me. I just wanted to comment. I've been a long-time listener of KQED here, and regarding Project 2025, I've read the doctrine, not in full, of course, because it's a very long doctrine, but in particular, the

And the portions of it that are of interest to me and the people within my network are around education and the protection of the nuclear family, which there are some components of Project 2025 that I think many Americans actually align with. For example, when it comes to education...

I think our educational system historically has been on the downturn and then in recent times has been a subject of controversy with regards to gender ideology and things like this. With

Oftentimes, communities of color and other disenfranchised communities already don't have access to quote-unquote good education. If you look at the test scores in many neighborhoods across the nation, schools are doing badly. And then when you put on top of it that teachers, even as young as

are pushing gender ideology on children while keeping parents in the dark. I think this is a bad thing. And for the federal government to come and provide, let's say, solutions, quote-unquote, I think many Americans, particularly parents, actually align with this, where our educational institutions need to be a place where they focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic to ensure that kids receive the education that they need and are able to advance throughout their life.

obtain good careers and become stewards of society. Marcus, thanks. I really appreciate that because, David, you have talked about this, how Project 25 does bring up aspects of, you know, issues that we are experiencing as a country where people broadly share agreement that there are problems and want to see solutions. So what do you think people should keep in mind when they're reading this document and finding things in it that they align with?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. You know, there are a lot of places where I think the, you know, I want to separate the diagnosis and the prescription. And often the diagnoses in Project 2025 are very persuasive.

The American education system has real problems. Test scores are down. People are disappointed in their systems all over the place. And the question is whether the suggestions that Project 2025 brings in would actually make things better. So, for example, if we look at charter schools, we see really uneven data on charter school outcomes.

achievement compared to public schools. In many places, it's worse. You have inconsistent education in a lot of private schools. So are these, you know, if we move to a system where the federal government block grants money for education and the states have less control over public education, are we going to solve those problems or not? And I think, you know, there are places where it may improve things, but by and large,

It does not strike me as likely to get what people want. But it's clear, like, you know, I mean, to Marcus's point, there's a concern from a lot of parents about they want parental rights. They want to know what's going on in the classroom. They feel like that's being kept from them. And that's one reason there's been support for Trump and for things like Project 2025. Russ writes, if the majority of Americans are against these plans, why are the Democrats so inept at taking advantage of that? There seems to be a disconnect between

between what the majority wants and what the Democrats have on offer. Do you want to try that, David? Well, I mean, it's striking to me that although you often get partisans saying that the other side has secret plans, in this case, the authors of Project 2025 wrote their plans down in a 922-page document and put it online 18 months before the election.

They weren't exactly hiding it. And yet Democrats do seem to be caught very flat footed, even though this is written down. I don't think they're looking ahead and looking what's in here and using it to guide Democrats.

their actions. During the 2024 campaign, they succeeded in making it the talk of the presidential election for a while. And people may remember images of the sort of oversized book version of Project 2025 that they were wielding at the Democratic National Convention. But I think they treated it as a traditional wish list. You know, here are a bunch of policies that we think Americans will dislike.

And we can talk about those things and get attention. I don't think they've appreciated how much there's a plan for implementation. And I think they have sort of forgotten about it since it faded from the campaign trail. Well, a listener on Blue Sky writes, what makes the Project 2025 people think this will work? Theocracies have been tried and failed. They don't work because people don't want to be oppressed. Mike writes, will it be possible to tie up these efforts in court until the end of this administration? Or will it be possible to reverse the actions if not?

I think those questions are actually a little bit related. Some of these things have been challenged in court, some of them successfully and some of them not, and some of them still ongoing. But I think even if you're able to challenge some of these things and turn them back, many of them are going to be a little bit more permanent. People are leaving the federal government and they're not going to come back. They're going to move on to other jobs. And so you're going to lose expertise and you're going to lose people. You're going to have smaller departments.

And you're going to, you know, their programs that once shut down take a long time to ramp back up. So it's not going to be the same federal government that the next president will not inherit the same federal government that that Trump did on January 20th.

And that's one reason why that's one thing I think is important about the structure. It's true that people may not respond well to a theocracy. It may be that people don't like that. But they see a way to restructure the government in general and in a long term way, not as a simple, you know, four to eight year situation, but as a generational project.

Which kind of relates to Kurt's question, which says almost everything advanced by the Trump administration has been through executive orders, which end or can be reversed by the next administration. What does this say about the 2025's author's long term plans? Will they push for Congress to pass laws within the two years they have left? So, yeah, you're saying it's it's a long game. But, you know, the executive orders piece of it suggests that.

