We got a pretty clear heads up about what Trump 2.0 could portend for so many facets of American life. The Mandate for Leadership, also known as Project 2025, is perhaps the clearest compilation of goals for Trump’s second term. Now that 100 days have passed of the second Trump administration, we thought it would be a good time to see where things stand. David Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.” He joins WITHpod to discuss what has already been done, what’s been most surprising, how he sees the plans playing out and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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David Graham: When they embarked on Project 2025, it was not just the policies, but it was this attempt to train people to fill these roles in government that are not visible. So political appointments that are not Senate confirmed, that are not, you know, titles anyone knows of or names anyone knows of, but who can get into there and slowly work the regulatory machinery. And that’s in many departments. I think that’s true also in HHS, where they need to get their people in, they need to get their people hired, and then those folks will start moving on the slow-moving stuff. They have to get the power first. They have to get the staffing, then comes policy later on.
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Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to Why Is This Happening? With me, your host, Chris Hayes. You know, something we’ve been doing on the television show I host, All In with Chris Hayes, 8 p.m., Tuesday to Friday, MSNBC, we’ve been doing this kind of recurring theme I’ve been thinking about called, like, who voted for this, where we take something that DOGE has done, usually DOGE, or not DOGE, someone has done in the Trump administration, that just seems like the least popular thing a person could do. Like, they canceled this huge women’s health study that had been going on for thirty years. It studied women’s menopausal health. They’ve been canceling, like, contracts for, like, veterans groups. They canceled a program where the USDA, like, pays farmers to grow crops that they then give to food banks and schools. There’s all these things that are just kind of deep in the bowels of the administrative state that are just, they’re not culture war stuff. It’s not, like, it’s not deportation. It’s not trans swimmers. It’s not tax cuts for the rich. It’s stuff that wasn’t really the subject of the campaign. Like, it wasn’t a thing people were like, I’m going to vote to really, really stick it to Alzheimer’s research. Like, we need to tell these Alzheimer’s researchers it’s time to get off the goddamn gravy train and get to work. Like, I was there. I covered the campaign. That was not the campaign.
And yet, so. at some level, no one voted for it. But a lot of what’s happening to the way the federal government functions was actually kind of written down in this thing you might recall called Project 2025. It attracted a ton of attention during the campaign. It was polling at one point worse than Hamas in American public opinion, and that was partly because of the kind of viral idea that there was this conspiratorial blueprint that had this ominous sounding name, but also because a lot of the stuff in it was really unpopular. For instance, getting rid of the Department of Education, which pulled way underwater. And when this kind of surfaced in the campaign and the Harris campaign, you know, said, look, this is Donald Trump’s blueprint. The people running this are connected to Donald Trump. Russ Vought, who’s kind of the guy overseeing it is like one of his big lieutenants. He’s probably going to be in the administration. There was this concerted effort to be like, oh, I’ve never heard of it. Nothing to do with it. Even though it was preposterous on its face, but it kind of worked. They did successfully, to a certain extent, distance themselves from it.
And then after they won the campaign, it was like, oh, yes, we’re doing project 2025, and they have been doing Project 2025. And, actually, this is one of those rare kind of blueprints that’s really useful to go back to after the fact because it does serve as a guide.
For instance, when I started to see that they were attacking the entire infrastructure of American scientific research and university funding, I was like, where did they get this cockamamie idea? Well, it turns out it’s in Project 2025. Exactly what they’re doing was in Project 2025. But because this stuff is technical and bureaucratic and sort of below the surface, they kind of hid it out in the open in a weird way, and now we’re all living with the consequences.
Well, it turns out that a lot of people have been writing and reporting about Project 2025, and one person, my guest today, actually wrote a book about it. It’s called “The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America.” David Graham, probably familiar to a lot of the listeners of the pod, who’s a staff writer at Atlantic, someone I’ve been reading for a very long time, and has expertise that is extremely useful in this moment. So, David, welcome to the program.
David Graham: Thank you for having me.
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Chris Hayes: What first got you on the Project 2025 beat?
David Graham: You know, I was trying to remember when I first heard about it. I think it was in 2023 when they initially published the big plan online, and I remember it being a big issue in 2024. And I feel like even then, I was dipping into it and reading bits and pieces as they applied to particular policies that, you know, what was it, whatever I was writing about or whatever was in the news. And I thought I had a good handle on it, and it was really only, I’m somewhat ashamed to admit, after the election that I sat down and read the whole thing start to finish. And I feel like it gave me a new appreciation for what a complete plan it is, like, how systematic and how methodical they are, rather than the kind of, I mean, we get wish lists of policy proposals every four years.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
David Graham: And this isn’t just, I mean, I think it’s how it was discussed in the campaign, and it’s how I understood it. And it’s just so much more than that.
Chris Hayes: What is it then?
David Graham: It is both a wish list of policy proposals but also a scheme for how to make it happen. So they had thought really deeply about what the levers were they needed to pull and how they needed to, for example, seize control of the executive branch, get rid of civil servants, make them political appointees, take over independent regulatory agencies. All these things that were essential to getting the policies done, they had thought through, and they had spent time with the government to learn how the government worked so they could do that.
Chris Hayes: Who’s the they in this?
David Graham: Well, there are about 70 named contributors to Mandate for Leadership, which is the major document, and they come from across the sort of MAGA big tent, MAGA curious, big tent of the right. I think the most important people I think of are Kevin Roberts, who’s the head of the Heritage Foundation, Paul Dans, who worked in the first Trump administration and was really organizer for Project 2025, and then Russ Vought, who was the head of OMB in the first Trump administration and, of course, is back as head of OMB now, wrote one of the major chapters and is kind of the intellectual eminence grease behind all this.
