In the lead-up to the Republican convention, many credulously lauded Trump for “softening” or “moderating” the GOP platform on the issue, despite the fact that the platform proposes fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights.

Trump said that Project 2025 went “way too far” on abortion in a Fox News interview filmed over the weekend in Mar-a-Lago, prior to the attempt on his life. But just hours after the interview aired on Monday morning, Trump announced his pick for running mate: Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a man with a recent history of strong opposition to abortion whose selection was celebrated by anti-abortion groups like Students for Life Action.

In the past 48 hours, Vance has tried to backpedal on his abortion stances, including by scrubbing an “END ABORTION” section on his Senate campaign website, which now redirects to a fundraising page for the Trump-Vance ticket. Until he got the nod, this site succinctly distilled Vance’s “100 percent pro-life” views:

Eliminating abortion is first and foremost about protecting the unborn, but it’s also about making our society more pro-child and pro-family. The historic Dobbs decision puts this new era of society into motion, one that prioritizes family and the sanctity of all life.

Vance’s views on abortion thus track with one of Project 2025’s most basic proposals: that “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.” Between Trump’s platform, Vance’s track record, and Vance’s ties to those leading Project 2025, the Trump campaign’s attempts to distinguish their own platform from the Project 2025 anti-abortion agenda are growing increasingly implausible.

Fetuses and the 14th Amendment

In past presidential election cycles, the GOP platform devoted multiple pages to various anti-abortion proposals, including appointing Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and enacting a national ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which Trump advocated when the House passed such a ban in 2017.

The concept of fetal personhood — that fetuses and embryos should have the same constitutional rights as people — has long been at the heart of the GOP’s anti-abortion plank. But past platforms envisioned passing a “human life amendment” to the Constitution and related legislation.

When the Republican National Committee unveiled the draft platform last week, it had just four sentences on abortion. Since the national 20-week ban was dropped, many commentators interpreted the platform as softening the party’s stance on abortion.

Abortion opponents, however, celebrated one sentence, in particular, which was approved by a voice vote of GOP delegates on Monday: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”

Far from moderating on abortion, the GOP platform now suggests that fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights — without the need for any new laws or amendments. This aligns neatly with Project 2025’s roadmap and Vance’s views. 

Notably, the platform refers to the constitutional rights of the “person” under the 14th Amendment, rather than the rights of the “unborn,” as prior platforms phrased it.

“To people in the know, the reference to every person being entitled to due process will bring to mind the idea of fetal personhood and suggest that the GOP will pursue it,” Mary Ziegler, a legal historian, wrote on X after the draft platform came out.

Plenty of anti-abortion organizations certainly read it that way and thus endorsed the revised language. 

“It is important that the GOP reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, in a statement.

“The most significant contribution that the GOP platform makes for LIFE comes in celebrating the fact that the 14th Amendment ‘guarantees’ legal protection for the preborn,” said Students for Life Action’s Kristan Hawkins in a similarly triumphant statement.

“It is proper and good to recognize every life, including those in the womb, share the distinct protections gained by those that have given so much and found as a guarantee within the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,” Americans United for Life wrote in its analysis of the draft platform.

As Erika Bachiochi, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center think tank argued in the wake of the Dobbs decision, getting courts to recognize fetuses as full “persons” under the law and Constitution is “the movement’s ultimate — if elusive — goal.”

“The Republican party has now decided that the Constitution already protects fetal personhood,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a University of Texas law professor who studies reproductive rights and religion. “They’re going to take the view that fetuses have full constitutional rights.”

“The RNC platform attempting to walk back its extremist positions on abortion is irrelevant,” said Sabrina Talukder, director of the Women’s Initiative at Center for American Progress Action, “because Project 2025 will ensure abortion is banned everywhere.”

Both Sepper and Talukder pointed to a ruling in February from the Alabama state Supreme Court as an example of the fetal personhood legal strategy in action. The Alabama court ruled frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization were “children” under a 19th-century wrongful death statute, and it cited the Dobbs decision for the idea that “unborn children” have “civil rights.”

Trump-Vance on Project 2025 and Abortion

In his Fox News interview, Trump said abortion “will never be a federal issue again.” But if, as the GOP platform suggests, fetuses and embryos already have constitutional rights, the federal government arguably has a mandate to protect those rights and restrict abortion. And Project 2025 lays out a road map to doing so using federal regulatory processes.

The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the entire Project 2025 manifesto, while the Biden campaign quickly labeled Trump and Vance “the Project 2025 ticket.” The playbook was drafted and edited by many in Trump’s camp, including numerous former Trump administration officials.

Before getting the nod from Trump, Vance told Newsmax that he had “reviewed a lot of” Project 2025 and found a mix of “good ideas” plus “some things I disagree with,” without further specifying which were good and bad. 

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In the foreword to the 900-page playbook, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts urges the “next conservative administration” to “work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life.”

When Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, Roberts called him a “good friend” that he was “privately really rooting for.” Earlier this year, Roberts said Vance was “absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.”

Vance is also a member of the Teneo Network, an invite-only conservative social group which is on the Project 2025 advisory board. In a private speech to Teneo members in 2021, Vance praised recently enacted abortion restrictions in Texas — S.B. 8, the abortion “bounty hunter law” — despite “the legal technicalities about whether that law is ultimately going to survive legal challenges.”

The “existing federal powers” available to restrict abortion, according to Project 2025’s more detailed chapters, include the Comstock Act, a sweepingly broad anti-vice law passed in 1873 that bans mailing materials “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” The Biden Justice Department has interpreted the Comstock Act to prohibit mailing abortion-related materials only when the sender knows they will be used for an illegal abortion, but this interpretation is not binding on future administrations.

Last year, a coalition of Republican attorneys general letters sent letters to CVS and Walgreens warning that sending abortion pills by mail violates the Comstock Act. One of the architects of the conservative legal strategy against abortion, Jonathan Mitchell, told the New York Times that he hopes Trump and anti-abortion groups would “keep their mouths shut as much as possible” about the Comstock Act until the election.

Project 2025 invokes the Comstock Act in the same way, in two chapters drafted by former Trump administration officials. The Justice Department chapter proposes “a campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” in the Comstock Act “against providers and distributors of abortion pills.”

“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” writes Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel of America First Legal, who drafted the Justice Department chapter and served in the Trump DOJ. “The Department of Justice in the next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.”

“Project 2025 is an authoritarian playbook to push a radical extremist agenda and outlines ways to create a backdoor national abortion ban by misapplying the Comstock Act,” Talukder, of the Center for American Progress, told The Intercept, “bypassing having to pass a national abortion ban in Congress or through an executive order.”

The Trump campaign and Vance’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about their views on using the Comstock Act to restrict abortion pills.

The Project 2025 chapter about the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, also cites the Comstock Act. The FDA should stop “promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs,” according to Roger Severino, who wrote the chapter and served as the HHS head of civil rights enforcement under Trump.

Severino also argues that the FDA should “reverse its approval” of abortion medications like mifepristone, and that one morning-after emergency contraceptive, Ella, should be removed from mandatory insurance coverage because it is a “potential abortifacient.” In a post to X, Project 2025 claimed the manifesto “says nothing about banning or restricting contraception.”

The Trump campaign and Vance’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about mifepristone and Ella.

Earlier this month, Vance caught flak from anti-abortion groups for saying he supported the Supreme Court’s decision dismissing a court challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Once Trump chose Vance as his VP pick, however, other abortion opponents downplayed the remark as part of a “left-leaning gotcha interview” on “Meet The Press” and thus insufficient to draw “too broad a conclusion about Vance’s abortion advocacy.”

But in his Teneo speech in 2021, Vance made his “abortion advocacy” clear. Praising Texas S.B. 8 — which prohibits abortions as early as six weeks, when the embryo is the size of a pea — Vance called it “a law that protects the rights of the unborn.” Like Project 2025 and the GOP platform, Vance believes fetuses and embryos already have rights that need protecting.

The post On Abortion, JD Vance Is the Bridge Between Trump and Project 2025 appeared first on The Intercept.

The application, including multiple-choice questions and open-ended queries, sought to place would-be Trump apparatchiks on the political spectrum and suss out their political priorities.

One of the people who filled the form out entered a name that would echo through the first six months of Trump’s new term: Paul Ingrassia.

Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Office of Special Counsel.

Now, pending a Senate confirmation, Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Office of Special Counsel. Among other responsibilities related to the federal workforce, the office is supposed to protect whistleblowers and keep partisan politics out of the civil service.

For Ingrassia’s critics, he would be just the wrong person to lead OSC.

The Project 2025 questionnaire answers given under Ingrassia’s name would appear to bolster the case that the applicant’s primary concern is loyalty to Trump and sharp-elbowed partisan politics. The responses include allusions to severely cutting down federal agencies because of their “toxic ideologies”; halting immigration; and imposing a new test for voting. (Ingrassia did not respond to a request for comment.)

