The Heritage Foundation’s self-proclaimed playbook for a second Trump administration called Project 2025 lays out a slew of supposed transition plans. The conservative think tank’s Project 2025 report covers some 900 pages and contains 30 chapters addressing various agencies.
But Donald Trump says he has “nothing to do with” Project 2025, that he disagrees with some of its proposals and “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
As with most things in Trump-world, the truth is not found in his words.
For example, most of the Project 2025 authors are former Trump appointees. However, none are A-listers. The chapter on EPA was written by Mandy Gunasekara, who first came to public attention as the staffer who handed the late Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) a snowball that he tossed across the Senate chamber to rebut the idea of global warming. She brings that same policy sophistication to the present task. Her 32-page agenda is full of bureaucratic bullet points lacking much context or explanation.
The chapter for the Department of the Interior was written by William Perry Pendley, who failed to win Senate confirmation as Trump’s Director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management despite several attempts. Nonetheless, Pendley illegally occupied that office well past his legal sell-by date to the point where his actions were invalidated by federal courts due to his violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.
Since Pendley’s entire undistinguished tenure was within BLM, his 28-page chapter ignores much of the rest of Interior’s portfolio. When he does venture outside BLM, he is clearly out of his depth. For example, he acknowledges the looming extinction crisis facing wildlife, but his solution would direct “the Fish and Wildlife Service to design and implement an impartial conservation triage program by prioritizing the allocation of limited resources to maximize conservation returns, relative to the conservation goals, under a constrained budget.” An “impartial conservation triage program”? Yeah, that sounds like a Trump idea.
Similarly, much of Project 2025 is half-baked right-wing woolgathering. For example, it calls for restructuring U.S. monetary policy, dismantling the Federal Reserve Board, and returning the U.S. economy to the gold standard, discarded under President Nixon back in 1971. Meanwhile, candidate Trump says he will keep Jerome Powell as the head of the Federal Reserve Board until the end of his term.
Project 2025 also calls for abolishing the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and casting its parts to the bureaucratic winds. NOAA contains the National Weather Service and its National Hurricane Center. I believe one of the very few lessons that Trump learned from the fiasco called “Sharpie-Gate,” where he tried to alter a NOAA map of Hurricane Dorian’s predicted path, is not to mess with hurricane predictions.
Project 2025 also calls on federal authorities to ban pornography. It is hard to imagine a less likely anti-porn crusader than Donald Trump.
This is not to minimize the very real adverse consequences to the environment, public health, and social welfare of a second Trump term. The realities are scary enough without the need to spend time worrying about boogeymen conjured up by the Heritage Foundation.
Jeff Ruch is the former Executive Director of PEER and now serves as its Pacific Director. 