Chris Hayes: If you had to describe Vought’s theory of the executive and the federal government, because it does seem to me like a fairly thought out theory. I don’t think Donald Trump has a theory other than I should be the dictator and everything I say goes. I mean, I really think he thinks that. He talks about how much he loves Kim Jong-il’s relationship with his people. Like, that’s his model. He’s said this many times. He wants to be, he says he’s called himself a king. He wants to be a monarch or an absolute ruler. So he’s got a very simple and, I think, feral and intuitive sense of what he wants. Vought has something, I think, a bit more sophisticated.
Tell me a little bit about who Russ Vought is, what his experience is that created him in this moment, and what his theory is.
David Graham: Vought is a long time operator. He worked for Phil Gramm in the eighties. He worked for Jeb Hensarling, another Gramm alum. So, he’s in this kind of fiscal conservative world. And then he worked for the Heritage Foundation. He’s very Christian. He went to Wheaton, and he has this idea that America is a Christian nation. He wants to sort of refract all of his political view through that Christian worldview and perspective. I think the approach to the executive branch that he takes is, although a lot more sophisticated than Trump’s, it matches up very closely or it ends up in the same place. You know, he complains, I think, convincingly that Congress is a mess and has yielded way too much power to the executive branch and isn’t doing its job. But what’s weird is then his answer is to grab more power for the executive branch.
And he thinks, for example, that having a civil service that doesn’t report to the president is a constitutional abomination. Because they’re in the executive branch, they ought to report to him. By the same token, he thinks that independent regulatory agencies like the FCC or the FTC should report to the president, and there’s no reason why Congress should be able to set up a law that puts them outside of Trump’s purview. So he wants to give power to Trump just as Trump wants to get it, and that means they work together really well.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I kind of, we used to call this in the Dick Cheney days unitary executive, which is the idea that, you know, the Constitution enumerates three branches, Article 2 is the executive branch, and that, ergo, you know, the president can personally, like, appoint the meat inspector at your local factory. And not only that, but it would be fine if he put the meat inspector in because that person was a loyalist who had been a truck driver the day before or a plastic surgeon, or whatever, and that person is now going to be the meat inspector on the line. And that was, in some ways, how the federal government operated, particularly in the Postal Service, how the Postal Service operated for a lot of presidents until we had the big civil service reforms of the late 19th century, which happened for a reason, which is that.
David Graham: Right.
Chris Hayes: Right? I mean, if you allow the president to individually appoint these patronage jobs, you get a government that’s quite corrupt.
David Graham: Right. And, you know, they acknowledge that. They say, you know, we understand why the civil service was created. It was well intentioned. But look, it just hasn’t worked out. You know, we’ve got these people. Basically, they’re too liberal.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Graham: And they’re not working along with the president. They’re not doing what we want to say, and so we need to go back to another system. And, yes, these people should be appointed on the basis of political loyalty. That’s what we need to do to get the federal government sort of moving all in the same direction.
Chris Hayes: We should also note that this idea of independent agencies is the source of a lot of constitutional debate through the years and, you know, was a big fight in the New Deal where a lot of these were created that the Supreme Court ultimately said, no, this is constitutional. I mean, starting with the Federal Reserve.
I mean, it’s very hard to square Vought’s theory of this, which is going to come before the Supreme Court in a bunch of cases where they have just moved to fire people in these independent agencies that they don’t have the power to fire. They’re saying the Constitution basically says these can’t be independent even though the Supreme Court has said they have been for 80 years. And that seems like a huge part of the Project 2025 vision and the Vought vision.
David Graham: Yes. They say over you know, repeatedly in the document, look, Humphrey’s Executor, which is the 1935 case that established that these agencies are constitutional, was wrongly decided. We need to challenge it. We think the Supreme Court will come down on our side when we challenge it, so the trick is getting the right case before them.
Chris Hayes: Yes. They view Humphrey’s as Roe, basically.
David Graham: Right. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, it’s precedent. The court was wrong, and we can count to five to get rid of it.
David Graham: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Why does that matter to them?
David Graham: I mean, because they do things that Trump doesn’t want, basically. I mean, I think it’s a little bit more sophisticated than that. But we saw in the first term where Trump felt like he wanted to use, for example, he wanted to use the FCC to punish broadcasters. He wanted to pull broadcast licenses from people, and he kept talking about that. But the FCC wasn’t going to do that. And now he has an FCC commissioner who wants to do that and who is very much on the team and who, in fact, wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025. So there’s all these places where, if they want to change American life in the way they want to, they need full control. And that’s the thing, is they have thought about how almost any department and agency can be part of the plan. So, when they talk about, you know, implementing a really Christian vision of the family, for example, they see a role for the labor department, for the education department, for the Health and Human Services department, for HUD. All of these things come together and work towards that vision.
Chris Hayes: How much have the first one hundred days matched the blueprint in Project 2025?
David Graham: I think directionally a ton, even maybe more than I expected, which is a little weird having written the book. You know, what has been different is Musk. They didn’t account for Musk, and they had, you know, worked up plans for how they could do a lot of these things, like Schedule F, which we heard a lot about at the end of the first Trump administration and then again in ‘23, ‘24. And we haven’t heard as much about it, although it is now moving forward as well, because just Musk came in and fired all these people and sort of used the bulldozer.
Chris Hayes: They just didn’t go through, I mean, what’s so crazy about the Musk thing is that they just decided to break the law in every direction all the time for three months straight. And it’s hard to say yet whether it worked or not, but it was much more just like Musk treating everything like there were no laws, there were no regulations, like, I can have whatever data I want. I can fire whoever I want. It’s like, no. There’s laws that say you can’t fire these people. There’s laws that say you can’t have this data. There’s a hundred plus lawsuits, I think, at this point, I don’t know, somewhere around that number, you know, around all these issues, much of it has been stymied in the courts. But I guess that was the like, it’s kind of funny to write this whole blueprint that’s about, like, leveraging the law and then just have Musk come in and be like, I don’t care.