A leaked dataset of the Project 2025 application questionnaires was released in June by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets. An analysis of the leaked data showed that more than 13,000 people had filled out the applications. (Heritage did not respond to a request for comment.)

DDoSecrets redacted the full entries for applicants but provided The Intercept with an unredacted version. The contact information and other personal data included in the Project 2025 file matched Paul Ingrassia’s information.

Ingrassia was set to face a confirmation hearing in the Senate on July 24 but it was delayed at the last minute.

Good government groups are opposing his appointment.

“As head of OSC, the special counsel should be someone who respects federal workers, who will treat them fairly and without bias,” a group of 24 civil society groups led by the Project on Government Oversight wrote in an open letter to Senators opposing Ingrassia’s nomination. “The special counsel must be a person who will exercise their duties in a nonpartisan manner, a person of honesty and integrity who has the necessary experience to fulfill such an important role.”

“Paul Ingrassia is none of these.”

Ingrassia has advocated for the arrest of the president’s political enemies, said that Democrats are a threat to democracy, and labeled Republicans who disagree with him as RINOs — a derisive acronym meaning “Republicans in Name Only.”

“Paul Ingrassia is a respected attorney who has served President Trump exceptionally well and will continue to do so as the next head of the U.S. Office of Special Counse,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, in an email received after publication. “The eleventh-hour smear campaign will not deter the President from supporting this nomination, and the administration continues to have full confidence in his ability to advance the President’s agenda.”

The Questionnaire

In the Project 2025 questionnaire filled out under the name Paul Ingrassia, the respondent agreed that “the President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.”

A response to a prompt about which political issue he was most passionate about and why included a long list of pet projects. 

“I’m passionate about restructuring the administrative state, condensing the size and scope of the various bureaucratic agencies, defunding many of them, given how destructive they and their toxic ideologies have been on the American way of life; reform and shut down many of the intelligence agencies; fully upend the justice department; reform the courts; redesign Washington, D.C., and build an even better city in its wake,” the Project 2025 applicant wrote.

The questionnaire also asked respondents to “name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why.” The response — Trump and Pat Buchanan — lacked an explanation. When asked to “name one person, past or present, who has most influenced the development of your political philosophy,” the data under Paul Ingrassia’s name said “Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Donald Trump.”

The answer to the question about what issues the applicant was passionate about said:

I’m also very passionate about immigration — specifically, ending birthright citizenship, deporting all illegals and thinking about economic, other ways, to incentivize them to self-deport, building the wall and militarizing it with state of the art technology, personnel; instating a moratorium on all immigration, and revising the tests for citizenship, voting, other basic privileges of American life.

Trump Loyalist

Long before his stint in government, Ingrassia was a right-wing firebrand. A 30-year-old lawyer and right-wing commentator, he has referred to himself as “Trump’s favorite Substacker” and spent years writing articles praising Trump.

He has ties to far-right figures and those with fringe beliefs. Last summer, Ingrassia showed up at a rally organized by far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes, whom Ingrassia has advocated for in the past. He also has a relationship with Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a January 6 rioter who the Justice Department called a “Nazi sympathizer.”

Ingrassia’s social media has included 9/11 conspiracy theories and support for Alex Jones, who gained notoriety for denying children were murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.

He graduated from Cornell Law in 2022. In 2023, Ingrassia worked for McBride Law, a firm that represented far-right influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate when they were facing allegations of rape and human trafficking in Romania and the United Kingdom. The firm filed a defamation lawsuit against one of their accusers that summer. (The Tate brothers have consistently denied these allegations. Proceedings are ongoing in both countries.)

Ingrassia was not legally allowed to practice or market himself as a lawyer at the time; the firm referred to him as an Ivy League-educated associate attorney working on the case. He sat for the bar in July 2023 and was admitted to practice in New York on July 30, 2024.

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After McBride, he worked as a communications director for the conservative nonprofit National Constitutional Law Union and occasionally wrote articles for the right-wing site Gateway Pundit. He left both positions after taking a job in January as a presidential liaison to the Department of Justice in January.

After a few months, however, he was reassigned from the Justice Department to another agency amid reports of administration infighting.

Reporting from ABC suggested his advocacy for the department to hire John Pierce, his old boss at the National Constitutional Law Union, played a role. Pierce represented many January 6 rioters. His work as a defense attorney faced criticism in the media.

Correction: July 24, 2025
This story has been corrected to remove an errant reference to the Office of Special Counsel being housed at the Justice Department. It has also been updated to include a statement from the White House received after publication and note the delay in Ingrassia’s hearing.

The post Project 2025 Data Leak Shows a Paul Ingrassia Calling for Test for Voting and Halting Immigration appeared first on The Intercept.

Some former Trump administration officials who contributed to Project 2025’s controversial 900-page manifesto seem to have gotten the signal. The Intercept found Project 2025 recently tweaked its list of individual contributors, removing two names entirely and modifying two more to eliminate their employment affiliations with prominent firms.

For weeks, former President Donald Trump has been trying to distance himself from Project 2025. In recent months, some conservative organizations have quietly exited the Project 2025 advisory board, including some that were extensively involved in drafting the playbook.

After the Tuesday ouster of the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, who previously served in the Trump administration, the Washington Post reported that “there had been requests from people to get their names taken off the work.” A campaign spokesperson reportedly threatened to blacklist other Project 2025 affiliates from posts in the Trump administration.

All four individuals identified by The Intercept had been listed as Project 2025 contributors since April 2023, when the Heritage Foundation first put out the playbook. All four changes were made quietly on different dates in July, including three after Trump issued a statement saying he had “no idea who is behind” the project. Heritage did not respond to questions about these changes, including whether other contributors had asked for their names or affiliations to be removed.

“The contributors listed below generously volunteered their time and effort to assist the authors in the development and writing of this volume’s 30 chapters,” reads a disclaimer on the Project 2025 contributors list, which currently includes more than 250 names. “The policy views and reform proposals herein are not an all-inclusive catalogue of conservative ideas for the next President, nor is there unanimity among the contributors or the organizations with which they are affiliated with regard to the recommendations.”

The most prominent name to disappear from Project 2025 is David Moore, dean of Brigham Young University Law School. As recently as July 16, Moore was listed among the contributors, along with his BYU affiliation, but his name was no longer there on July 17.

Before leading BYU Law, Moore served in the Trump administration as acting deputy administrator and general counsel of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Moore, who did not respond to questions, was named dean in June 2023, two months after the Project 2025 playbook’s release.

The second former Trump official whose name evaporated from the Project 2025 list is attorney Sohan Dasgupta, who served as special counsel to the Department of Education and deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security. Dasgupta’s name and affiliation with the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, where he is a partner, appeared as recently as July 27. By July 28, it was gone. Dasgupta also did not answer questions about his involvement in Project 2025.

Two other individuals remain listed as Project 2025 contributors, but their entries were recently modified to eliminate their employers.

Earl Comstock, an attorney who served as senior adviser in the Trump Department of Commerce, is now senior policy counsel at the law firm White & Case in Washington, D.C. As of July 27, Comstock’s name appeared along with his employer, but by July 28 the firm’s name was gone.

“White & Case is not affiliated with Project 2025,” said a firm spokesperson. “Earl Comstock contributed to the project as a private citizen. The change was made for accuracy.”

The final tweak on Project 2025’s contributor list was for Joel Frushone, who served during the Trump years as a spokesperson for the Peace Corps and U.S. Economic Development Administration. As of July 2, Frushone was credited as a Project 2025 contributor along with his current employer, the accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young. By July 3, only his name appeared. Frushone declined to speak with The Intercept, and Ernst & Young did not respond to questions.

The post Project 2025 Contributors Are Abandoning Ship as Trump Turns Against Them appeared first on The Intercept.

Miller’s group, America First Legal Foundation, was one of the first organizations to jump ship from the Project 2025 advisory board. Last week, America First Legal asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board webpage. The organization was part of Project 2025 since at least June 2022, when the Heritage Foundation first announced the advisory board’s formation.

America First Legal staff were deeply involved in writing and editing the Project 2025 playbook. Its vice president and general counsel, Gene Hamilton, drafted an entire chapter about the Justice Department, which proposes launching a “campaign” to criminalize mailing abortion pills. In a footnote, Hamilton thanked “the staff at America First Legal Foundation,” who he wrote deserved “special mention for their assistance while juggling other responsibilities.” 

Last summer, in a podcast with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, Hamilton said that one thing that makes Project 2025 special is the vast coalition of conservative groups that came together to craft it. 

“What is so great about this book, and this chapter, and this whole initiative that Heritage is leading,” Hamilton said, “is that we have a coalition of organizations and individuals coming together to say: ‘These are the things, these are the bare minimum things that we expect you to do in this next conservative administration.’”

The Project 2025 playbook list of contributors includes three other America First attorneys: senior vice president Reed Rubinstein, legislative counsel John Zadrozny, and legal counsel Michael Ding, who also co-taught a module in Project 2025’s training academy. 

