OXON HILL, Md.—The Heritage Foundation and a small army of conservative allies on Friday launched the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, also known as Project 2025, calling for reining in federal agencies and curbing political weaponizaiton.
“For the most powerful think tank in America, it would be very easy to go it alone,” said Ed Corrigan, president of the Conservative Partnership Institute, referring to The Heritage Foundation. “This has been really a team effort, 50 different conservative organizations contributed to this. That’s what makes this a historic product.”
Policy and personnel recommendations dot Heritage’s blueprint for the next conservative president. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
The first pillar of the plan is Heritage’s book “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” which sets forth policy proposals touching on virtually every government agency. The second pillar is the concept that personnel is policy. The third is a call for training and the fourth recommends executive orders to advance conservative policy.
“This has never happened. We’ve never had this coming together in our movement to prepare for one thing—Day One, January 2025,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, referring to Jan. 21, 2025, when the next president will be sworn into office.
“What brings all these organizations together is our common theme to take down the administrative state, the bureaucracy,” Dans said. “The bottom line is we need to have an army of conservatives ready to march in on Day One.”
Dans stressed that the effort includes examing the 50 states for useful and practical knowledge outside Washington. The alliance of conservatives will be involved in recruiting and training officials.
Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s acting deputy secretary of homeland security, wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Homeland Security.
“We don’t agree on everything all the time—you may have noticed that in the conservative movement—but we reflect alternative options, and DHS is a good example of this,” said Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general who now is part of The Center for Renewing America. “We start out with a recommendation which may surprise some of you, to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security.”
Cuccinelli said he didn’t want to bet on that:
We don’t mean get rid of the missions. We mean [make them] better managed from the national standpoint, how American security is protected. We go through agency by agency as well, including some of the things we think we should get rid of, like the TSA [Transportation Security Administration]. There should be security, but government doesn’t need to run that.
“The peaceful transition of power is an awesome responsibility. I would have given my right arm to have the book on the tables out there,” Rick Dearborn, former deputy chief of staff for President Donald Trump and also executive director of Trump’s presidential transition team in late 2016 and early 2017.
Dearborn, who was referring to copies of “Mandate for Leadership 2025,” is now a Heritage visiting fellow on the Presidential Transition Project.
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