[The far right has a plan to remake America. They even wrote it
down. ]
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THE BLUEPRINT  
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Harold Meyerson
November 27, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ The far right has a plan to remake America. They even wrote it
down. _

, (Illustration by Roberto Parada)

 

It’s not like we haven’t been warned.

Should the Republican presidential nominee (likely Donald Trump) win
the election next year, conservatives have been pretty clear about
what they intend to do. In fact, explicitly clear.

Trump himself isn’t much on policy, of course. The 2020 Republican
National Convention was notable chiefly because, at his behest, it
made no effort to pass a party platform, effectively giving Trump
carte blanche for whatever he wished to do in his second term.

But Trump’s all-too-personal vision for a second-term agenda is now
leaking into the press. According to stories in _The New York Times
[[link removed]] _and _The
Washington Post
[[link removed]]_,
it begins with transforming the Justice Department into an instrument
of his vengeance, initially against those first-term appointees Trump
thinks betrayed him: former Attorney General Bill Barr, former chief
of staff John Kelly, former Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley, and others
who opposed his attempted seizure of power. Then comes filing charges
against Joe Biden and his family, with the substance yet to be
determined.

To this end, Trump is assembling a cadre of lawyers who supported his
attempt to cling to the presidency, and who won’t be deterred from
doing his bidding—as those wusses from the Federalist Society
were—by the niceties of constitutional law. A leading figure among
these _l’état c’est Trump _legal eagles is Jeffrey Clark, a
Trump Justice Department official who during the plot to overturn the
2020 election countered a White House counsel’s argument that
Trump’s putsch would lead to “riots in every major city” by
noting, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act”—a law that
allows the president to deploy the Army to quell protests. That
exchange is quoted in the federal indictment of Trump for fomenting
the January 6th insurrection. (The _Post _indicates that Trump is
plotting to invoke the Insurrection Act on the _first day _of his
presidency: January 20, 2025.)

At a recent campaign event in New Hampshire, Trump stumbled into a
rationale for going after Biden, should he win the 2024 contest.
“This is third-world country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’”
Trump said. “And that means I can do that, too.”

If nothing else, that quote explains why Trump is seeking more lawyers
like Jeffrey Clark.

But Clark’s current ambit isn’t confined to Mar-a-Lago. He’s
also part of Project 2025 [[link removed]], an
initiative of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which, in
collaboration with over 80 other far-right groups (including
the Center for Renewing America [[link removed]],
where Clark is a senior fellow and director of litigation), is laying
out the tasks and recruiting the candidates that the next Republican
president must employ to de-woke-ify America, banish liberalism, and
extirpate modernity.

When the _Post _reported that Clark is leading a study on how to
implement the Insurrection Act, a Heritage Foundation official quickly
sought to assure the wider world that “there are no plans within
Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political
enemies.”

Oh really?

Earlier this year, Project 2025 published
[[link removed]] a
920-page manifesto called _Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative
Promise_, laying out its agenda for Trump or any other Republican who
should win the White House. The book consists chiefly of the world’s
longest enemies list, with detailed instructions on how to target
them, oust them, and reverse their policies, both real and imagined.

I’ve read every damn page of that book. Here’s what it says.

THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME Heritage has sketched out a blueprint for
a conservative presidency. In 1980, the think tank aided another
neophyte politician with revolutionary aspirations—Ronald
Reagan—with a report, also called _Mandate for Leadership_
[[link removed]],
that stretched to 1,100 pages and covered virtually every nook and
cranny of government. Heritage boasts that Reagan took up the majority
of their proposals, including across-the-board tax cuts, “Star
Wars” missile defense, inner-city “enterprise zones,” and a hard
line with the Soviet Union. On the latter, Heritage claimed that
“Reagan sticks so closely to the Heritage suggestions that [Mikhail]
Gorbachev complains to Reagan about Heritage’s influence in the
first few minutes of the [1986 Reykjavik] summit.”