America First Legal did not respond to questions about why it asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board despite its prior participation.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank, were among the more than 100 groups listed on the Project 2025 website as part of its advisory board. By Wednesday, Americans United for Life and the Mackinac Center had vanished. 

Both organizations were relatively recent additions to the Project 2025 coalition. The Heritage Foundation announced they had joined in February 2024, several months after the massive playbook was released.

Neither organization would elaborate as to why it had joined the Project 2025 board in the first place or why it was exiting it now.

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“Americans United for Life has always sought to maintain a non-partisan stance,” said John Mize, chief executive officer at Americans United for Life, in an emailed statement. The group’s current pinned tweet on X thanks J.D. Vance for his contributions “to the pro-life movement,” and the Project 2025 playbook’s anti-abortion proposals seem to align with its philosophy and goals. 

“Going forward into the heart of this election season, we believe we can be most effective in our mission if we maintain this posture,” Mize said. “Of course, we will continue to partner with the Heritage Foundation as opportunity allows, knowing they share our profound commitment to the Life issue.”

A spokesperson said the Mackinac Center had “offered a few recommendations on energy and labor issues” to Project 2025, but that “Project 2025 contains some ideas we do not endorse and others outside of our scope.”

“Because of that, we requested that our name be removed,” said Holly Wetzel, public relations director at the Mackinac Center. 

Wetzel did not respond to questions about which parts of Project 2025 the Mackinac Center did not endorse and whether the think tank read the playbook before joining the advisory board.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about these defections from Project 2025. 

The post Conservative Organizations Are Quietly Scurrying Away From Project 2025  appeared first on The Intercept.

“I like to refer to it as sort of the menu from Cheesecake Factory,” he said of a document that calls for outlawing pornography and withdrawing FDA approval for abortion medications, among its 900 pages of choice offerings. “It’s every possible thing that somebody might want to take on.”

“It is impossible for every individual conservative to agree with everything in the document,” he told reporters at a Heritage event outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

But conservatives increasingly are finding this menu hard to swallow. A growing number of groups that Heritage previously listed as part of the effort’s advisory board are jumping ship, and even some whose staff helped craft Project 2025.

The Intercept’s review of the Project 2025 website identified seven conservative organizations that have been removed from the advisory board member list since Heritage first announced it two years ago. Among these are four newly identified groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an influential think tank.

The Defectors and the Departed

As of publication, the Project 2025 website lists more than 100 organizations as part of the “broad coalition” that helped shape the effort alongside Heritage. This coalition morphed over the last two years, The Intercept found, including by quiet attrition of some prominent members. Some dropped off the website even before the Trump campaign started distancing itself from Project 2025 in early July.

We traced the timeline of vanishing advisers by comparing Heritage press releases, the Project 2025 playbook, data pulled from the website, and archived versions of the advisory board page.

In June 2022, Heritage announced that it had formed an advisory board of “leading conservative partners” for Project 2025, which had 21 organizations. Of these original members, three are no longer on the Project 2025 website. This includes two newly identified influential libertarian groups — the now-defunct FreedomWorks and the Competitive Enterprise Institute — plus Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation, as previously reported.

In February 2024, FreedomWorks was the first to disappear from the Project 2025 advisory board page. Three months later, in May, FreedomWorks dissolved very publicly, but it continued its policy advocacy up to its final gasps.

When Heritage released the Project 2025 playbook in April 2023, it listed FreedomWorks as part of the advisory board, as did press releases in May 2023 and last October. Three former FreedomWorks staffers contributed to the Project 2025 manifesto, including Stephen Moore, an economist and former Trump adviser, who co-authored the Treasury Department chapter.

Former FreedomWorks leaders did not respond to inquiries about the group’s removal from the Project 2025 page prior to its dissolution.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, was also acknowledged in the Project 2025 playbook. Its president and CEO, Kent Lassman, contributed a chapter, as did Daren Bakst, a CEI senior fellow. A handful of other CEI staff were also contributors, including its general counsel Dan Greenberg, and Iain Murray, vice president for strategy.

Last August, economist and columnist Paul Krugman specifically called out CEI in his review of Project 2025’s effort to recast climate change as a culture war issue.

“Project 2025 appears to have been largely devised by the usual suspects,” Krugman wrote in the New York Times, “fossil-fueled think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute that have been crusading against climate science and climate action for many years.” CEI’s website has a clip of Krugman’s takedown.

Quite recently, CEI staffers trumpeted their involvement in Project 2025. In a January 2024 speech at Heritage, Murray said he was “delighted to contribute” to the “deregulatory proposals.”

“There’s a blueprint for a better tomorrow,” Murray said. In a February blog post, CEI economist Ryan Young, who got a shoutout in the playbook, pointed to Project 2025 as an example of “a successful approach to trade policy.”

Heritage continued to list CEI in Project 2025 press releases as recently as February 2024, and CEI remained on the online list of advisory board members until early March 2024. By March 15, CEI’s logo had been removed from the web page.

The next week, Heritage added a disclaimer to the Project 2025 page.

“The opinions of Project 2025 and The Heritage Foundation do not necessarily represent the opinions of every one of its advisory board partners,” it reads. The disclaimer apparently didn’t stanch the flow.

By late March, another group dropped off the page: the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish foreign policy think tank that seemed confused at why it was on Project 2025 lists in the first place. FDD was not in the inaugural advisory board cohort, but Heritage included it in the Project 2025 playbook and in press releases from May 2023 until this February.

FDD appeared on the online advisory board list as recently as March 15.

“FDD was included in error,” a spokesperson told The Intercept. “This was quickly corrected once known to us.”

FDD did not answer follow-up questions about how it failed to notice its inclusion in the Project 2025 playbook and advisory board lists for nearly a year.

In late June, the Discovery Institute, a think tank focused on “intelligent design” and “Judeo-Christian culture,” among other concepts, also disappeared from the Project 2025 site. The Discovery Institute, which did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, was first announced as part of the advisory board in a February 2024 press release. Its logo was on the Project 2025 website as recently as June 25, but by June 28, it was gone.

July brought more defections, including a vocal exit from America First Legal, whose staff played multiple roles in both the Project 2025 playbook and its training academy.

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Conservative Organizations Are Quietly Scurrying Away From Project 2025 

Most recently, as The Intercept reported, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan-based think tank, asked to be taken off the advisory board. Both groups disappeared from the website at some point between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday, and both were first listed as members in a February 2024 press release.

Neither elaborated in detail on their reasons for exiting the Project 2025 coalition.

“Being listed on an advisory board indicated that we endorsed everything listed in the project, which was not the case,” said Holly Wetzel of the Mackinac Center. “We do not sign our name to things that we do not fully endorse.”

Wetzel did not respond to follow-up questions about how the Mackinac Center ended up on the Project 2025 advisory board list in the first place.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to emailed questions.

The post The List of Conservative Groups Abandoning Project 2025 Keeps Growing appeared first on The Intercept.

More than 50 years ago, lawyer Lewis Powell penned a letter to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that the American business community must take political power and must use it “aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance.” President Richard Nixon would go on to appoint Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim speaks to David Sirota about his new investigative podcast series, Master Plan, that examines how corporate corruption took root in American politics.

[Theme music.]

Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed. And, today, I’m excited to be joined by my friend, investigative journalist David Sirota, founder of The Lever, who’s here to talk about his new podcast.

David, thanks so much for joining me.

David Sirota: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

RG: So, the podcast is called Master Plan. Let’s play a little clip from it, then we’re going to get into it.

David Sirota: When you wake up in the morning and see the recent headlines about the Supreme Court.

News Clip: A judicial decision sparking a political eruption.

David Sirota: I’m guessing you feel overwhelmed and bewildered.

News Clip: The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Well, it’s terrifying. I don’t know what’s next.

David Sirota: And you hear about the court helping corporations trample your long standing rights.

News Clip: This is a sweeping decision by the Supreme Court to overturn the Chevron precedent.

News Clip: What this does is it ends 40 years of regulating big business.

David Sirota: You hear about the justices making it literally legal to bribe politicians.

News Clip: In a 6-3 opinion, the court ruled that gifts to public officials can only be considered illegal bribes if they’re given before the official act.

Clip: Seems like every few months the Supreme Court makes it easier and easier to bribe government officials.

David Sirota: You even hear about the Supreme Court actually declaring Clearing that the President does not have to follow the law.

News Clip: It’s the first time the Supreme Court has ruled that former presidents can be shielded from criminal charges —

Amy Goodman: In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.

David Sirota: As you’re doom scrolling, do you ever stop and ask what the actual f—k is going on, and how in god’s name did we get here?

RG: Well, David, I, I feel like I’ve been hearing from you about this podcast for quite some time now. How long has it been that you’ve been [that] you and your team have been putting this together?

DS: Well, we thought it was going to be, like, a six-month project. And then it became a year, a year-and-a-half-long project. And then, it became a full two-year project. We went really deep down the rabbit hole. It felt like every door we opened led us to six other doors in trying to uncover this story of how corruption was legalized in America.

