# data[].attributes.headline
Understanding Project 2025 & a 2nd Trump term

# data[].attributes.subject
Understanding Project 2025 & a 2nd Trump term

# data[].attributes.body
In this essay I will be writing an op-ed which will be setting the record straight on what Project 2025 and a 2nd term of a Trump presidancy will mean for youth minorities in the United states. I find that this issue needs addressing due to alot of misinformation being spewed by "fact-based" organizations such as Fox News or the New York Post, which even their non-editorial publications are extremely biased from the ground up. One of the larger things that irks me is how the people writing articles on, "gen-z" this & "the woke youth" that, are often older people, Gen X or Baby boomers. I find that this is a serious problem as there is a fundamental differnece in mentalities, and a bias for the ones writing the articles to say their you know what doesn't stink while demeaning the youth for being naieve or plain stupid. With so many news sources providing baised or down right manufactred "facts", it's more important now than ever to be educated. I will cite fact based & peer reviewed sources along side low bias news sources reporting fact and not opinion. I wan't those who don't have the know how to navigate the legal bs and fake news thrown at them daily.

# data[].attributes.body
This AP news article covers the planning and contributions made by conservative organizations to dismantle the current democratic government and transform it into the ideal conservative government for Trump to slide into and take control of. Some of the facts are that over 350 conservative groups have produced a nearly 1,000-page book of policies detailing proposed changes across numerous government agencies. These proposed policies threaten the rights of millions of Americans, and the planet as a whole due to rolling back environmental regulations. These policies are aimed to be implemented within the first 180 days of Trump's 2nd term.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
WASHINGTON (AP) - With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.

Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president's return - or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President in 2024.

With a nearly 1,000-page "Project 2025" handbook and an "army" of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the "deep state" bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.

"We need to flood the zone with conservatives," said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking.

"This is a clarion call to come to Washington," he said. "People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, 'This is my lifetime moment to serve.'"

The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.

Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the "administrative state" from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president's agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive's approach to governing.

The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump's first years in office, when the Republican president's team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance - by lawmakers, government workers and even Trump's own appointees who refused to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.

While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.

And if Trump wins a second term, the work from the Heritage coalition ensures the president will have the personnel to carry forward his unfinished White House business.

"The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state," said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America.

Much of the new president's agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what's called Schedule F - a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.

Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021, but Trump - and other presidential hopefuls - now vow to reinstate it.

"It frightens me," said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, who warns the idea would bring a return to a political spoils system.

Experts argue Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service, which was overhauled during President Jimmy Carter's administration in an attempt to ensure a professional workforce and end political bias dating from 19th century patronage.

As it now stands, just 4,000 members of the federal workforce are considered political appointees who typically change with each administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of career professional jobs at risk.

"We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide. Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun," Guy said.

The ideas contained in Heritage's coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.

There's a "top to bottom overhaul" of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

There are proposals to have the Pentagon "abolish" its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the "woke" agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

Chapter by chapter, the pages offer a how-to manual for the next president, similar to one Heritage produced 50 years ago, ahead of the Ronald Reagan administration. Authored by some of today's most prominent thinkers in the conservative movement, it's often sprinkled with apocalyptic language.

A chapter written by Trump's former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security calls for bolstering the number of political appointees, and redeploying office personnel with law enforcement ability into the field "to maximize law enforcement capacity."

At the White House, the book suggests the new administration should "reexamine" the tradition of providing work space for the press corps and ensure the White House counsel is "deeply committed" to the president's agenda.

Conservatives have long held a grim view of federal government offices, complaining they are stacked with liberals intent on halting Republican agendas.

But Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said most federal workers live in the states and are your neighbors, family and friends. "Federal employees are not the enemy," she said.

While presidents typically rely on Congress to put policies into place, the Heritage project leans into what legal scholars refer to as a unitary view of executive power that suggests the president has broad authority to act alone.

To push past senators who try to block presidential Cabinet nominees, Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative roles, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.

John McEntee, another former Trump official advising the effort, said the next administration can "play hardball a little more than we did with Congress."

In fact, Congress would see its role diminished - for example, with a proposal to eliminate congressional notification on certain foreign arms sales.

Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers and was not part of the Heritage project, said there's a certain amount of "fantasizing" about the president's capabilities.

"Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he's in charge, so everyone has to do what he says - and that's just not the system the government we live under," he said.

At the Heritage office, Dans has a faded photo on his wall of an earlier era in Washington, with the White House situated almost alone in the city, dirt streets in all directions.

It's an image of what conservatives have long desired, a smaller federal government.

The Heritage coalition is taking its recruitment efforts on the road, crisscrossing America to fill the federal jobs. They staffed the Iowa State Fair this month and signed up hundreds of people, and they're building out a database of potential employees, inviting them to be trained in government operations.

"It's counterintuitive," Dans acknowledged - the idea of joining government to shrink it - but he said that's the lesson learned from the Trump days about what's needed to "regain control."