You know, it's a hard game, I guess. Right. Even though those executive orders can be reversed, I think it's, you know, it's one thing to change an executive order that's, for example, guidance on how the education department should interpret Title IX. It's another thing if you end up losing thousands or tens of thousands of workers from the federal workforce. You can't bounce that back in the same way. So what could mess this up for us?

Project 2025 and their and their authors and inventors and so on. We talked a little bit about how President Trump himself could be hard because his approach to policy is tends to be less ideological and much more focused on himself and on political convenience, I think is the way that you described it as well. I'm also wondering about the president's partnership with Elon Musk, right? Because he is all about reducing the workforce. And I'm not sure it's all it's about bringing people together.

people back, for example. Right. I mean, just as the Project 2025 people, I think, have viewed Trump as a vessel to achieve the things that they want. They're also treating Elon in that way. You know, he was not envisioned by the plan, but he's been working closely with Russ Vogt and he's achieving a lot of the reductions in the federal workforce that they wanted.

Now, I think there are going to be places where there are conflicts. So, for example, if you want the Department of Health and Human Services to track a lot more statistics about people and outcomes, you have to have people working there. You have to have competent people working there. And instead, we see this kind of meat cleaver approach. That's going to make it more challenging to do some of these things.

I think Trump's attention span is a problem. You know, Trump has historically had a strong eye and close eye close on the on his approval ratings and how voters feel. If he continues to operate that way, you can imagine him going back.

I think the other thing is the economy. You know, Project 2025 is not decided on tariffs. In fact, there's a debate within about whether tariffs are a good idea. But it's clear that Trump is pro-tariff. And if, you know, Trump's economic policies cause a recession, it's going to set everything else back and it's going to make it hard for these folks to do any of the other things they want.

How much do the ideological conflicts that you're sort of finding within the document you think could set it back? Or do you think they're just small things they could probably get over for the broader goals? I think the economic questions are really big. And in some ways, they're a little bit secondary. They haven't resolved all of these questions. You know, they haven't really laid out. They don't say barely anything about Social Security, which is a major expense. They say they want to cut Medicaid, but they don't say by how much. They have this disagreement about tariffs.

They don't really have any plan for fighting inflation, which obviously is a major topic in the election. And so that's a place where there's disagreements and instability. And I think that is a problem. In other places, they're more about implementation. They know that they want to create a sort of pro-natalist society, but they have disagreements about the best way to achieve that. So I think those could be interesting conflicts, but they're less likely to derail the whole project.

Where are they on sort of Trump's goals for retribution? Or maybe a better question is, you know, what role do they see for the Department of Justice?

They have a lot of interesting ways for how to create presidential power, and that is using the Department of Justice as a tool of retribution and putting it directly under the control of the president in a way it traditionally hasn't been. Using the Office of Management and Budget, which Russ Vogt says is like the president's air traffic controller, to push more priorities within the agencies. These are all things that—and obviously bringing in more political appointees. These are not explicitly—

designed as ways to get retribution, but they're places where they achieve the increase in presidential power that they want, and they give Trump avenues toward retribution. They also complain a lot about politicization in the executive branch. So they talk about the Justice Department being politicized, or the FBI being politicized, or the State Department or USAID. And I think it's interesting. Really what they seem to want is for these departments to be politicized in the other direction. It's not so much that they want to remove politics. They just want a different kind of politics.

Tom writes, these are no Christians. They're ignoring Pope Francis's teachings to prioritize the well-being of the infirm and the injured, the migrant and the refugee. Of course, Pope Francis passed. Martha wants to know, does Project 2025 take a stand on divorce? It is. They are not fond of divorce, but they don't advocate, for example, a federal ban on divorce.

I mean, to the question of the prior comment about, you know, the pope, there's a there's a lot of theological justification. You know, Russell Vogt has talked, for example, about the idea that, you know, there are teachings in the Bible. You should take care of your neighbors who are closest to you. And if we're not closing the borders, we're not concentrating on our neighbors. We need to deal with Americans first. Right.

This is something that a lot of theologians have a lot of issues with and a lot of denominations have issues with. But they have thought a lot about the theological groundings for the things they say, certainly. Let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Let me go to Dave in San Francisco. Hi, Dave. Thanks for waiting. You're on.