I think it’s a difficult story to tell, because I think it’s kind of like the David Foster Wallace speech, the famous one about the fish, you know? There are two fish, one fish swims by and says, hey, how’s the water today? And one of the other fish turns and says, what is water?

Right? I think we live in an era where corruption is so rampant, where money is so determinative of political outcomes and legislative outcomes, that we’ve become so accustomed to it and numb to it that it feels like, that’s not corruption anymore. That’s just how politics works. That just is politics.

The truth is, when you look at it, it didn’t have to be the way it is. It has become that way because of a series of decisions and a series of actions that were taken that were the result of a very specific plan, executed by specific people, over a long period of time. And so, what our podcast series does is, it starts when that plan was hatched, and it goes through, each step of the way, to legalize the kind of money politics that we now are immersed in.

RG: And what’s fascinating about the story that you really uncover and tell here is the way in which so much of this ended up being done under the guise of fighting corruption.

DS: Totally.

RG: So, talk about what it was like before these new laws legalizing corruption were in place. So, for the people who look around and see it as water, what was a world where corruption was illegal like?

DS: So, for most of the 20th century, there were very, very weak anticorruption laws, very, very weak campaign finance laws. To the point where — and this is kind of amazing — that the one law that existed on the books was interpreted when it applied to Congress, the anticorruption law, that it would not be enforced by the Department of Justice unless the leaders of the House and Senate first referred cases to the Department of Justice. That was a directive, by the way, under the Eisenhower administration, which was carried forward.  In other words, the House and Senate would have to tell on itself in order for the Justice Department to even investigate corruption.

So, obviously, in this period of time, corruption scandals simmer. Petty corruption, graft, there were periodic scandals. One scandal, for instance, involved the Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, who had to effectively resign from the Supreme Court. To be clear, that scandal now seems minimal and quaint compared to the scandals of the current Supreme court.

RG: What was that one, just for fun?

DS: He had gotten a grant. He’d been paid to write a series of papers for somebody who had — I think it was a financier — who had ostensibly some business before the government. I think it was only about $20,000.

RG: And it was before he became a justice, right?

DS: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And so, it hadn’t come out, he did it. And so, he had to resign.

RG: It’s remarkable.

DS: It is remarkable, compared to what happens today, and is legal.

Now, I think that’s an important point that, while there were not strong laws being enforced in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, into the ’70s, there still was a cultural aversion to corruption, to the point where a guy on the Supreme Court who did something not particularly great, but not, like, horrible by modern day standards, was so shamed he had to resign.

So, there was a cultural aversion to corruption in a way that doesn’t exist today.

RG: Yeah. And I think people underestimate the power of that cultural aversion.

DS: A hundred percent. Yes, totally. Like, there was shame in it. Like, it existed, but you didn’t do what Donald Trump does, which is, you know, Donald Trump, a couple weeks ago, said to the oil industry, give me a billion dollars, and I’ll give you policy, right? I mean, like, that was just not the way it was done back then.

But, obviously, all of this exploded in the Watergate scandal, which was, obviously, a huge political event, but a huge cultural event. It was on television. The country was focused on it. And the Watergate scandal, I think we remember it now as, obviously, an abuse of power, the break-in and the like. But, also, what was exposed during Watergate was that there was corruption underneath it; by that, I mean money that was given by people who wanted favors from the Nixon White House.

RG: Corporations wanted mergers, and were moving cash in bags, and, yeah.

DS: American Airlines, as a good example. American Airlines gave lots of money to the Nixon campaign committee, and the campaign committee used that slush fund to fund the Watergate break-in. And I should mention, those corporations and executives were prosecuted.

I mean, it’s kind of hard to imagine major corporations being prosecuted, really, for anything, but certainly for corruption and campaign finance. And we talked to, in the series, in episode two, we talked to one of the Watergate prosecutors who talked about why they felt they needed to aggressively prosecute these corporations, to send a message that this is not acceptable.

And what came out of that was the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms, which mandated disclosure, which set campaign donation limits, which tried to set some spending limits. It was the first time, really, that — after that period we just talked about, this sort of lawless period — that it seemed like Congress was getting tough.

But it’s also worth mentioning, at the exact same time is when the business community — big business — was feeling like it was incredibly under attack. This is the era when Ralph Nader was a celebrity, winning all sorts of battles in Congress for consumer protection, regulation, and the like. And Nixon, though he had resigned in 1974, he left a ticking time bomb in Washington, in the form of a guy named Lewis Powell.

Lewis Powell In 1971 was the head of the American Bar Association. Top of the establishment, sort of a very well respected lawyer who was, frankly, traumatized by Ralph Nader, and he writes about this in what became known as the Powell Memo.

RG: Have you seen Mad Men?

DS: Mm-hmm.

RG: So, there’s this great scene where somebody has a problem with Ralph Nader. Like, is there anything we can do about Ralph Nader? And these are the most powerful people in Manhattan. And the answer is, immediately, no.

DS: Exactly.

RG: There’s nothing you can do about Ralph Nader.

Now, what I love about what you found about the Powell Memo, there’s multiple levels of people’s understanding as they go through life about the Powell Memo. You know, first, you know nothing about the Powell Memo. Then you learn about the Powell Memo, and you’re absolutely shocked, and it seems like, how could this possibly be true? That, basically, this conspiracy was orchestrated in order to kind of take over our democracy.

Then you go further on, you learn, well, actually people are saying that this was just a little letter that a guy wrote to his neighbor, and it’s been blown out of proportion, and you should actually go back to your original understanding of it, which was that it doesn’t — Don’t even think about it.

You’re taking on that third layer here, which I love.

DS: Alright. So, Lewis Powell is the head of the American Bar Association. He’s being radicalized by the politics of the moment. I don’t think, I’m not sure anybody’s ever reported on these. We found [that] he gave a series of speeches elucidating his process of radicalization, his speeches to business groups. He was clearly echoing a lot of the themes of people like Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater.

He sees Ralph Nader on the cover of Fortune magazine, or a huge article of Ralph Nader in Fortune magazine. And he gets real pissed off. And he calls up his friend — Eugene Syndor at the Chamber of Commerce — and  decides to write this memo for how the Chamber of Commerce and the larger business community can fight back. And it’s this incredible manifesto.

He casts the American business community as the, quote, “forgotten man.” It’s a direct quote. Corporate America has no power. I mean, it’s kind of shocking; I mean, yes, the reformers were winning, but the idea that Corporate America was as victimized as is portrayed in this memo is obviously absurd.

RG: They were only making a hundred times, or fifty times the average worker, rather than what they feel is their just due. Like, several thousand times.

DS: It’s incredible. But, look, I guess that,  if you’re a corporation, and you’re used to being able to just dump the chemical in the river, and then, suddenly, you have to only dump half of those chemicals in the river, you’re not allowed to dump all of the chemicals in the river, you probably felt traumatized by the environmental regulations that were passing, as one example.

So, he writes this memo, and it’s this whole strategy for what the business community has to do to fight back, and there’s a particular focus on taking over the courts. And, specifically, on doing what Nader had been doing, which is creating, manufacturing, or seizing upon lawsuits that would secure specific rulings.

And he basically was saying, Ralph Nader owns the space of the so-called public interest lawsuit and public interest law firm. We can create a different version of public interest law and public interest lawsuits, essentially, from a business perspective. I mean, it’s completely Orwellian, right? Because, obviously, their agenda is quite literally the private interest.

RG: [It’s] antisocial.

DS: Yeah. It’s the private interest. Exactly.

So, the focus on the judiciary, etc., etc. What we found is not just the memo, obviously. But there were a series of secret meetings, and the creation of a task force on the Powell Memo — that’s what it was called in the Chamber of Commerce — comprised of executives at some of the biggest and most powerful corporations in America. And we’re talking about General Electric, Ford, media companies, ABC, CBS, where they convene these meetings — and we have the documents from them — to review what they needed to do, and what they were doing.

Again, we’re telling the story of the legalization of corruption. Let me give you a really good story about this, as it relates to this. So, in 1973, they convene a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce to review the task force on the Powell Memo, its task force, and what it’s doing. It’s in Disney World.

The chief lobbyist for U.S. Steel is running the task force, William White, who’s very close to his friends, Jerry and Betty. And they bring Jerry and Betty down to Disney World; of course, I’m talking about Gerald Ford and Betty Ford. They bring them down to Disney World, and the meeting notes show that Gerald Ford keynotes the event, and the event has a focus on the Federal Election Campaign Act, which had passed in 1971 after an earlier pre-Watergate scandal, where Nixon was on tape talking about shaking down the dairy industry for cash. That’s, by the way, a direct quote, “shaking down” in exchange for milk price supports, to keep the price of milk high.

So, obviously, the Chamber of Commerce, this Powell Memo task force is concerned about such things. They fly Gerald Ford down to the meeting. They review how to navigate the early new campaign finance reforms. And we found a document from the Olin Corporation, a guy who was part of these task forces — Olin is a huge right-wing funder, I think it’s a chemical or weapons fortune — and he says in the document, what they’re trying to do Is get an amendment into the updates to the campaign finance reforms that would allow for the creation of corporate PACs, OK?

