Trump Hypes Budget Chief’s Project 2025 Credentials — Here Are All the Times He Tried to Distance Himself From It
President Donald Trump openly boasted Thursday that he is consulting one of Project 2025’s top architects — his budget director Russell Vought — on what cuts and layoffs to impose during what he called the “unprecedented opportunity” of a government shutdown.
As he piled pressure on Democrats and hours after he called on Republicans to “clear out dead wood” from government, Trump wrote on Truth Social:
I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity. They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DJT.
Media commentators like liberal Fox News host Jessica Tarlov and CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju quickly seized on the remarks as a mask-off moment for Trump, given his previous claims that he had nothing and wanted nothing to do with Project 2025.
Project 2025 is a nearly 900-page conservative policy blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and larger network of other right-wing groups.
It calls for a sweeping overhaul of the federal government in 2025, including the replacement of tens of thousands of civil servants with presidential loyalists, the consolidation of executive power, and the dismantling of regulatory authority in areas such as climate, healthcare, and education.
Backers see it as a roadmap to “break the deep state.” Critics have warned it amounts to an authoritarian playbook for a second Trump term.
Indeed, Democrats spent much of the 2024 campaign warning that Project 2025 was not just a think-tank exercise, but a working model for Trump’s second-term policymaking. His general election opponent, Kamala Harris, blasted it as “a detailed and dangerous plan.” Since Trump returned to the White House, some independent activists have attempted to catalogue overlaps between the plan’s objectives and Trump’s agenda.
Trump, however, spent the campaign denying any link.
On July 5, 2024, he posted: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying,” adding that some ideas were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Later that month, on July 20, at a campaign rally, he claimed Democrats were trying to make him sound “extreme” and that claims he was associated with the blueprint were “misinformation.”
“I’m not an extremist at all,” he said at the time, adding that Project 2025 had been written by the “radical right” before disavowing it: “I don’t know anything about it, I don’t want to know anything about it.”
At the ABC presidential debate with Harris on September 10, Trump went further: “I have nothing to do as she knows better than anyone, I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That is out there. I have not read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it,” he said.
He dismissed the authors of Project 2025 as a “group of people that got together.”
“They came up with some ideas, I guess, some good, some bad,” he added. “But it makes no difference. I have nothing to do. Everybody knows I’m an open book.”
And in a Time magazine interview published last December, he offered only a hedged acknowledgment: “I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things. They have some things that are very conservative and very good. They have other things that I don’t like.”
He went on to blast the authors for publishing it before the election, calling it “foolish” and “totally inappropriate” before complaining it was used by “the enemy” against him.
Going back to April 2022, however, the president did praise the Heritage Foundation in a speech and applauded the organization as a “great group” who were going “to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Needless to say, Trump’s Truth Social post has jolted Washington by teasing the open embrace of the very plan he has long dismissed as irrelevant.