David Graham: Totally. And I thought at the beginning of the term that that might be a conflict. But I think that what Vought realized is that in the same way that, to some extent, he has hijacked Trump as a, you know, means to his end, he could hijack Musk. And so, he sort of, pointed Musk at things. And sometimes Musk went further than they wanted, and Musk is laying off people who they really would have liked to have had around to do the things they wanted to do. And Musk did things that are going to get tossed out in court. But he got enough done for them that it moved them a long way along the sort of civil service side of that. And then, of course, they’ve been, you know, trying to close the education department, and they’ve been issuing executive orders that match up really closely with things laid out in Project 2025. So, a lot of the other parts of the agenda are also falling right there.
Chris Hayes: Does the Project 2025, it’s been a while since I looked at the education portion. Do they acknowledge you need statutory authority to close the department? That it’s been created by Congress, it has funds appropriated by Congress, and you can’t close it with an executive order.
David Graham: Yes. They do. And there are a bunch of these places where they —
Chris Hayes: That’s the thing. Like, that document is a more lawful document than the version —
David Graham: Totally.
Chris Hayes: — that they have gone with.
David Graham: Yes. I mean, that’s what I mean about these guys being insiders. Like, they’ve thought about it. They understood that what they were doing was really radical, but they also wanted to have a plan for it. Although, I mean, this is one of these places where they’re like, yes, Congress will have to pass legislation doing this. But, you know, they’ll do that. They don’t really explain how to get there, which I think is shortsighted.
Chris Hayes: Well, but here’s what I, here’s my understanding of this of the problem that a lot of Project 2025 is solving for and that Russ Vought is solving for. So they say they’re solving for the problem of an unaccountable deep state bureaucracy that that is extra constitutional and not responsive to the president of the United States.
I think in a lot of cases, what they’re responding to is they don’t like what democratic results have produced. I think this is particularly true in the realm of Congress and spending. So Vought comes from the Phil Gramm, Jeb Hensarling, like this kind of, quote, unquote, fiscal conservative, we want to cut social spending wing. We don’t and it’s hard to cut social spending because Congress is the power of the purse. Congressional representatives get lobbied by people who don’t want them to cut that funding, and that could be all sorts of things. It’s grants to universities when the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa is the largest employer for Alabama. So, like, are the two Republican senators from Alabama going to vote to cut a ton of money to Tuscaloosa? No. So then maybe if you just do it unilaterally, you can do it. And this comes back to this impoundment idea, which to me is kind of one of the central fights here. So, talk about empowerment and talk about Vought and talk about how empowerment is discussed in Project 2025.
David Graham: Yes. So, empowerment is, you know, simply the president doesn’t spend all the money that Congress has appropriated. And for a long time, that was something that was legal. And then finally, in 1974, Congress, after several fights with Nixon, got pissed and passed a law saying the president couldn’t do that. And Vought and his crew think that that is unconstitutional. This is another one they want to challenge. And we saw Trump try to impound funds, you know, in the case of his first impeachment, which, you know, became talked about as a, like, political, you know, use of the presidency to get the Biden sort of thing, which was true. But it was also an impoundment scandal where they tried to hold back funds that Congress had appropriated. And now they want to do that again and, you know, treat what Congress appropriates as a floor rather than a ceiling or ceiling rather than a floor. Excuse me. And so they’re like, if we don’t want to spend on those things, we won’t do them. So they really want to hijack the power of the purse is the long and short of it.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And only in one direction. Right?
David Graham: Right.
Chris Hayes: So, like, what’s so brilliant about this as a kind of, as it’s like Supreme Court jurisprudence that’s constantly finding that, like, the real power rests in state legislatures. Because, like, oh, lo and behold, that’s where Republicans are, you know, in these states. It’s like, oh, you can’t spend more than Congress has appropriated. But if Congress appropriates $10 billion to stop children dying of AIDS in Africa, you can spend $0.
David Graham: Right. Exactly. The other thing about their spending and I think this is a place where you can see how they’ve given over to Trump and Vought in particular, I guess. You know, Vought comes from this very entitlement cut sort of background. In Project 2025, they acknowledge that you can’t, they say they want to balance the federal budget. They acknowledge you can’t balance the federal budget without either cutting Social Security and Medicare or else raising taxes. But they don’t actually say they’re going to do either of those things. They don’t make that proposal because they know Trump won’t go along with it. And they know it’s politically toxic. So, they’re willing to acknowledge it there. They just don’t really offer any scheme out, but they want to cut all these other things. And, of course, they want to cut Medicaid. They want to cut things that are services to poor people but not services to the people who they see as on their side.
Chris Hayes: The impoundment fight is one that I knew we were going to get because Russ Vought has been vocal about this. It’s in Project 2025. We’ve gotten it more dramatically than I’ve ever seen. I mean, they have just unilaterally cut a bunch of stuff. Some of it’s being challenged in court. It’s crazy to me how much them doing it has kind of reset a default that they can. Is that surprising to you? Like, again, the kind of Musk angle of this.
David Graham: I mean, Congress has to say something, and I think they correctly calculated that Congress was unwilling to stop Trump. They said that this plan was for the next conservative president. It didn’t matter who it was going to be. But it’s hard to imagine anybody who would be willing to keep Congress from saying boo about all these prerogatives that are just being totally trampled over.