Now, fast forward just a few months from 1973, from that one meeting, as an example. Now, Gerald Ford is President of the United States, Watergate has unfolded. There’s even more of a push to make the campaign finance laws stronger. Gerald Ford, who clearly didn’t like the campaign finance reforms as a congressperson — there were a lot of Republicans who didn’t like it — he’s now president, and essentially forced to sign the bill, because Watergate has happened.

RG: Yeah, you can’t veto that.

DS: You can’t veto that. It passes, but guess what? Baked into the law were the loopholes that they had been plotting for. There was a small provision put into that final bill that allowed for the creation of corporate political action committees which, not surprisingly, exploded right after the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms.

And it’s worth adding one more thing, is that the legal groups that were formed through these Powell Memo task force meetings — groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation and the like, and including the Chamber of Commerce — they were also pursuing what was then a radical notion in the court system. Which was, they wanted to enshrine the idea that money isn’t corruption, money is speech.

And so, right after those campaign finance reforms were signed into law by Gerald Ford — with those loopholes, by the way — they filed a lawsuit in the federal courts to try to invalidate those laws, on the ground that you cannot limit money in politics, because money is speech. And we talk a lot about in this podcast about how the Master Plan really does have kind of a “Master Plan cinematic universe.” These people who keep popping up.

The notion that money is speech and not corruption was masterminded by — and the lawsuit was masterminded by — none other than John Bolton. Yes, the same John Bolton. And it was boosted by Robert Bork, who was still the Solicitor General of the United States. Who, in an incredible story — I mean, it’s just kind of mind blowing, right? — he has to defend the law, because he’s still the Solicitor General of the United States. Like, that’s his job, so he officially has to defend the law, defend the Federal Election Commission. But this guy files two briefs.

He files one brief sort of barely defending the law, and then he files another brief, essentially on behalf of the Ford administration, siding with the people, with the John Boltons, who were trying to destroy it. And guess what? What the court produces is the enshrining of the doctrine that money is speech.

And, soon after that, Lewis Powell, who’s now been installed on the Supreme Court — the guy who wrote the Powell Memo — he works behind the scenes at the Supreme Court to take a subsequent case a few years later to extend those free speech rights to spend in elections, to extend those rights to corporations.

RG: What’s so important about what you guys have uncovered here is that it really puts to rest this new-ish idea that has been circulating, that, oh, actually, the Powell Memo, like I said, it’s just a letter to a neighbor. Like, that’s what the kind of talking point has become about the Powell Memo. And that if you actually invest this incredibly prescient document with any real meaning, then you’re a conspiracy theorist.

DS: Yeah.

RG:What they’re trying to say is that, the world we have today is just a natural function of the way that the market and history unfolded. And that, you, if you’re looking for decisions made by particular people for particular reasons at a particular time, you’re not going to find them.

In other words, this is water, because we’re just living in a world that has water in it.

DS:It absolves the people and the movement that created this world of responsibility for creating this dystopia, by pretending that it was all just a force of nature.

I would agree that the Powell Memo is not the singular explanation.

RG: Yeah, absolutely. Right.

DS: But it was, certainly, A, if not the catalyzing document to prompt and unleash all of the organizing that happened subsequently. I mean, here’s a specific example, right? To tie it right to today. This is very specific.

The Powell Memo was cited by Joseph Coors as the document that stirred him into political action. Joseph Coors, after reading the Powell Memo, decided to provide the seed funding for the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation carved out its niche in all of this organizing in the early 1970s into the early ’80s. Carved out its niche as a focus on policy, specifically its mandate for leadership series, which is this giant document that they produce every election that is an agenda for conservative presidents to take and implement.

Now, if that sounds familiar to you, you may be thinking, oh, that sounds like Project 2025. Well, Project 2025 is the ninth iteration of the mandate for leadership series. Point being that you can draw a direct line from the Powell Memo to project 2025. That’s a piece of what the Powell Memo inspired. And, clearly there was a lot of pent up energy for this.

I agree that the Powell Memo doesn’t explain everything, but the idea that it was just some version, some 1970s version of a random Facebook post or a Reddit rant is absolutely ridiculous.

RG: What absolving people who created this of responsibility also does, is it kind of absolves the subjects of it — you and me and the rest of the public — from responsibility to overturn it. Because, if it’s just an act of nature, well,  I guess we’ve just got to weather the storm and wait till it’s over, and then maybe we’ll have a democracy again at some point.

But if it actually is the actions of a concerted group of people working toward their own interest, that means that a concerted group of people working in the opposite direction [to] the public interest can actually undo this stuff. That’s the other point about it being unnatural.

DS: A hundred percent. And, by the way, you don’t have to reach back all that far. I mean, you can reach back to Common Cause, John Gardner, the post-Watergate era of at least passing the Federal Election Campaign Act and the Amendments of 1974, that’s one example. But another example that’s worth mentioning is John McCain.

I think people have forgotten the John McCain of the ’90s and early 2000s. The John McCain that I remember, because it was the time when I was right out of college. John McCain, after Buckley v. Vallejo, which we just talked about, you know, money is speech, John McCain after the loopholes where Corporate PACs explode. John McCain gets himself embroiled in what was called the Keating Five scandal in the late ’80s.

And the Keating Five scandal sounds quaint by current standards, but the Keating Five scandal was, basically, five senators tried to pressure a federal banking regulator to rescind a proposed regulation that would have hit those five senators’ major donor Charles Keating. This became a huge scandal. It’s kind of funny.

RG: Hilariously quaint, right?

DS: Right. Because that’s literally how politics now works. That’s just how congressmen raise money now. It’s just, oh, give me money, and I’ll go pressure the regulator who’s bothering you. Like, that’s a standard— Anyway, McCain gets singed by this. Actually, both parties, their rising star heroes get singed. John McCain, war hero? John Glenn was also involved in this, right?

So, both parties’ golden boys get super-singed by this. And McCain does something that you rarely see in a politician. Instead of resigning, or pretending it didn’t happen, or just shutting up, McCain decides to apologize, and adopt the campaign finance reform cause with the zeal of a convert. And he goes on a crusade to try to pass campaign finance reform legislation that would require more disclosure, and would, specifically, most importantly, cut off the unregulated, unlimited amounts of corporate money that were flooding into both parties in the form of money called soft money, which was a sort of 1990s term for just money flowing into the parties, giant slush funds.

McCain pushes this with Russ Feingold, I think it’s in the mid 90s. He can’t get it passed through the Senate, decides to run for president in 1999, and he is in a primary against a human personification of money politics: George W. Bush, and George W. Bush’s Rangers and Pioneers, the name for his big bundlers, his big donors, and Bush had all the money.

McCain, we have in this episode about him, we talked to his former chief of staff, who says, you know, we told him not to talk about money and politics, nobody cared. And McCain said, you’re wrong, and went to New Hampshire and talked all about it. And it was a huge issue, people loved it. And McCain actually almost won that campaign. He didn’t win that campaign, but he came really close.

And here’s the thing: it was such an effective campaign, it was such an effective anticorruption crusade, that it compelled George W. Bush — like, Mr. Corruption — to endorse and say he would sign that McCain-Feingold law. And McCain ultimately use that presidential campaign to pass it through Congress, and get Bush to sign it, and Bush signed it. And then the Supreme court upheld it.

Now, I bring up all of this to say, it’s a good lesson to remember that what John McCain was trying to fix was the water back then, right? It was, nobody can fix this, don’t go talk about this, nobody will care, you can’t get anything done. And he actually proved you can get things done.

Now, I know the other side of the story would be, well, he got things done. The Supreme court upheld it, and then, later, the Supreme court overturned it. Well, sure. But I think that speaks to the idea that you’re never going to do one thing that fixes the corruption problem in America. There has to be kind of an ongoing vigilance to fighting this fight, and that hasn’t existed for, I think, arguably, since John McCain.

I mean, you could argue [that] Bernie Sanders would bring up Citizens United, sure, and I think that, certainly, anti-corruption was part of Bernie’s campaign. But he wasn’t able to elevate it in a way that John McCain was.

RG: Right. And Citizens United has become a thing that is kind of a toss-off that people say, because the Supreme Court has six Republicans on it who all support Citizens United. And so, I think, dwelling on it probably for too long, for Democrats, probably just makes them realize their powerlessness there.

So, they’ve kind of shifted their focus toward public financing of campaigns, you know? John Sarbanes had his — The voting rights legislation never ended up passing the house. His piece of it, that had a six-to-one match for anything under $250 came reasonably close. It was not as if this was something that 20 Squad and Squad-adjacent members were supporting, it’s something like 200-plus Democrats were cosponsoring this. So, they’ve kind of given up for the time being, it seems like, of crimping the corruption and, instead, saying well, let’s just allow the public to match it

DS: But I would say this: I do think that Citizens United, I mean, yes a movement to overturn Citizens United constitutionally is a worthwhile and valid endeavor. It will take a long time. But I also think that public financing does speak to [how] there are ways to make things better even within the Citizens United paradigm, right?

