'Shoestring operation' and infighting: Reporter goes behind the scenes at Project 2025

The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 has been described as a massive, behind-the-scenes force recruiting an army of conservative ideologues to reshape the federal government, give former President Donald Trump almost limitless executive power, impose Christian nationalism, and gut federal programs across the board from Social Security to military families' benefits.

But while all those plans are laid out in the document, the organization behind the plan is hardly the big, slick operation advertised, reported Politico — on the contrary, it's a small handful of bickering staff members trying to make do with threadbare funding.

When Ian Ward visited the main offices of the Heritage Foundation for a tour in June, he wrote, "What I discovered — during my visit and in my conversations with conservatives involved in the project — was a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation and questionable leadership.

"Project 2025 had set out to turn Trumpism into a well-oiled machine; instead, it had created an engine of the same sort of political disorder that defined the first Trump White House."

One of the key disputes among staffers, wrote Ward, was the hiring of Rick Dearborn, who managed Trump's 2016 transition team, to a senior role in the project advising on operations in the West Wing.

This kicked off a wave of infighting, with many arguing Dearborn mismanaged that transition and shouldn't be in charge of anything that would inform another one. One staffer reportedly said, “It was essentially like asking an amputee sitting at home who’s never driven a car to comment on Formula One.”

Another person whose involvement raised criticism was Steven Bradbury, who served in the George W. Bush administration and drafted opinions authorizing the use of torture for terror suspects.

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Meanwhile, as Democrats have hammered the GOP on the plan's most extreme and unpopular elements, Trump himself has run away from it, calling it "extreme" and denying any affiliation. This week, Paul Dans, one of the major figures working on Project 2025, was forced out, for which the Trump campaign claimed credit.

For all of these issues, wrote Ward, and despite Trump's efforts to cut the Heritage Foundation loose, Project 2025 is not dead.

For one thing, he wrote, "Many of the people who have been closely involved in the project ... are likely to hold senior positions in the next Trump White House."

Additionally, a hypothetical Trump transition team might find itself "relying on the project’s resources, especially its personnel database," simply because it's the only comprehensive list of people ready to execute Trump's agenda out of the gate, the report stated.