A subsequent edition of _Mandate for Leadership _has been produced
for every presidential election since 1980. This iteration, very much
in the spirit of Trump, is lighter on policy and heavier on
retribution. Its enemies list begins with the usual targets of
right-wing ire: welfare recipients, lazy and liberal civil servants
(since they’re liberal, one might think Heritage would be heartened
by their laziness), anti-business regulators, environmentalists, and
union bosses. But it expands from there to include more
recent _bȇtes_ _noires_: scientists, woke bureaucrats, woke
educators, woke diplomats, woke generals and admirals, woke G-men, and
anyone who doesn’t indulge the next Republican president’s every
whim (an adaptation to the likelihood of a Trump nomination).

The particular frustrations Trump encountered when federal employees
pushed back at his more lunkheaded notions loom large in Heritage’s
assessment of the federal workforce, which the book’s editors
describe as “largely underworked, overcompensated, and
unaccountable.”

No matter what department or agency is under discussion in this
volume, their officials’ and employees’ adherence to the
president’s policies and piques should be their primary, if not
only, task. When dealing with the State Department, the book advises,
“the next Administration must take swift and decisive steps to
reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine
that serves the President.”

If that requires a purge, so be it. The authors advise the incoming
administration to identify and interview every Treasury Department
official who participated in its DEI (diversity, equity, and
inclusion) activities and programs, and make such activity “_per
se _grounds for termination of employment.”

Project 2025 sees a path to manipulating the Federal Vacancies Reform
Act to ensure loyalists take control.

In a 900-page book, one occasionally encounters boilerplate affirming
the importance of hiring qualified experts. Writing about the CIA, one
author apparently on autopilot says that the administration must avoid
selecting intelligence leaders “for their policy views or political
loyalties.” But when fully conscious of who he’s advising, he gets
down to the real stuff, writing, “The President-Elect should choose
a Deputy Director who, without needing Senate confirmation, can
immediately begin to implement the President’s agenda.”

That last part is critical. For Project 2025, speed is at a premium,
lest career officials persist in doing their jobs. Besides, a
Democratic Senate or even a Senate with a narrow Republican majority
may resist approving a number of Trump’s more outrageous
appointments. Jeffrey Clark as attorney general? Michael Flynn running
Defense? All the more reason why deputy directors who don’t need
Senate confirmation should take power immediately to begin Trump’s
war on his so-called “vermin.”

Waiting for Senate confirmations, some of which are still pending for
the Biden administration nearly three years into his presidency, does
not align with this wholesale takeover of government. And this is
where Heritage’s knowledge of the federal vacancy process becomes
useful.

Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, for most federal agencies, a
vacancy at the top means that the next available deputy becomes the
acting head. Project 2025 sees a path to manipulating this law to
ensure loyalists take control.

“Where a career employee holds a leadership position,” explains
Ken Cuccinelli, the former acting deputy homeland security secretary
under Trump, “that position should be deemed vacant for
line-of-succession purposes, and the next eligible political appointee
in the sequence should assume acting authority.” Other authors call
for political appointees to be put into the line of succession
directly, “selected by the President-elect’s transition team”
and “in place the first day of the Administration.”

This gambit would hand over the administrative state to those
dedicated to crushing it. That would combine with the restoration of
Trump’s October 2020 “Schedule F
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order, which would reassign up to 50,000 civil service workers with a
designation that robs them of employment protections, making them
easier to terminate. So the leadership of executive branch agencies
would be ideologues, and many bureaucrats under their care could be
fired at will.

Republican candidates have warmed to this vision. Vivek Ramaswamy has
said that if elected, he would fire more than 75 percent
[[link removed]] of
the federal workforce, and disband such agencies as the Department of
Education, the Food and Nutrition Service, the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, and the FBI.

In short, Heritage’s directions for Day One presidential
appointments come straight out of Macbeth’s musings as he ponders
the timing of his imminent murder of Duncan, his king:

_If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well_

_It were done quickly._

THE REPUBLICAN NEED TO BANISH the ostensibly woke is nowhere clearer
than in Heritage’s agenda for the armed services. Picture Sen. Tommy
Tuberville (R-AL) and his viewpoints (such that they are), only inside
the Pentagon. Project 2025 sees a Defense Department that “has
emphasized leftist politics over military readiness,” and makes an
impassioned plea to DOD to “eliminate Marxist indoctrination.”
(You didn’t know that all recruits are required to read Volume III
of _Das Kapital_?)