Like, public financing — not just a matching system, but a true public financing system — I think could change the game in a big way, which would say, listen, there’s a way for you to run for office where you don’t have to rely on money that comes with the expectation of government favors. The fact that we haven’t done this, you understand why. It’s because the people who are voting on whether to do it are the masters of the current privately financed system. They don’t want to change the system.

But the fact is, you mentioned the Sarbanes bill. I mean, public financing passed the U.S. Senate twice in the mid-70s. A version of some public financing passed Congress in the early 1990s by Democrats, and was vetoed by George H.W. Bush.

RG: And it was in law for the presidential races. I mean, it still is.

DS: And it was in law for the presidential races. It still is, technically, but they don’t fund it, yeah.

So, the point is, this is not some crazy pie-in-the-sky insane idea that’s never been reviewed before. And it’s the same thing, by the way, with the most minimal thing that could be done, which is Sheldon Whitehouse’s Disclose Act.

I mean, short of public financing elections where we say, hey, there’s an avenue for you to run for office where you don’t have to just rely on private donors. Short of that, there can at least be legislation — and some states are trying to pass this kind of legislation — which says, listen, people can spend money in elections, but they’ve got to disclose who they are. Like, this era of not just unlimited spending, but unlimited anonymous spending, is insane. That shouldn’t be a controversial idea, even in the slightest. That is literally written into the Citizens United ruling that says the government has the constitutional right to require disclosure.

I mean, Justice Antonin Scalia said in a case subsequently after Citizens United, said, essentially, democracy relies on disclosure, on the idea that people, they can participate in politics, but they have to identify themselves when they participate in politics. Or, at minimum, when they participate at a level of hundreds of millions of dollars, they have to identify themselves. The fact that this hasn’t passed is just completely insane.

My hope is that, when you look at the Congress right now, I mean, are there enough — are there any — Republicans who are willing to participate in reforming those laws? I mean, the Democrats on the Disclose Act, to their credit, I think all of them in the Senate, or at least most of them, have cosponsored Whitehouse’s bill. Kamala Harris, for instance, she could be president, she cosponsored it. Josh Hawley has put a bill out, it’s sort of a message bill, purporting to be opposed to Citizens United. He’s a Republican. Maybe it’s not a real bill but, like, I don’t know. At least one Republican sees some sort of political opportunity or political upside to positioning themselves against the corrupt paradigm that we live in.

So, the question that I come out of, having done this series and reported all this is, look, we know it can be done. We know it was a master plan, we know decisions were made that can be reversed. The question is, what is it going to take to actually reverse them? Where is the next John McCain? Is it even possible to have another John McCain?

Because, Ryan, I think the thing that I end up with — and I don’t want to be a doomer here, because I think a lot of states have done good things, and those are real, and there’s a ballot measure in Maine this year — but one of the things that really bothered me most recently about all this is, in the 2020 campaign that I worked on for Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders, one of his surrogates, Zephyr Teachout, the law professor, anticorruption reformer. She published an op-ed in the 2020 election in The Guardian, saying Joe Biden basically is too close with his corporate donors. She made a sort of list, credit card industry donors. I mean, donors that Joe Biden had done a lot of favors for over his legislative career, and said that Joe Biden has a corruption problem. Which was an obvious statement. And Bernie Sanders felt compelled to come out and apologize for his surrogate, essentially, invoking the C word: corruption.

And then you saw, in my view, a similar thing happen a few months ago, when Congresswoman Katie Porter loses her run for the Senate. And she makes a comment that billionaires rigged the election with millions of dollars. Which, they did, right? I mean, crypto billionaires spent a ton of money in that Democratic primary to get the result they wanted, which was the defeat of Katie Porter. And, when Katie Porter said this, it touched off a firestorm of criticism. How dare Katie Porter say this?

Now, part of that was, I guess, people think rigged election, they think Trump, they think election-denying.

RG: Can’t say “rigged.”

DS: Can’t say “rigged.” But my takeaway is, wait a minute, wait a minute. Between Bernie apologizing and Katie Porter being vilified for saying millions of dollars rigs elections, we’re moving into this discourse paradigm. We’re calling out systemic institutionalized corruption that we’ve all gotten used to. Calling it out is the crime, not the corruption itself. Those who say this is wrong, or bad, or even that it exists, these are the problems. That those people should apologize, not the people corrupting the system.

RG: My favorite part, by the way, of the Sarbanes legislation, is that it pays for the public funding out of a pool of collected corporate fines for corporate corruption.

DS: Oh, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. That’s perfect.

RG: Which only seems fair.

So, the podcast is called Master Plan. Where can they find it, besides just searching “Master Plan?”

DS: Yeah, you can go to masterplanpodcast.com, that’s masterplanpodcast.com. When you go there, you can just click any of the buttons to add it to the app you’re listening to. I really think people will like it.

I want to just underscore, there’s a lot in there that I had no idea about. We found all sorts of documents that have never been seen, including my favorite — just to give you a little teaser — the vinyl record that we found that’s never been found before, a vinyl record of Philip Morris and its executives throwing a sendoff party to the Supreme Court for Lewis Powell, a few months after Lewis Powell wrote the Powell Memo. A vinyl record of the party that was emceed by Walter Cronkite.

And here’s one other teaser — this part kind of blows my mind — Lewis Powell writes his memo in 1971, three months later, he gets nominated to the Supreme Court. There’s a Democratic senate, the Democratic senate had just rejected a couple of Nixon’s other Supreme Court nominations. That’s what had sort of opened this place for Powell’s nomination. Powell, unbeknownst to everybody at the time, unbeknownst to me until we found the documents, Powell was a correspondent and, essentially, source for J. Edgar Hoover.

And guess what J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI didn’t turn over to the U.S. Senate when it voted on Lewis Powell’s nomination? They somehow omitted any reference to the Powell Memo. Had there been a reference to that, had senators found that, a Democratic Senate in opposition to Richard Nixon, Lewis Powell might not have been on the Supreme Court. Lewis Powell might not have been on the Court to engineer, as he did, behind the scenes, that early ruling that created the legal foundation for Citizens United. I mean, it really is, like. a butterfly-flaps-its-wings kind of moment.

RG: Great work. Really excited to finish listening to this, enjoyed what I’ve listened to so far. And, also, everybody should be subscribing to The Lever if they’re not already, you guys are doing incredible daily anti-corruption reporting over there as well. Thank you so much for joining me here.

DS: Thanks so much, Ryan. I really appreciate it

RG: Alright, that was David Sirota and that’s our show. Deconstructed is a production of Drop Site. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. And I’m Ryan Grim, cofounder of Drop Site News.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Deconstructed wherever you listen to podcasts. And please leave us a rating or a review, it helps people find the show. This program was brought to you in part by a grant from The Intercept.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you soon.

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As Trump prepares for his second term, the president-elect announced he is bringing Homan back as “border czar” — an amorphous post with unclear formal authority but the advantage of not requiring Senate confirmation. Once again, Trump has found a way to empower Homan while shielding him from scrutiny.  

“My guess is that if he had to survive a political nomination process, there would be hard questions about his support for family separation during Trump 1.0,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director for the American Immigration Council. “Appointing him to a position that doesn’t require confirmation avoids those hard questions.”

Trump announced he was bringing Homan back in a social media post on Sunday night, writing that Homan would be “in charge of our Nation’s Borders (‘The Border Czar’), including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security.” Homan “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin,” Trump wrote. 

Homan joined the first Trump administration as a carryover from the Obama years, when he led ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations component and built a reputation as a relative moderate. He shed that veneer under Trump, defending the family separation policy that ripped thousands of children from their parents, unleashing massive raids, and urging criminal prosecution for leaders in “sanctuary” jurisdictions.

“We have seen over time his support and leadership of increasingly harsh and punitive policies, particularly in the interior of the U.S.,” Gupta told The Intercept. “That is an evolution we’ve seen, even though he seems to believe he is enforcing the laws as they’re written.”

Related

The Trump Administration Carried Out Thousands More Family Separations Than Previously Acknowledged

Trump tapped Homan as acting director of ICE soon after taking office in January 2017, and he formally nominated Homan to lead the agency in November 2017. But Senate Republicans never held a confirmation hearing or a vote on the nomination.

By April 2018, Senate Democrats wanted to know why the Trump administration hadn’t sent vetting materials to the relevant Senate committee, particularly since Homan’s extended stint leading ICE in an “acting” capacity potentially violated federal law.

“We understand that the Trump Administration may be concerned about Mr. Homan answering questions under oath about his leadership of ICE, as well as the possibility that Mr. Homan’s nomination could be defeated in the Senate,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to the secretary of Homeland Security. “The absence of a Senate-confirmed head of ICE for more than a year hinders Congressional oversight and the efficient operation of the agency and is troubling in any circumstance.”