Chris Hayes: The other big area. So impoundment is an area where you saw the fight coming. They’re having the fight now. They’re trying it more aggressively than maybe I would have guessed. I mean, like, the dismantling USAID or cutting off PEPFAR. Was that in, were they like, we’re going to take all the AIDS drugs away from children across the world? Was that in Project 2025?
David Graham: No. I mean, their view of USAID is that it should be, you know, it’s too squishy. The Liberals are using it for all this sort of soft humanitarian nonsense, and we need to use it as a tool of American policy, but not get rid of it. They want it as an instrument.
Chris Hayes: So that stuff, you know, the empowerment fight, I sort of saw coming. The thing that has really blindsided me, and I’d like to spend a little time on, is the grants and the sort of attacks on universities, but specifically ripping out the infrastructure of American federal research funding. I didn’t realize a lot of that was in Project 2025 until they started doing it. But it is in there. Talk a little bit about what’s in there and how much it matches what they’re doing.
David Graham: I say what they’re doing is it connects closely to what they have, and it’s been done on a much grander scale. A little bit like the Musk stuff, where they let out a plan for it, and they’ve just gone way beyond that. But, you know, there’s an antipathy towards universities, obviously, and this belief that the system is giving them all this money, and they’re churning out Marxists. And we need to slim it down. We need to take all this money, all this overhead money they’re using, and shift it into, for example, vocational education. So, you’re already going after the universities. And then, more generally, there’s a hatred of research, again, because it produces these kind of liberal outcomes. So, they want to, you know, demolish almost all of the climate change research, for example. Whether that’s federal or funded by the federal government elsewhere, they want it all to go away.
Chris Hayes: Okay. But the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, like, this has been shocking to me. So, there’s a few things they’ve done that I think it’s worth being sort of more specific. Talk a little bit about the overhead part of this. Right? Because a big part of what they’ve done, and this is the part that they do enunciate in Project 2025, is making what is a seemingly technical tweak.
David Graham: Right.
Chris Hayes: To federal grants that ends up essentially eviscerating the entire finances of any research institution.
David Graham: Yes. So, many of these grants require well, when the university put in the grants, they ask for some sort of overhead, which funds all kinds of things, the infrastructure behind this. It funds the labs. It funds the ability of the schools to employ the people who do the work. So it is funding the work, but it’s not funding only the work. And they look at this and they say, look at this huge number that isn’t even going to this research that these people say they’re doing. We’re going to cut that off, and we’ll give them the money they want to do for the research. And I think it’s clever in a devious way because you can’t do the research that way, but nobody wants, you know, for the general public, I think it’s very easy to demagogue this because it looks like you’re just throwing soft money at universities to do who knows what.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I mean, but it’s also the case that this overhead percentage the universities take as the means of, and this is not to say there is not fat to trim in universities. Any adjunct working near minimum wage will point their finger at lots of things, including the enormous growth of administrators in the modern university, that they that they think can be trimmed. So I am not saying, I’m not defending in total the status quo of university, finances. But, fundamentally, the U.S. does spend more on this on research than almost than I think any other country. And the kind of social contract has been the federal government moves this money through universities, particularly big R1 research institutions. They get grants in the federal government for a drug trial or whatever sort of, you know, biomedical research they’re doing. They take a cut which is goes to the university’s, you know, building of buildings and all the other sort of.
David Graham: Yes. You need labs. You need all those things.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. And my understanding is, like, what they are now doing represents the most drastic cut to American science and biomedical research we’ve seen. Is that your understanding?
David Graham: Yes. Totally. Yes. It’s, like, an epical, existential event for universities. And it totally tear, I mean, this is an understanding. You can say that maybe universities ought to limit their overhead, but this is a system that’s been in place for decades. And if you try to change it overnight, which is more or less what they’ve done, what you’re doing is just cutting off the research.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I understand why they want, like, they want to get rid of all climate research. I even understand that they’ve, like, kind of negatively polarized themselves into, like, being skeptical of the germ theory of disease or whatever crazy nonsense they’ve ended up with about they don’t like public health because they hate Anthony Fauci. But, like, it is crazy to attack the foundation of American science and biomedical research. Like, I have talked —
David Graham: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — personally to people that work on cancer and Alzheimer’s who are like, we are not going to work be able to do our work on cancer and Alzheimer’s. Is that present like, that animus, which I think, a, the general public didn’t know during the campaign, b, seems, like, weird to me even politically. Like, it didn’t peg them as having antipathy towards cancer researchers. Is that present in the document, and how do you understand do they know what they’re doing? Why are they doing it?
David Graham: No. I think that this is one of these places where they didn’t reckon with how huge the effects would be.
Chris Hayes: Okay.
David Graham: So, they saw an easy target and went after it. But I also think I mean, I know we’re talking about cancer and Alzheimer’s stuff. I don’t think you can discount how much COVID hangover there is. I mean, just in in the mentality. They’re so freaked out by COVID. They’re so freaked out by things like the CDC closing churches, which has, like, clearly impacted their psyche really deeply. And it has manifested as an antipathy towards all kinds of medical research. They are convinced that these people are doing something, and they’re out to get us.
Chris Hayes: Yes. So this idea that, like, right, the medical establishment is woke and it’s all, like, devious Faucis that want to, I don’t know, you know, close churches and prevent you from knowing the secret horse to warmer solution to all your problems. Like, it’s just wild. I’ve seen a few open letters from scientists at American universities who are basically like, I’m a conservative or I’m a Republican or, like, I hate the campus Marxist too, and, like, I don’t like the culture of universities, but, guys, you are killing the goose that is laying the golden egg.
And I just continue to be astounded by how freaked out everyone in that world is about this. And how little it seems to have landed in the public consciousness and how unperturbed the Trump administration seems to be by it.