___

This story has been corrected to show the name of the university is the University of Colorado Denver, not the University of Colorado.

___

Follow the AP's coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
2024 united states presidential election

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump's vision

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump.

# data[].attributes.body
This CNN news article covers the Trump side of Project 2025 where he claims no knowledge of anything regarding Project 2025 such as who runs it, what legislation is in it, and the plans to implement it. Trump publically distances himself from 2025 as it is a rather extreme piece of proposed policies and he had votes to gain by not publicly showing support for project 2025. Now that he has taken the role as president-elect many speculate whether it will be implemented. However, many of Trump's former staff from his first term are a part of the group that wrote the proposed policies for the trump administration, there is reasonable doubt that Trump does know of Project 2025, what policies are in it, and how he wants it to be implemented.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trump claims not to know who is behind Project 2025. A CNN review found at least 140 people who worked for him are involved | CNN Politics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Donald Trump has lately made clear he wants little to do with Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican president that has attracted considerable blowback in his race for the White House.

# data[].attributes.body
This peer-reviewed article covers the actions Trump plans to take during his presidency. Trump proposed to purge thousands of federal civil servants, His implementation project 2025, and take control of the executive and civil branches of the government. This article is wholly information so here is the key takeaway, Federal sector labor law including union certification and contract enforcement will play a major role in the balance of power between the president and civil service during his 2nd term.

# data[].attributes.body
This AP news article covers the proposed federal changes that Project 2025 aims to implement. Project 2025 wants to utilize Trump as a tool to implement its ideologies. Some federal changes that Project 2025 aims for are the reduction of protections for civil service jobs, replacing long-standing government employees with those who align with the political alliance of those in power and those loyal to the administration, and making it easier to implement conservative policies against less political agencies such as the EPA. Project 2025, and by extension Trump, emphasize immigration restrictions, mass deregulation for corporations, and greater presidential control.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
MIAMI (AP) - Donald Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, a massive proposed overhaul of the federal government drafted by longtime allies and former officials in his administration, days after the head of the think tank responsible for the program suggested there would be a second American Revolution.

"I know nothing about Project 2025," Trump posted on his social media website. "I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."

The 922-page plan outlines a dramatic expansion of presidential power and a plan to fire as many as 50,000 government workers to replace them with Trump loyalists. President Joe Biden's reelection campaign has worked to draw more attention to the agenda, particularly as Biden tries to keep fellow Democrats on board after his disastrous debate.

"He's trying to hide his connections to his allies' extreme Project 2025 agenda," Biden said of Trump in a statement released by his campaign Saturday. "The only problem? It was written for him, by those closest to him. Project 2025 should scare every single American."

Trump has outlined his own plans to remake the government if he wins a second term, including staging the largest deportation operation in U.S. history and imposing tariffs on potentially all imports. His campaign has previously warned outside allies not to presume to speak for the former president and suggested their transition-in-waiting efforts were unhelpful.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast Tuesday that Republicans are "in the process of taking this country back." Former U.S. Rep. Dave Brat of Virginia hosted the show for Bannon, who is serving a four-month prison term.

"We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be," Roberts said.

Those comments were widely circulated online and assailed by Biden's campaign, which accused Trump and his allies of "dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America."

Some of the people involved in Project 2025 are former senior administration officials. The project's director is Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under Trump. Trump's campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt was featured in one of Project 2025's videos.

John McEntee, a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration, is a senior adviser. McEntee told the conservative news site The Daily Wire earlier this year that Project 2025's team would integrate a lot of its work with the campaign after the summer when Trump would announce his transition team.

Trump's comments on Project 2025 come before the Republican Party's meetings this coming week to begin to draft its party platform.

Project 2025 has been preparing its own 180-day agenda for the next administration that it plans to share privately, rather than as part of its public-facing book of priorities for a Republican president. A key Trump ally, Russ Vought, who contributed to Project 2025 and is drafting this final pillar, is also on the Republican National Committee's platform writing committee.

Project 2025 said in a statement it not tied to a specific candidate or campaign.

"We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations for the next conservative president," it said. "But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement."

A Biden campaign spokesperson said Project 2025 staff members are also leading the Republican policy platform. "Project 2025 is the extreme policy and personnel playbook for Trump's second term that should scare the hell out of the American people," said Ammar Moussa.

On Thursday, as the country celebrated Independence Day and Biden prepared for his television interview after his halting debate performance, the president's campaign posted on X a shot from the dystopian TV drama "The Handmaid's Tale" showing a group of women in the show's red dresses and white hats standing in formation by a reflecting pool with a cross at the far end where the Washington Monument should be. The story revolves around women who are stripped of their identities and forced to give birth to children for other couples in a totalitarian regime.

"Fourth of July under Trump's Project 2025," the post said.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
2024 united states presidential election

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Biden assails Project 2025, a plan to transform government, and Trump's claim to be unaware of it

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Former President Donald Trump claims he knows nothing about a plan for a massive overhaul of the federal government drafted by some of his former administration officials.