How are you doing? Yeah, it seems pretty clear to me that this Project 2025 is really just ultimately about control. It's a bunch of religious zealotry held bent on control. Dave, thanks. I think you have others who agree with you. Based on the comments that I'm seeing coming in, let me go to Barbara in San Francisco next. Hi, Barbara, you're on.

Hello, thank you. They definitely didn't reveal during the election what Donald J. Trump and this group wanted to do, and that was very sneaky. But along with that, I'm very concerned that they want to go back into the model of keeping women barefoot in the winter, pregnant in the summer.

uh... going back to the nineteen fifties and before and during those times women were abused very abused in the household uh... i'm i'm i'm very very concerned about them having blatantly unqualified people put in high positions the only qualification for them for federal jobs for example and everything else if loyalty it's loyalty

to what they want to do. The other thing is I've noticed they're into book burning in terms of trying to blot out history. And, of course, free speech being muzzled at the university is just the start. So I am, in closing, I am gravely concerned about what's happening. Barbara, thanks. How accurate do you think Barbara's assessment is, David?

Well, I think that's true. I mean, there's a real concern. There's a real goal to have people who are chosen on their political qualifications. And I think, you know, it's worth asking, do you want the person who's looking at your taxes or assessing your Social Security account or, you know, any number of things? Do you want that person chosen on the basis of their expertise or do you want them chosen on the basis of what candidate they have supported?

You know, even if people have complaints about the federal bureaucracy and, you know, many, many people have their complaints about the federal government. Is this going to make things better or is it going to make things worse? You know, I think there's a lot of reason to expect that more politicization would make things worse for the same reasons that the authors are clear about, you know, how politicization of other branches has been bad for the government.

Well, Casey on Discord wants to know, aside from the more obvious impacts of programs primarily funded by the federal government, where do state governments fit into Project 2025? I love this question. You know, there's an attempt, I guess, to use red state governments to move forward the goals they want. So, for example, religious schooling. But they also are perfectly willing to use a kind of stick approach for other governments.

If governments do not cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security, for example, if they give driver's licenses or in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants, then they want to withdraw federal funds for education. They want to withdraw federal assistance for law enforcement. They want to withdraw federal assistance for disaster relief. So all of these strings attached in order to make sure that state governments are cooperating with the agenda on issues like immigration.

Besides the state governments and certain state governments, the electorate could certainly make things harder. But I'm seeing people, you know, writing in who are saying essentially that, I mean, you made the assessment that you think that, yes, the majority of the country doesn't want this. We have others saying that they believe that the majority of the country actually does want this. Do you, you know, who do you think is right in this instance?

You know, there is clearly a large portion of the electorate that does want parts of this. Trump consistently has a high base of support. Many of these people agree with these goals. Also, you know, as the callers today have generally demonstrated, there are a lot of people who feel really passionately about it.

And they are opposed. I do think that there is a lot of evidence that people are going to be upset about particular aspects of this policy. But there are also things that people will go in for. I think it's really conflicted. And I think that the difference will come in how it affects people's everyday lives in the one, three, five year time frame. Art writes, does Project 2025 have anything in it that directly or indirectly limits freedom of speech or freedom of assembly?

I think in a lot of ways they would inhibit freedom of speech. And it's through a little bit roundabout measures. So, for example, they want to threaten the broadcast licenses of news broadcasters who broadcast things they don't like. They want to make it harder for companies to do things like ESG, environmental social governance. They want the government to sort of crack down on companies that have done that. So that is a way for the federal government to...

to inflict its desires on these private companies. The same goes for regulation of social media. You may have complaints about Facebook or X, how they've handled free speech issues, but I don't see how putting the government in charge of that and forcing people to speak in certain ways is more of a free speech solution. I think that's very much a problem with some of the arguments in Project 2025. So we have talked about how there's been less attention to the sort of

key goals of Project 285 related to the family and gender and so on. Will we see something more explicit around this coming next from the administration, in your view?

I don't know if it will be the next thing because there are so many things. And I feel like every day I wake up and there's some new headline like, oh, yeah, well, that was and I forgot that line was in there, too. But I think it is because it is such a deeply held view for many of the people who wrote this and who are now staffing the federal government. It is something that we are going to see and will happen slowly, but it's going to affect our lives and it's important to be watching for.

David Graham. His book is The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America, a staff writer at The Atlantic who writes The Atlantic Daily Newsletter. Always glad to have you on, David. Thanks so much. Oh, it's my pleasure. And thank you, listeners, for your questions and comments and nuance. And thank you, Caroline Smith, for producing today's segment. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Nina Kim.

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