David Graham: Yes. I don’t understand why it hasn’t landed more in the public, and I think maybe it’s just it takes too long or, you know, it will take too long before people understand it. You know, I think for the Trump people, they see this and they’re like, it’s great, it’s working. Like, those people are freaked out, clearly, what we’re doing is right. I mean, you can imagine Stephen Miller sort of cackling at each one of those open letters, and tenting his fingers, and seeing things proceeding according to his plan.
Chris Hayes: That’s the first time we’ve mentioned Miller, who I think, from all the reporting I’ve seen on the White House and from people I’ve spoken to, really does seem, even more than Musk in some ways, I mean, there are certain things that Musk is allowed to kind of rush out on, but on certain things, it really seems like Stephen Miller is the president.
David Graham: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like and when you ask Donald Trump certain things, he’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know. But it’s basically, someone told me this was fine or I’m not a lawyer. It’s like, wait a second. You’re not allowed to say I’m not a lawyer when you get asked about the policies of your administration, but he does say it.
David Graham: Right.
Chris Hayes: How much does Miller intersect with this, and how much does Project 2025 channel a similar tendency to Miller or is in contrast or intention with it?
David Graham: I think they’re generally fellow travelers with some differences. You know, Miller is not a Christian, and this is an extremely Christian worldview. I mean, it’s so much about Christianity.
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting.
David Graham: And they make allowances for other faith traditions, but they’re very Christian, and they phrase it in those ways very much. And although Miller spent a lot of time in the government now and seems to be learning some more about things you know, we saw this even in family separation, he doesn’t understand how the government works nearly on the level that Russ Vought does. But they can work together too, because what Vought is all about is how to operationalize all these things and how to make OMB into a command center to do whatever it is the White House wants to do. And so, they seem to have reached a way to work together and to accommodate each other’s ideas.
Chris Hayes: Talk about the Office of Management and Budget, what it is and why it is a useful command center. It’s one of these sort of obscure agencies. It’s interesting because it has to be Senate confirmed, so it’s, like, sort of a cabinet position, but it’s not its own, it’s not like Department of Veterans Affairs or something like that.
David Graham: Right. And it’s one of the, you know, the people who have run OMB in the past tend to be really capable political operators who are really smart, but not the people who are going to be in the spotlight. And if they are, it’s usually because something has gone very wrong.
And Vought, I think, is in a way in that tradition. He’s very smart, and he doesn’t seek attention for himself. But he describes it as being like the air traffic control agency for the White House. You know, they deal with the budget every year, obviously, but they also deal with all the management. They deal with personnel, so they can change personnel policies. They can fire people. And his critique is that in the past, presidents have, one, not really paid attention to OMB or, two, allowed the departments and agencies to kind of push their priorities up towards the White House through it. And he’s like, that’s the wrong way around. We need to be pushing these things down to the departments.
And so, you see Vought issuing orders through OMB that are really unusual. Like, the one that sticks out as he sends this memo to CFPB employees in the first weeks being like, you can keep coming to work, but don’t do anything. And that’s a really weird thing for the OMB chief to do.
Chris Hayes: Yes. This point, to me, points to a central inversion that’s happened in this administration unlike any I’ve ever seen having covered some administrations and also been fairly close to one in the Obama administration, my wife worked in the White House counsel’s office, it’s not that these the cabinet agencies are independent. They’re not. They work for the president. It matters a huge amount in all these places bureaucratically if the president says something about HUD and what they say about HUD in the State of the Union or if the president’s going to do an event at HUD. It’s a huge deal. Or if the president issues a directive, they take it very seriously. But it’s also the case that there’s kind of a distinct gravity to the agency itself that also pushes up to the White House.
David Graham: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And, again, this is contemplated by the founders insofar as the cabinet is a constitutionally designated phenomenon, advice and consent to the Senate, officers of the United States. Like, they do contemplate all this. It’s not like this is some invention of the New Deal. Like, secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, he’s got some ideas. Some people in the other cabinet might have other ideas. They fight it out. Like, this administration seems more top down, less department agency, if you will, than any I’ve seen. And it sounds to me like you’re saying that’s exactly the Vought vision.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And it’s a little bit of a weird situation because Trump is, as you were saying, doesn’t care about so many of these things.
Chris Hayes: Any of the stuff.
David Graham: He’s the first stop people on them. He doesn’t know.
Chris Hayes: Yes. What do you think? He’s got some huge agenda about the Veterans Affairs that he’s sitting there being like, they got to do this and they got to do that? Like, come on.
David Graham: Well, I mean, even at a place like state where they’re like, you know, we can’t have these diplomats making these decisions. We need to be needs to be directed by the president. The president has never heard of Lesotho, as he has made clear. So, the idea that the White House is going to pay any attention to that sort of granular stuff is so weird. But they’re just freaked out about the idea that the state might operate independently and there might be pockets of wokeness there that are going to sabotage him.
Chris Hayes: But they’ve also operationalized it, it seems to me.
David Graham: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, Rubio seems like a henchman of the White House, and state is famously, state is a little like the Southern District of New York. It’s like a famously kind of independent place, partly because it’s a repository of a lot of expertise, and sometimes, I think, to the detriment of U.S. foreign policy, honestly. Because they can like, it could be hard to move the people there, same as the Pentagon. But, like, Rubio just it just seems that they’ve been fairly successful in this kind of top down approach to the agencies that Vought envisions, even though at the center of it is a person who has less formed views on any of this than any president in modern times.