As Heritage sees it, the military stinks from the head down. “Most
officers, especially below the rank of general or admiral, continue to
be patriotic defenders of liberty,” they affirm. But those generals
and admirals, boy oh boy. Accordingly, Heritage advises the National
Security Council to “rigorously review all general and flag officer
[admiral] promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities
of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters,
including climate change, critical race theory,” and many more. This
amounts to providing an ideological test for the military leadership.

The other stalwart defenders of traditional American values that
Heritage thinks have gone awry are the Justice Department, and the FBI
in particular. Sinister Attorney General Merrick Garland, they lament,
has “devoted unprecedented resources to prosecuting American
citizens for misdemeanor trespassing offenses,” which sounds a lot
like a complaint against the prosecution of the January 6th
insurrectionists. Worse yet, Justice also “sued multiple states
regarding their efforts to enhance election integrity,” which of
course refers to the states’ efforts to suppress voting.

We’ve already seen that conservatives want the power to shape
Justice Department discretion on who to prosecute. But according to
the Heritage book, the president should also be able to
“terminate” FBI investigations and activities that are “contrary
to the national interest.” Who is charged with determining what’s
in or contrary to the national interest? They don’t say it, but you
can take a guess: the president, as long as they’re a Republican.

Expand

[DEC23 Meyerson 2.jpeg]

This edition of the Heritage Foundation’s guide for the next
Republican president is tailored to the likely nominee’s thirst for
vengeance.  RON ADAR/SIPA USA VIA AP

VIRTUALLY EVERY CHAPTER OF _Mandate for Leadership _comes with
suggestions for privatizing governmental functions, deregulating
industries, or just plain helping corporate America make more money.

Some of these would require congressional sign-off, a bold break from
Heritage’s main preoccupation with centralizing power. Heritage
recommends lowering the corporate income tax to 18 percent and the tax
on capital gains and dividends to 15 percent. As for those employers
foolish enough to provide their employees with not just wages but
benefits, Heritage suggests changing tax law so that those employers
can deduct no more than $12,000 in an employee’s benefits from their
taxes. That, of course, could hold down employer expenses on benefits,
a boon for employers, if not for their workers.

Each chamber of Congress should require a 60 percent supermajority for
any tax hikes, Heritage proposes. That is already practically in place
for the Senate thanks to the filibuster, but this supermajority would
extend to the House, too—and only for taxes. Project 2025 further
calls on Congress to repeal the Federal Reserve’s mandate to promote
full employment. Inflation reduction, no matter how many Americans it
throws out of work, is what matters.

The chapter devoted to the Defense Department suggests ending
congressional review of arms sales to foreign countries, which hit an
all-time high in 2018 (when Trump was president) of $56 billion. The
to-do list for Transportation calls for privatizing the TSA, to
“bring private-sector know-how to government programs” (like,
presumably, the airlines’ expertise in passenger boarding and
seating).

But these are by and large wish lists. The proposals for economic
regulations, which the next Republican president’s new teams of
functionaries will carry out themselves, reveal the deeper dangers of
the agenda.

On that perennial area of Republican expertise, health insurance,
Heritage suggests that the government should “make Medicare
Advantage the default enrollment option” for people getting into the
system, so that private health insurers can make more money and
seniors’ health care options can be limited. That could be
accomplished by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Heritage also requests a regulatory change to Medicaid co-payment
levels, so that recipients are required to pay for the services they
receive “at a level that is appropriate to …” You think it’s
going to say “appropriate to their ability to pay”? No. The
sentence actually concludes: “appropriate to protect the
taxpayer.”

As for student loan recipients, Heritage wants the government to phase
out income-driven repayment plans that hold repayment levels to a
percentage of the payer’s income. The Education Department created
those programs and could dissolve them.

Heritage also has some suggestions for regulatory enforcement
agencies. It calls for a limit on the amount of time the Securities
and Exchange Commission can spend on investigating financial chicanery
to two years. That may need congressional authorization, but a
loyalist at the SEC could initiate that as a norm by themselves. And
there are admonishments to agencies like the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to simply
cease making rules. Much of what the new conservative leadership will
do with these enforcement agencies is to give the impression of being
busy without doing anything at all.

“THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S CLIMATE fanaticism will need a
whole-of-government unwinding,” Heritage tells us, and proceeds to
explain how that can be done. First, they want Congress to repeal the
Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for clean-energy companies, a
rare example of a conservative endorsement of tax increases.

But the real agenda here is ensuring that climate change deniers are
appointed to the relevant agencies. To that end, Heritage suggests
reforming EPA’s Science Advisory Board “to ensure independence,
balance, transparency, and geographic diversity,” which are all
admirably creative euphemisms for climate deniers. Just in case
EPA’s scientists persist in mapping out the planet’s future, the
administration should revive Trump’s ban on the use of cumulative
impact analysis in assessing environmental risks. And just to snuff
out any further resistance to the president’s mandates, the
administration should impose a rule on EPA that it “will not conduct
any ongoing or planned science activity for which there is not clear
and current congressional authorization.” Inquiry itself, then, is
banned.

For regulation that Heritage wants implemented, it sees a way for the
chief executive to just unilaterally suspend administrative procedure.

In its current state, American science is just too woke—which in
this case means too empirical—for Republicans. “The National
Labs,” Heritage laments, are “too focused on climate change and
renewal technologies.” The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric
Research is a “source of much … climate alarmism” and thus
should be downsized.

Getting scientists out of the policy business is the overriding goal
of any incoming Republican administration. The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health are
primary anti-Fauci targets of Heritage ire. They are “the duo most
responsible—along with President Joe Biden—for the irrational,
destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed
upon an ostensibly free people.” The CDC, in whatever reduced form
it may continue to exist, should have “severely confined ability to
make policy recommendations.”

But do not let it be said that Project 2025 rejects all critical
research. The book stresses that the CDC should “fund studies into
the risks and complications of abortion.”

THE INCOMING REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT, Heritage makes clear, should not be
daunted by the public’s overwhelming rejection of
the _Dobbs _decision and support for abortion rights. The Department
of Health and Human Services “must ensure that all HHS programs and
activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life,”
and like that federal judge in Texas, do what it can to ensure that
mifepristone, the abortion medication, is made illegal. It should also
withhold Medicaid funds from states that require insurers to cover
abortions. These could all be carried out by the administrative state.

Republicans, Heritage makes clear, should put Christian nationalism at
the center of policy and statecraft. On matters of LGBTQ rights and
gender identity, the government must uphold the rights of religiously
inspired bigots to violate civil rights laws by denying services to
those whose practices or identities offend them. In its discussion of
the nation’s Middle East policy, Heritage avers that “special
attention must be paid to challenges of religious freedom, especially
the status of Middle Eastern Christians and other religious
minorities.” As to Palestinians, Heritage’s policy brief is brief,
indeed. In its entirety, it reads: “The Palestinian Authority should
be defunded.” Even before the current war, this pouring of oil on
fire was as idiotic as it was callous.

When it comes to encasing bigotry in policy, Heritage gives the next
Republican president a lot of leeway. The president should give the
HHS secretary the power to deny admission at the border (or ports, or
airports) to “persons from such countries or places as he or she
shall designate” to avert or curtail mass migration. That would seem
to encompass, for instance, Trump’s ban on immigrants from “Muslim
countries” that he sought to establish as president, which he
has vowed to bring back
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expand. Next time, says Heritage, the president should stipulate that
such orders “shall not be subject to the requirements of the
Administrative Procedures Act.”

Now there’s quite a tell. The Administrative Procedure Act
establishes the procedure for creating regulations, with a public
comment period and compliance with various guidelines. It has
typically been something that bogs down regulation, which Heritage
would usually appreciate. But for regulation that Heritage wants
implemented, it sees a way for the chief executive to just
unilaterally suspend administrative procedure. This would invite a
court challenge, but you may remember the state of the Supreme Court,
which hangs over this entire project as a reminder of how much easier
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may be to enact this radical agenda.