Instead of pushing Homan through, Trump withdrew the nomination in May 2018, and Homan retired from federal service later that summer. But his relatively brief time leading ICE left a grim impression on immigration advocates.

“What we know from his prior work and recent comments is that he supports a punitive, harsh agenda,” Gupta said. “He’s made clear that any undocumented person is at risk of detention and deportation.”

In the private sector, Homan continued to build his MAGA clout as an immigration hawk. He was a frequent Fox News contributor and joined the Heritage Foundation as a visiting fellow, where he co-signed the Project 2025 “playbook” as a contributor. (Although Homan is not credited for any specific section of the manifesto, the chapter on the Department of Homeland Security proposes that Trump “may need to take a novel approach to the confirmations process,” including by relying on “acting” officials.)  

Homan established ties to other right-wing figures like former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, two leaders of the election denial movement. Homan served as the CEO of an organization co-founded by Flynn and Byrne, The America Project, which he praised for its far-flung “rights and freedoms” work, including fighting against the “grooming of young adults” and to “get the woke material out of schools.”

Homan also founded his own nonprofit, Border911, and was a director of the nonprofit that sponsored the “J6 Choir” anthem. In 2022, he was scheduled to speak at a conference put on by white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s group, American First Political Action Conference, but reportedly left after finding out Fuentes praised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Trump began touting Homan as a likely pick for his second administration over the summer, even as his campaign tried to distance itself from Project 2025. At the Republican convention in Milwaukee, Homan took the stage to warn undocumented immigrants to “start packing now.”

In a press blitz on Monday, Homan told Fox News what to expect from his tenure.

“We’re going to take the handcuffs off ICE,” he said to Sean Hannity. 

The post Trump’s Family Separation Czar Is Back appeared first on The Intercept.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’s book, titled “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” sparked a media frenzy last week because it features a foreword written by JD Vance. As interest in the book rose following Trump’s pick of Vance as his vice president, a digital version of the text vanished from a website where publishers share advance copies with book reviewers.

The Intercept has reviewed a proof of the book’s acknowledgments page. In it, Roberts thanks Heritage Foundation colleagues, including Roger Severino, who wrote a Project 2025 chapter urging further abortion restrictions, shouts out prominent conservative media personalities, and praises Vance by name.

“And to Sen. J.D. Vance, thanks for inspiring me and millions of Americans with your story, and now with your leadership,” Roberts writes. “I’m so grateful that you wrote the foreword.”

The acknowledgments page isn’t the only part of the book made public on Tuesday. The New Republic published Vance’s foreword, which quotes John Travolta’s “Pulp Fiction” character, compares American politics to weeding gardens, and praises the book for “articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.” Vance praises the Heritage Foundation for being “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

But the meat of what Vance endorsed in Roberts’s book — which one commentator called “the popular narrative version” of Project 2025 — remains under wraps.

It has been a rough few days for the conservative braintrust behind Project 2025, as organizations that helped draft the document have quietly backed away. On Tuesday, Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who served as Project 2025’s director, stepped down. The Trump campaign wasted no time in putting out a jubilantly sinister statement on X. 

“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you,” reads the statement. 

Roberts released a more upbeat statement praising Dans’s leadership and suggesting Project 2025 will “continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local.”

Roberts hasn’t commented on the status of his book, which vanished last week from NetGalley, a website publishers use to share advance copies with book reviewers. The Intercept requested a NetGalley copy on July 25; within hours, the request function for that title had been disabled on the website. The book no longer shows up in search results on that platform. 

Publishing giant HarperCollins and its Broadside Books imprint, which “specializes in conservative nonfiction,” did not respond to questions about the book’s status or why review copies were taken offline.

The book “identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save,” according to HarperCollins. Roberts’s list includes federal agencies like the FBI and Department of Education, both targets of Project 2025, plus an array of cultural institutions like the Ivy League and the Gates Foundation, “to name a few.” 

In recent weeks, the book’s title and cover were subdued to remove literal inflammatory language. The book jacket previously featured a matchstick and the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America,” according to archived pages on Amazon and the HarperCollins website. “Just as a controlled burn preserves the longevity of a forest, conservatives need to burn down these institutions if we’re to preserve the American Way of life,” read a sentence from the book description which has been nixed.

At the same time, HarperCollins leaned into the controversy surrounding Project 2025. At some point, the Amazon page was updated to note that Roberts is the “Project 2025 head” and allude to his controversial comments about a “Second American Revolution.” 

HarperCollins did not respond to questions about when these changes were made and why. 

In the uncorrected proof of the book’s acknowledgments section reviewed by The Intercept, Roberts thanks “friends” like Tucker Carlson and Newt Gingrich for “reviewing the draft and for writing some excellent blurbs,” which are also on the current Amazon page. 

Roberts praises one of Trump’s former national security advisors, K.T. McFarland, who also wrote a blurb on the book’s Amazon page.

The acknowledgments thank Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, for writing a blurb, but hers has not been published on the site.

On Tuesday, Hemingway blasted the Trump campaign’s dig at Project 2025. “Trumpworld bows down to left-wing media lies, and keeps signaling he doesn’t want his most loyal foot soldiers — who kept with him even when very few others did — or their conservative ideas in his next administration,” she wrote on X. “Interesting.”

Along with Vance, Roberts expresses gratitude to several other conservative politicians. “A few elected officials were vital to this book,” Roberts writes in the acknowledgments, singling out two more by name: his “friends Rep. Chip Roy and Sen. Mike Lee, with whom I’ve had long and esoteric discussions about conservatism.” 

Roberts and the Heritage Foundation did not immediately return requests for comment. 

The post Project 2025’s Mastermind Personally Thanked JD Vance in His New Book appeared first on The Intercept.

They notched successes that included the election and reelection of District Attorney Larry Krasner and a package of criminal justice reforms. There has always been pushback, however, including Krasner’s impeachment.

This election, organizers have a new concern and a new talking point as they canvass communities affected by mass incarceration: Project 2025. 

“Under Project 2025, the Justice Department would be used to undermine and crack down on so-called progressive district attorneys.”

The wide-ranging policy document from the Heritage Foundation has been disavowed by the Trump campaign, but groups in Philadelphia fear it could still be used as a road map for a federal power grab.

“Under Project 2025, the Justice Department would be used to undermine and crack down on so-called progressive district attorneys,” said Saleem Holbrook, the executive director of criminal justice advocacy group Straight Ahead. “It was hard enough fighting that battle on the state level. We can only imagine how difficult it would be to fight that battle on the state and federal level.”

Pushback on Project 2025

Much of the debate over the document’s 900 pages has centered on reproductive rights, the gutting of civil service protections, and downsizing Medicaid.

Along with expanding the death penalty, however, Project 2025 also offers a road map for criminal justice policies that include fighting reform-minded prosecutors such as Krasner.

Ominously for prosecutors such as Krasner who have exercised their prosecutorial discretion, it suggests initiating “legal action against local officials — including District Attorneys — who deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.”

Holbrook’s group has not endorsed in the presidential election, but Project 2025 comes up often when its canvassers hit the streets to encourage the formerly incarcerated and their communities to vote.

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Sergio Hyland, a 43-year-old Philadelphia native, spent more than 20 years in prison before his release in 2022. Now he’s an organizer with Straight Ahead, visiting communities where many people have been to prison or know someone who has.

If Project 2025 is implemented, Hyland warns voters, “criminal justice reform would be all but wiped out. We could forget about any progress we have made.”

Low Former Incarcerated Turnout

Straight Ahead is part of a larger cohort of groups across the country encouraging the formerly incarcerated to vote, said Ariel White, an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“You see groups all over the place doing this now, and I think particularly in places where people have previously organized to expand or regain the right to vote,” White said.

State laws on voting rights for the formerly incarcerated vary widely. Even in places that have expanded those rights in recent years, however, White said that registration and turnout rates are still “substantially lower” than the general population.

“The biggest challenge is apathy,” Holbrook said. “And that’s not just this election cycle, that’s every election cycle, because people do feel like the system is not working for them.”

“The biggest challenge is apathy.”

Going door to door, the presidential campaign inevitably comes up in conversations with voters, Hyland said. What does he focus on? “The issues: ‘This is what our community needs, this is what you’re telling us you need,’” he said. “‘This is what this candidate represents, this is what that candidate represents.’”

Nationally, there isn’t good data on how the formerly incarcerated are planning to vote, White said. A survey of 54,000 people behind bars conducted by the Marshall Project found surprisingly strong support for Donald Trump, given his often draconian rhetoric about law and order.

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Polls show Kamala Harris losing support among the Black and brown men whose communities have been most affected by mass incarceration, although Holbrook said his experience has been that she is not losing support “en masse.”

“It’s the misinformation that is driving some Black men to go over to Donald Trump, and that is the importance of us being out on the streets, talking to them about real issues,” said Holbrook. “Don’t get me wrong, there are legitimate complaints about how Democrats have engaged or moved in Black and brown communities.”

