J.D. Vance, vice-president
Throughout the campaign, Vance attempted to distance the ticket from Project 2025, but the vice-president-elect is a prominent ally of the Heritage Foundation and a longtime friend and collaborator with foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin D. Roberts. Vance wrote the foreword for Roberts’s upcoming book,
Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. In
the foreword, Vance has nothing but praise for Roberts and the Heritage Foundation, calling the think tank “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump”:
In October, a Vance spokesperson insisted that the foreword “has nothing to do with Project 2025,” and Vance has said that “there are some good ideas” in the proposal as well as “some things I disagree with.”
Vance additionally has ties to Project 2025 co-author Oren Cass and project contributor Elbridge Colby. He also
wrote the introduction for a 2017 report from the Heritage Foundation that put forward an expansive policy agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms.
Russell Vought, Office of Management and Budget director
Trump has nominated
Russell Vought to return the role he held in the first Trump administration, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Vought is one of the architects of Project 2025, and he wrote the
Mandate for Leadership’s Executive Office chapter, which proposes a sweeping transformation of the federal bureaucracy to eliminate the independence of federal agencies and consolidate and expand the president’s executive power. The introduction of the chapter has a revolutionary tone, explaining that “The overall situation” of the executive branch “is constitutionally dire, unsustainably expensive, and in urgent need of repair. Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.”
Copy, PasteVought is a proponent of slashing, impounding, or reallocating government spending without congressional approval, as well as firing scores of career government employees and replacing them with political appointees. The think tank Vought founded, Center for Renewing America, has put out numerous proposals recommending authoritarian presidential power grabs, including using recess appointments to avoid congressional oversight, ending the Department of Justice’s tradition of political independence, and deploying the military to quell social unrest on U.S. soil. The think tank is also one of Project 2025’s advisory groups.
This post has been updated.