Expand

[DEC23 Meyerson 3.jpeg]

The Heritage Foundation has boasted that past presidents have adopted
half of their recommendations or more in the first terms of their
presidencies.  JESS RAPFOGEL/AP PHOTO

A FEW OF HERITAGE’S SUGGESTIONS evoke simpler solutions from
earlier times, such as linking the value of the dollar to the gold
that the government holds, or at least once held, in its vaults, a
policy that ensured long and severe depressions throughout the 19th
century. But the complexities of today have required Heritage to
acknowledge that there’s not yet a consensus on the right on several
key policies. And when it can’t lay down the line of what
conservatives should do, Heritage lays down two lines and lets
conservatives pick one, or try to muddle through.

On what to do about the war in Ukraine, for instance, Heritage
presents an argument for continuing U.S. aid and another for stopping
U.S. aid. On the question of free trade, the right’s unified
opposition to China has been a major factor behind the critique some
have leveled at the global investments, and global dependence, of
American corporations and banks. That critique is fully voiced in a
chapter by Trump trade counselor (and fellow election denier) Peter
Navarro, in which he also documents the damage that offshoring has
visited on American workers. Navarro’s arguments are countered in
another chapter by Kent Lassman, who not only argues for limitless
free trade, but also makes clear his opposition to including any labor
or environmental standards in trade accords.

In the book’s section on antitrust policy, two opposing views are
presented within the same chapter. Most of the discussion follows the
pro-business conventional wisdom as propounded by Robert Bork, that
concentration is fine so long as it doesn’t raise the prices
consumers must pay. But the author also acknowledges that “many
large U.S. corporations are earning substantial incumbency rents,”
and frets about the undue market power exercised by platform
monopolies. Indeed, he actually faults the Obama administration for
opting not to prosecute Google in 2013 for its monopolization of the
search function.

Even the chapter on labor and collective-bargaining rights, to which
almost all Republicans remain unalterably opposed, contains some blips
of pro-worker sentiment. The chapter’s author acknowledges some
input by Oren Cass, who heads up the GOP’s
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and relatively pro-worker wing. This may explain why it includes a
debate on repealing the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires the payment of
prevailing wages to workers on federally financed projects, rather
than just a straight call for termination. Astonishingly, there’s
one suggestion (surely from Cass) that unions should have the right to
get court injunctions (10(j) injunctions, they’re called) to require
employers to immediately rehire workers they’ve fired in the midst
of an organizing campaign. That puts Heritage in line with Biden’s
National Labor Relations Board.

Alas, most of the chapter calls for reversing gains that workers have
only begun to make at Biden’s NLRB and Labor Department. Heritage
wants to limit the number of workers eligible for overtime pay,
relieve corporations of liability for violations of workers’ rights
that their franchisees may make, and insist that workers are
independent contractors, not employees entitled to certain wages and
benefits, if their employer says so. Workers should not be able to win
union ratification if a majority sign affiliation cards. They should
be given a seat on publicly traded corporate boards, but only if
it’s nonvoting. (I’d term that non-co-determination, or simply, a
device enabling workers to determine nothing at all.) Perhaps worst of
all, Heritage suggests a new law that permits states to get
“waivers” from the National Labor Relations Act for a five-year
period in which they can try to demonstrate that their workers will
fare just as well without a right to bargain collectively as with it.

Finally, there’s one proposal that nicely mixes Christian
nationalism with better pay for workers: requiring employers to pay
time and a half to workers whom they compel to work on the Sabbath. If
your off-days normally come in the middle of the week and you’re
compelled to work on one of them, looks like you’re denominationally
out of luck.

_Mandate for Leadership _is more than a book; it’s a recruitment
poster. Its organizers want to use it to attract like-minded
conservatives into Washington, with the promise of political
appointments. “People need to lay down their tools, and step aside
from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to
serve,’” said the director of the project
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Paul Dans, to the AP. Project 2025 even ran a booth at the Iowa State
Fair looking for recruits.

It concludes with an afterword by Ed Feulner, Heritage’s founder,
who briefly runs through its previous editions and notes that Ronald
Reagan implemented “almost half” of their recommendations in his
first year as president, while Trump implemented 64 percent in his
first year.

What Feulner doesn’t note is how autocratic, theocratic, and
downright unhinged the current edition is when compared to its
predecessors. But in that, it merely is tracking the descent of the
entire Republican Party.

_HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of The American Prospect. His
email is [email protected].  Follow @HaroldMeyerson
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Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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Used with the permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org,
2023. All rights reserved. 

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