David Graham: Yes. Exactly. And I don’t want to overdo the symbolism because they you know, it’s so carefully scripted, but I think it tells us something. You see these Oval Office press conferences where they have, you know, Rubio and Bondi and various cabinet folks sitting on the couch, and you can tell that they don’t have any real input into this. They are there to be yes men and yes women, for whomever is making decisions, whether that’s Trump or Miller or whomever.
Chris Hayes: But then there’s also this question of, like, yes, the whomever is really the question to me, though.
David Graham: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Chris Hayes: Because that’s the weirdness of this.
David Graham: Right.
Chris Hayes: You’ve got this Russ Vought, Stephen Miller fully formed vision. You’ve got Donald Trump at the center of it who’s got a bucket of, like, four ideas and unbounded ambition and avarice for his own personal glory and power. Who’s filling in the rest? This is my question.
David Graham: Right. Exactly. Well, so right. You’re saying the president has to be in control of all of these things, and you’re saying it’s terrible for unelected bureaucrats to be in charge of them. And instead, you’re putting all of the power in the hands of basically unelected political appointees. These are bureaucrats. They are not elected officials, so it’s a real hollowness in their critique or a real contradiction inside their critique.
Chris Hayes: But I also just worry about it operationally.
David Graham: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, particularly when I think the thing I think about all the time is the intelligence apparatus, you know, which I’ve, you know, my formative experience coming up both politically and also as a journalist was the run up to the Iraq war where the American intelligence apparatus was sort of abused and manipulated and used in a way to produce a catastrophic outcome. And there’s some of those same dynamics of, like, unaccountability, like, how accountable should these, quote, unquote, bureaucrats. There’s a certain left critique of, like, the CIA is this rogue agency that does whatever it wants. But then at the same time, you want them to have a certain amount of independence because you don’t want the president to be able to direct them to find something that’s not true.
And the place where these contradictions really hit to me is, like, I worry a lot about the operational competence of the intelligence apparatus under this vision. I wonder what Project 2025 says about that part of the national security state.
David Graham: You know, they invoke Iraq a lot, and it’s very convincing because they’re like, well, look, if you don’t have control over these things, you’re going to get these people who are just doing things, you know, to they’re going to be running American foreign policy by pushing us into these wars. They’re going to be producing cooked intelligence, which is, you know, it’s persuasive to me instinctively as a child of the Iraq war. But then the answer to that is, so, basically, if you dissent from the intelligence judgments, you should shut up. Like, you shouldn’t be political about these things, but you better not dissent. And that leaves a really narrow band. You have to do whatever is ordered of you, and it’s going to be politicized, and you can’t speak up. It seems like a path that the intelligence agencies aren’t going to be able to walk very effectively if they’re also really producing intelligence. They’re just producing political, conclusions, I think, under this vision.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Under this vision. And we should also say that critique is, in some ways, a 180 degrees off in the sense that Dick Cheney was personally going over CIA and calling CIA analysts to get them to produce the intelligence he wanted. It was like, the one way of viewing the story of Iraq is that the Deep State got it right and the political appointees didn’t care —
David Graham: Right.
Chris Hayes: — and ran over them, and that the deep state was kind of the only I mean, again, I’m using deep state sardonically. Right? The professional intelligence analysts of CIA were largely correct. That’s why you got these sort of, you know, leaks to, you know, some reporters that kind of got the story right, where they were like, this is not right. And it was being cooked because Dick Cheney was personally calling people over at Langley to be like, give me what I want. And it’s that exact vision, which is now kind of the manifest policy, as I understand it, in this administration.
David Graham: Yes. Totally. They do this over and over again where they diagnose a problem or they invoke the right diagnosis, and then they go off in a totally crazy direction with the prescription, something that doesn’t make sense or will make it a lot worse. And I think intelligence is one of those.
Chris Hayes: HHS seems like a curveball. That’s another place where I kind of knew it was coming, particularly when RFK got on board. I know how kind of negatively polarized into kind of hating health they’ve become or hating the traditional medical establishment, I guess. They say they like health, but, you know, they like cod liver oil to rub on your measles as opposed to a vaccine. How much does Kennedy’s tenure at HHS sync up with the vision embodied in Project 2025?
David Graham: So, where it doesn’t so far is a big one, which is abortion.
Chris Hayes: Abortion. Yes.
David Graham: Where they haven’t done a lot. And I, you know, I just, I have to imagine there’s more of this coming because it’s so important to the kinds of people who Project 2025 has stocked the government with, and they’re going to be pushing on these things. But Kennedy’s, you know, who knows what Kennedy’s view is on abortion? I can’t keep track of it. It doesn’t seem like he can either. So I think that’s been a little bit slow. But where they unite is this antipathy towards the sort of health establishment. And, in particular, there’s again, I mean, it’s a little bit I can buy into parts of this. They talk about revolving door between regulators and big pharma companies, and they think that you need to do something about that. And, sure, I agree.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Graham: But if you simply close these things off and you’re, you know, you’re going to lose it’s going to be total brain drain. If people can’t make a decent salary in the government and they can’t make a decent salary somewhere else, what are you going to do? So, there’s a lot of that. We need to shut down these relationships. We need to cut off any communication between the regulators and the big companies. And then we need to not quite kill the CDC, but really stifle it. We need to make them really focused on, on the one hand, statistical health, but then we need to hive off control of things like declaring emergencies into an avowedly political body instead of something like the CDC.
Chris Hayes: Let’s stay on the abortion thing for a second because I think that, to me, has been the one big dog that has not quite barked at the federal level. And it’s interesting to me because I was convinced that they were, that Trump and everyone was doing about abortion the same thing they did about Project 2025. Be like, oh, no. No. Us? Come go after abortion? Get out of here. And, you know, I have to sort of be honest with myself here because I’ve been kind of mocking people that are surprised by the tariffs, you know, because it was something that he said all the time, and we talked about on the campaign trail in our campaign coverage all the time. And I’ve been a little like, hey, guys. Welcome to the club. But if I’m honest with myself, I said they’re going to do a lot of, they’re going to go after abortion in a big way.
