Project 2025 per Professor Brooks

This is a discussion of an interview 2024-10-26 about Project 2025 with Karl Brooks. After the interview, a video of it will be posted here with a 29:00 mm:ss audio file, prepared for distribution as the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show syndicated for the Pacifica Radio Network of over 200 community radio stations.

It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources and treating others with respect.

Karl Brooks discusses Project 2025 with Spencer Graves, originally produced for Radio Active Magazine on KKFI, Kansas City Community Radio, and for the fortnightly Media & Democracy series syndicated for the Pacifica Radio Network of over 200 community radio stations.

interview recorded 2024-10-26 about Project 2025 with Professor Brooks

29:00 mm:ss extract from interview recorded 2024-10-26 about Project 2025 with Professor Brooks.

Selected observations

Trump's knowledge of Project 2025

Early in the interview, Graves asked Brooks his reaction to Trump's denials that he knew anything about Project 2025. Brooks responded, "Trump's denials of any connection to project 2025 are, like most of the things he says he lies so frequently." The Wikipedia article on Project 2025 says that many contributors to Project 2025 "are associated with Trump and his 2024 presidential campaign." The Heritage Foundation employs many people closely aligned with Trump including members of his 2017–2021 administration. Moreover, some Trump campaign officials had regular contact with the Project 2025 team but began to distance themselves from it as it started generating controversy. Much of Project 2025 is contained in Trump's official "Agenda 47". (The next president will be the 47th in US history.)

Biggest problems facing the US today

Graves asked how Project 2025 defines the biggest problems facing the US today. Brooks said it "reads more like a lament for a lost America. They, I think, say that the biggest problems in America are too much freedom for women, too much equality for people of color, too much competence in the federal workforce, and too many protections for workers' rights and the natural systems that we all rely on to sustain life here on earth. ... [T]hey see the problems almost more cultural and political and legal than what you might call policy".

Global warming

Asked how Project 2025 perceives global warming, Brooks said, "Most of the authors of the segments about energy and climate change come from organizations that pretty expressly deny the reality.. ... Many of them have direct links to fossil fuel industries. ... Project 2025 endorses the promise that Trump made in the second year of his administration that the United States should ... dominate the world's energy markets" with fossil fuels.

Pollution

Graves then asked what Project 2025 wants to do about water and air pollution. Brooks said that the parts of Project 2025 dealing with the environment had been appointed to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by Trump and said the "EPA is probably twice as big as it needs to be" and far more powerful. It should be cut in half and moved out of DC, e.g., to Texas or Florida.

Personnel can be policy

A key point in Project 2025, Brooks said, "is the recognition .... that in DC, personnel can be policy." Project 2025 has compiled a huge list of Trump loyalist whom they hope to install in key positions in the federal government. They've also identified "blacklist members", people whom they believed were not sympathetic to Trump's goals or even tried to undermine them. Project 2025 believes, Brooks said, "that the federal workforce needs to have a lot more political appointees directly responsible to the president and not independent, qualified, competent civil servants." It's similar to the 1890s when our economic inequality is as grotesque as it is today. Loyalty matters to Trump and to Project 2025 more than competence.

The president can ignore the Supreme Court

Brooks continued, "JD Vance has identified many federal workers as the enemy from within. During the summer Vance suggested that the president's first act, should he be elected, would be to fire about half or more of all the federal agency employees throughout the country to make way for people who are personally loyal to Donald Trump and JD Vance. ... Vance, who is also a lawyer, said to Donald Trump, if you fire all these people, of course you violate probably half a dozen different laws ... . And if the Supreme Court finds that you broke the law, tough: Disregard the Supreme Court." Andrew Jackson did that when he was president of the US, 1829-1837. Recent decisions by the Supreme Court have made it much easier for the president to do that, e.g., in their decision in Trump v. United States (2024-07-01) that current and former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts while in office. Also, Loper Bright Enterprises decision (2024-06-28), which overturned the Chevron (1984) decision, makes it potentially impossible for governmental agencies to enforce the law as long as a major corporation can claim there is ambiguity in the statute.

Karl Brooks

Brooks is an attorney with a PhD in history. He served three terms in the Idaho state senate and taught environmental history at the University of Kansas for a decade during which time he wrote two books on (2006) Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy, (2009) Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law, 1945-1970, and edited a third, (2009) The Environmental Legacy of Harry S. Truman. In 2010 he was appointed the Administrator for Region 7 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas including native American jurisdictions in those states. In 2015, he became the national operations manager for the EPA. He later became deputy director of the Administrative Office of the Courts in New Mexico. Then he served two years as senior staff executive for the multi-county judicial district based in Taos before rejoining the faculty at KU.

Project 2025

Project 2025 is a political initiative published online in 2023 by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation as Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.

Kevin Roberts, President of The Heritage Foundation, introduced that book by noting that the Heritage Foundation had published an earlier Mandate for Leadership in January 1981, the same month that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President, and “By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy—and Reagan was on his way to ending stagflation, reviving American confidence and prosperity, and winning the Cold War.”

The Heritage Foundation has published new editions of Mandate for Leadership during 8 of the 11 presidential elections since 1981, with the current version being the ninth. In 2018, The Heritage Foundation claimed that the Trump administration had embraced 64%, almost 2/3rds, of the 334 proposed policies in the seventh edition of their Mandate for Leadership.

Other experts on US history and politics do not agree that Reagan ended stagflation, revived American confidence and prosperity, and won the Cold War. For example, Matthews (2022) claimed that Paul Volker, appointed to chair the US Federal Reserve system in 1979 by President Carter, had pushed the US into recession by 1980 and contributed to Reagan’s victory that November. And Ohio State professor John Mueller insists that the Cold War was not won by President Reagan but rather by the non-interventionist policies of President Carter, which encouraged the Soviet Union to try to support economic basket cases like Nicaragua and Mozambique and to invade Afghanistan, where they essentially bled to death.

The threat

Internet company executives have knowingly increased political polarization and violence including the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, because doing otherwise might have reduced their profits. Documentation of this is summarized in Category:Media reform to improve democracy.

Discussion

[Interested readers are invite to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources and treating others with respect.]

Bibliography

• Karl Boyd Brooks (2006). Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (in en). Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wikidata Q130621895. ISBN 978-0-295-98976-1. OCLC 62615830. 
• Karl Boyd Brooks (2009). Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law, 1945-1970 (in en). University Press of Kansas. Wikidata Q130622199. ISBN 978-0-7006-1627-5. 
• Karl Boyd Brooks, ed. (2009). The Environmental Legacy of Harry S. Truman (in en). Truman Legacy Series. Kirksville: Truman State University Press. Wikidata Q130622326. ISBN 978-1-931112-93-2. OCLC 317288276. 
• Ashley Carnahan (4 February 2024). "ABC host abruptly ends interview with JD Vance over Supreme Court remarks: 'No, no George'". Fox News. Wikidata Q130709054. https://www.foxnews.com/media/abc-host-abruptly-ends-interview-jd-vance-supreme-court-remarks-no-no-george. 
• Paul Dans, ed. (April 2023). Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (in en-us). Mandate for Leadership. The Heritage Foundation. Wikidata Q122632674. ISBN 978-0-89195-174-2. OCLC 1444085205. https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. 
• Dylan Matthews (13 July 2022). "How the Fed ended the last great American inflation — and how much it hurt". Vox. Wikidata Q130624117. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/13/23188455/inflation-paul-volcker-shock-recession-1970s. 
• John Mueller (4 March 2021). The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency (in en). Cambridge University Press. Wikidata Q113702723. ISBN 978-1-108-84383-6.