David Graham: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It’s spelled out in Project 2025. There are too many true believers crawling around this movement. So far, that hasn’t happened. It does seem like they’re setting up a big move against medical abortion. But tell us what at least is in Project 2025 on this, because I do think it’ll be something helpful to look for if they do turn towards it.
David Graham: Yes. So, they start with just banning you know, they wanted a nationwide abortion ban. And they understand that’s unlikely, but that’s the top of the list. After that, they have all these ways they would like to crack down. So, for example, they want the FDA to withdraw approval for medical abortion drugs, which we’ve seen some efforts to do. They want to use the Comstock Act from 1873 to ban the mailing of abortion drugs, another thing we’ve heard a lot of buzz about. And then, even beyond that, they want to do things like monitor abortions at the state level and demand that states turn over really detailed information, partly so they can do things like track interstate travel for abortions and open women up to prosecution in red states that ban that kind of travel. So it is like from the very top, this, you know, full ban down to how can we use the power of the government to create a surveillance state and pressure people on these things and make it as difficult as possible even if we can’t ban it.
We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: We’ve seen now states like Texas and Indiana and other places sort of moving in some of these directions. But, again, we haven’t, I don’t want to say, like, oh, everything is fine. Not at all fine. You know? It’s the opposite of fine, you know? Roe has fallen. Abortion is illegal in, you know, a little less than half the states and millions of women do not have access to reproductive rights or care. We’ve seen infant and maternal mortality climb in the same states. We’ve seen OBGYNs leaving those states. We’ve seen a million different problems, the criminalization of miscarriages, et cetera. So it’s still a nightmare.
All of that said, it could be worse, and I was bracing myself for, for instance, Pam Bondi to start using the Comstock Act, which is on the books. I was bracing myself for, you know, the head of the FDA to come out and say, we’re rescinding Mifepristone. Now they’re doing some studies now. They’ve started some studies that many people think will be essentially a kind of pretextual foundation for them to move towards us. Why do you think we haven’t gotten some of the bull rush attempt to implement this vision in this area that we have in so many other areas?
David Graham: I have been surprised too. I mean, the best explanations I can offer are two. One, this is a place where Trump doesn’t care a lot about abortion, and he also sees political risk in it, which I think had a lot to do with his position on the campaign trail where he was like, oh, we’ve gone far enough. Let the states handle it. There’s kind of selective federalism going on.
I also think that these are places where, when they embarked on Project 2025, it was not just the policies, but it was this attempt to train people to fill these roles in government that are not visible. So political appointments that are not Senate confirmed, that are not, you know, titles anyone knows of or names anyone knows of, but who can get into there and slowly work the regulatory machinery. And that’s in many departments. I think that’s true also in HHS, where they need to get their people in, they need to get their people hired, and then those folks will start moving on the slow moving stuff. They have to get the power first. They have to get the staffing. Then comes policy later on.
Chris Hayes: This brings us to another big part of what Project 2025 was, aside from this sort of report, was this hiring project. Tell us about what that hiring project was, what it produced, and how much, how successful it’s been in feeding people into the actual administration.
David Graham: One of the things that surprised me when I was doing the research here was the animus that some of the Project 2025 authors had for political appointees in the first Trump administration. And, you know, obviously, Trump clashed with cabinet, officials and so on and so forth. But you have somebody like Paul Dans just frothing at the mouth over the kinds of people who served in the Trump administration. And in his case, I think it was personal because he had this idea that he was going to get a plum DOJ appointment, you know, on January 20, 2017, and it took him years to get into the White House. But Vought had this too. They look at the people who were in political jobs, and they think they were lazy or they were just social climbers or they were rhinos or, you know, Bush conservatives who were there trying to sabotage Trump. And they were determined to not let that happen again.
And so they created this database, and they’re basically like, you know, we want the people who have been canceled. We want the people who have been fighting their school board. And we want to identify them and then train them so they’re ready to serve in the government and can, you know, they get these certificates for watching videos, and then they can be ready. And kind of pre ready.
Chris Hayes: Well, hanging a shingle out for the most antisocial people we can find, please refer them to us.
Chris Hayes: That’s almost verbatim what Paul Dans said. I mean, you joke, but it’s very close to that. I think it’s been moderately successful.
If you look at Trump’s pace of appointments, it’s ahead of his pace in the first term and it’s ahead of Biden’s pace, but it’s still not that good. We don’t have the full database, so it’s a little bit tough to know exactly how close they are. But they’re just not hiring a lot faster than they were, and I think that is a little bit of a failure.
Chris Hayes: There’s also a supply problem, which I think you’re seeing in the Department of Justice. They’ve got top political signing and, presumably, writing briefs that those folks almost never write because the career people won’t write them, or they’ve left.
David Graham: Right.
Chris Hayes: And, like, they’re doing a lot of pretty bad lawyering. Now part of it is they’re doing bad lawyering because they have bad positions that are not easily convertible into persuasive arguments through good lawyering. I have not been like there are a few areas where they do seem to be more competent, but there’s also a lot of bluster and ambition not necessarily matched with some, like, vast army of technical expertise.
David Graham: Yes. I think that’s right. And I think it becomes clearer faster at DOJ where you have to start filing lawsuits —
Chris Hayes: Right. Exactly.
David Graham: — than at other regulatory agencies or at, you know, the labor department where the results aren’t seen as quickly.
Chris Hayes: Do you ever think about what this would look like on the other side?
David Graham: Some. People keep asking me. I think it’s hard to know. I think there’s a couple lessons the left could take. One is thinking really hard about, you know, the methods of execution. So, they didn’t just do the policy wish list. They did lay out how they were going to get these things done.
And the other thing is bringing in so many people from across the MAGA right. So that, you know, there are disagreements within Project 2025, which I think is really interesting and makes it kind of a rich document in places. They couldn’t resolve all those things, but, generally they wanted to get everybody on the same team and pulling in the same direction. And I think that’s one reason they’ve been so effective just in the first three months.
Chris Hayes: What was an example of a disagreement that is in that document that you think is interesting?
David Graham: Tariffs is the biggest one, where you have Peter Navarro arguing that tariffs are great. Although, even there, I mean, he doesn’t go as far as Trump has. He wants tariffs on China. And you have Kent Lassman from the Competitive Enterprise Institute saying tariffs are a disaster. They’ve made Americans poorer. They will do it again if we keep doing this. Free trade is one of the great miracles of the 20th century. You have Veronique De Rugy saying trade deficits don’t matter. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool. So, there’s, I mean, there’s a real, you can still see the kind of old fiscally conservative right not quite giving up on a few of these issues like that.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And yet, what’s interesting there is that, like, if it’s between them and Trump, you know which way it’s going to go.
David Graham: Yes. I think even Navarro’s presence is a fig leaf. They understood that they couldn’t come out and say tariffs are a terrible idea, even if it’s what they thought. And so, they felt like they had to bring in Navarro to give that voice to make it more palatable to Trump.
Chris Hayes: In terms of the, like, lessons to the left, the thing that I’m struck by in the parts that I’ve read and the implementation is, like, this is something I’m kind of obsessed with is, one thing definitely is not enough is that if we survive this with American democracy recognizably intact, which remains an if, and if there are free and fair elections and a Democrat is elected president in 2028, it’s just not enough to be like, here’s the policies, because you actually have to reconceptualize the entire constitutional order in federal government.
David Graham: Yes. Exactly. You can’t just put things back. And I think that’s an underrated problem. It’s unclear how successful a lot of these things will be and where the courts will push them back on hiring, for example. But the executive branch that a new president inherits on January 2029 is going to be so different from the one that Trump inherited on January 2025.
And so any project from the left has to just think about the government new and think about how to interpret the Constitution in a different paradigm. You can’t return to a, you know, a great society view because some of those things are going to be gone. You have to rethink it. I’ve thought a little bit about the post-Watergate reforms as a model, but I think even that is probably too limited in scope for what is going to be facing the country after Trump, assuming there’s an after Trump.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I think the post-Watergate model is interesting because it’s the closest analog we have where you have a whole bunch of there’s statutory reforms, good government corruption reforms, campaign finance reforms, reforms to at OLC about the Department of Justice independence. There’s national security reforms. There’s a sort of swing of power back to Congress, which claims it back, for instance, impoundment. Right? And a few other areas where Congress seizes back power from the executive quite intentionally. There’s the church committee. There’s kind of investigatory aspect of kind of going back and looking at, you know, where the kind of growth of an unaccountable secret state post-World War II led to some of the excesses that would come to light in Watergate and also just come to light generally. So, there’s a whole kind of vision, and it’s unified around a few themes, at least in response to Nixon. And I do think that you would need something like that for the Democratic Party or progressives or the center left or the pro-democracy coalition, whatever you want to call it, precisely because so much will be broken. And, also, it’s not going to be enough to be like, all right. Let’s get back to work at CFPB.
David Graham: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, I mean, yes. You should get back to work at CFPB, but that’s not, there’s got to be something more than that and particularly around the balance of power between the branches, the relationship between the president and the agencies. Why independence in some places, and what is it good for, how is it protected, how do you create democratic fail safes and redundancies that don’t allow this kind of destruction to happen. I mean, you’re going to have to think very hard and long and in detail about all of that.
David Graham: Yes. I mean, especially things like redundancies. Because so many of those Watergate reforms seemed like they were effective until Trump, and then you saw that they were not statutory. They were, you know, they were guidelines or they were general practices, and he mowed right through them. So it has to be something more rigorous than that.
Chris Hayes: Do you think this document is going to end up, I have a hard time projecting forward even a week in the Trump presidency, like, I just don’t know what’s going to happen, and I think everything from the U.S. sliding into a pretty scary and unrecognizable presidential dictatorship along the lines of Turkey to Donald Trump having to leave office in disgrace before his term is over are, like, plausible things that could happen. And I don’t, I guess I wonder what it’s going to matter what the legacy of Project 2025 is where we end up on that spectrum. Right?
David Graham: Yes. That’s true. I think they’re thinking about this in a couple ways. One is they see Trump as a vessel, and so they wanted to elect him and they wanted him to do these things, but they’re thinking past him. And they imagine that what they’re doing is going to shift the executive branch and American society for much longer. They also understood that there would be pushback. And so they write, you know, the first hundred days are crucial. The first two years before the midterms are crucial. We have to get as much done in that time as we can. And then they know Washington will sort of push back.
It’s about shifting the baseline, and, you know, I worry that they have managed to permanently shift the baseline. I just don’t know quite how far.
Chris Hayes: David Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the book, “The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America.” David, that was great. Thanks so much.
David Graham: Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great. Thanks to David Graham. The book is called “The Project: How Project 2025 is Reshaping America.” You can get it wherever you get your books. You can also check us out on YouTube. You can watch full WITHpod episodes by going to msnbc.com/withpod. You can watch it on your phone or on your laptop or on your television. Just kick back. Watch a full WITHpod.
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