“We don’t sugarcoat that.”

The post Formerly Incarcerated Voters Keep Bringing Up One Thing Again And Again: Project 2025 appeared first on The Intercept.

Together, these rulings further one of the prime directives of the conservative legal movement, enshrined in the Project 2025 manifesto: “deconstruct the Administrative State.” The decisions also further consolidate authority within the federal judiciary. 

In the first decision, SEC v. Jarkesy, issued Thursday, the conservative majority undercut oversight agencies’ ability to issue fines and penalties through specialized administrative proceedings instead of backlogged federal courts. In the second, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, issued Friday, the conservative majority struck down a landmark decision about regulators’ role in interpreting the law. 

Both cases were decided 6-3, along ideological lines. 

Writing for the dissenting liberal justices in Loper Bright, Justice Elena Kagan paired the two decisions as showing “the Court’s resolve to roll back agency authority, despite congressional direction to the contrary” as well as the conservative majority’s eagerness to jettison “settled law” like Roe v. Wade. 

Allison Zieve, litigation director at watchdog Public Citizen, said the decisions were a power grab. 

“Like the Jarkesy decision from yesterday, today’s decision increases the courts’ authority at the expense of the other two branches,” Zieve told The Intercept.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote both decisions and in both, the conservative majority followed the paths urged by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and conservative advocacy organizations like America First Policy Institute. 

“Like the Jarkesy decision from yesterday, today’s decision increases the courts’ authority at the expense of the other two branches.”

Earlier this term, over the howling objections of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the court stopped short of holding that an entire oversight agency, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, was unconstitutional by design. Instead, the conservative majority is taking the tack of hamstringing regulators. 

The SEC decision eliminates one of the enforcement mechanisms Congress created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In the Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010, Congress authorized the Securities and Exchange Commission to impose civil penalties against fraudsters through administrative hearings instead of a full-fledged federal trial. The Supreme Court ruled that this mechanism violated the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs — a hedge fund manager and his firm — to a jury trial.  

The ruling has implications far beyond the SEC. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the three liberal dissenters, pointed out, it casts doubt on similar administrative enforcement mechanisms at more than two dozen agencies, including the CFPB, Environmental Protection Agency, and Food and Drug Administration. 

“Today’s ruling is part of a disconcerting trend,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the three liberal justices in her SEC dissent. “When it comes to the separation of powers, this Court tells the American public and its coordinate branches that it knows best.”

The Loper Bright case originated from a seemingly minor dispute over fishing regulations, but conservatives used it to challenge a key feature of oversight agencies: their role in interpreting the laws they enforce. In a 1976 decision reviled by conservatives, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court ruled that courts should defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. 

“The Chevron doctrine was an effort by the earlier Supreme Court and lower courts to respect the separation of powers,” Zieve told The Intercept, “by respecting Congress’s decision to delegate authority to agencies to implement regulatory statutes and not aggrandizing the role of the courts.”

On Friday, the conservative majority struck down the Chevron doctrine. In her dissent, Kagan fleshed out how sprawling the effects would be. 

“That rule has formed the backdrop against which Congress, courts, and agencies — as well as regulated parties and the public — all have operated for decades,” Kagan wrote. “It has been applied in thousands of judicial decisions. It has become part of the warp and woof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of all kinds — to name a few, keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest.”

The Loper Bright majority ruled that prior decisions that applied Chevron to questions about the scope of the Clean Air Act and other laws are still good law, for now. 

This week’s rulings set the table for other conservative challenges already making their way to the court, including attacks on the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Trade Commission. 

“Taken together, these cases continue the pattern of the Supreme Court taking power for the federal judiciary and away from people who are accountable to elected officials,” said Georgia State University law professor Eric Segall. “The justices are accountable to no one.”

The post The Supreme Court’s Latest Power Grab: Regulatory Oversight appeared first on The Intercept.

For the last three years, Vought and the CRA have been pushing laws that require porn websites to verify their visitors are not minors, on the argument that children need to be protected from smut. Dozens of states have enacted or considered these “age verification laws,” many of them modeled on the CRA’s proposals. 

This year, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Texas’s version, which took effect last September and drew from CRA’s model legislation. 

But in a wide-ranging, covertly recorded conversation with two undercover operatives — a paid actor and a reporter for the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting — Vought let them in on a thinly veiled secret: These age verification laws are a pretext for restricting access to porn more broadly. 

“We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use,” Vought said, “as opposed to the person who visits the website getting to just certify” that they are of legal age. 

Vought called this a “back door starting with the kids” and offered the age verification laws as an example of an “immediate fight leverage point that we can win” that sets up “the next fight.”

“We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?” he added. Vought contributed a chapter to the Project 2025 manifesto, which argues in the foreword that all pornography “should be outlawed” and its producers “imprisoned.” 

Restricting “indecent” material has long been at the heart of free speech debates, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly found that the First Amendment protects adults’ right to access sexually explicit materials, except for child porn and other extreme material. 

“Sex is the canary in the coal mine of free speech,” said Mike Stabile, public policy director at the Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry group that is leading many of the lawsuits challenging these laws, including in the ongoing Supreme Court case. “It’s funny to hear him say it explicitly, because we’ve been calling age-verification laws ‘backdoor censorship’ since they were first introduced.”

Bob Corn-Revere, a First Amendment attorney, was not surprised by Vought’s strategy but noted that it’s “rare for proponents of pretextual measures to engage on this.”

“The candid statements that age verification laws are a stalking horse masking true intentions for seeking broader bans on protected speech come as no surprise,” said Corn-Revere, who is chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to consider the Texas law’s constitutionality. 

“Using children as a way to get a ‘foot in the door’ has long been a strategy employed by those in anti-free speech movements,” he said.

Aaron Mackey, the free speech and transparency litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is also urging the Supreme Court to strike down the Texas law, said, “The text of these laws demonstrate that they were never intended to be narrow measures to protect children, despite being presented that way. And these quotes confirm their true purpose.”

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As Texas, Idaho, and other states enacted these bans, companies like Pornhub have blocked their websites in those areas while industry groups challenge the laws in court. 

To Vought, these state-by-state blackouts are all to plan, since shutting down porn altogether is the ultimate goal. 

“We’ve got a number of states that are passing this,” he said during the July meeting, “and you know what happens is the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state.’ Which of course is entirely what we were after, right?” 

Vought’s research director echoed that the age verification laws were a stepping stone. 

“We’re for restricting, you know, age verification for porn,” Micah Meadowcroft said in an earlier discussion with the undercover climate reporter, which was also secretly recorded. “Outlawing it if we could, but right now we’re advancing the age verification stuff.”

Vought, Meadowcroft, and the CRA did not answer The Intercept’s questions about these statements. 

“If you’re suggesting that more of pornography’s degradation of women and fewer safeguards for children are good things… no, thank you,” said Rachel Cauley, a CRA spokesperson, in an emailed statement. 

There are numerous active challenges to age verification laws in federal courts around the country. Last August, a federal judge blocked parts of the Texas law on First Amendment grounds, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit lifted the injunction in March. In July, federal court blocked similar laws in Indiana and Mississippi.

Finals briefs in the Texas challenge are due to the Supreme Court in mid-November.

The post Project 2025 Co-Author Caught Admitting the Secret Conservative Plan to Ban Porn appeared first on The Intercept.

Project 2025 is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with dozens of right-wing advocacy organizations. It has two main components: First, a 900-page manifesto with a wish list for the first 180 days of the “next conservative administration,” including to further restrict abortion access and “dismantle the administrative state.” The second component is an application-only recruitment effort to ensure the administration is quickly staffed with loyalists.  

On Friday, Trump disavowed Project 2025 in a post to Truth Social, his social media platform, saying he found unspecified parts of the project “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” 

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump wrote. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Trump’s vague disavowal of Project 2025 came a few days after Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, made inflammatory statements about a coming “second American Revolution” that would be “bloodless” “if the left allows it to be.”

“As we’ve been saying for more than two years now, Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign,” the Project 2025 account said in a statement on X. “But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.”

Despite Trump’s claims to have “nothing to do with” Project 2025, his administration and campaign personnel contributed to the project, including Karoline Leavitt, his campaign’s national press secretary, as the Biden campaign quickly pointed out on X. 

Former Trump administration officials wrote and edited massive chunks of the manifesto. One of its two primary editors, Paul Dans, who directs the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, served as the White House liaison for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, among other positions. 

Former Trump administration officials wrote and edited massive chunks of the manifesto.

Rick Dearborn, who was briefly Trump’s deputy chief of staff, wrote the White House chapter. Russ Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the chapter on OMB and similar executive offices. 

Gene Hamilton, who served in the Trump Justice Department and is now the vice president and general counsel of America First Legal, wrote the DOJ chapter. Similarly, the chapter on the Department of Homeland Security was written by Ken Cuccinelli, who held multiple positions in Trump’s DHS. The list of Project 2025 playbook contributors includes former Trump administration officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Commerce, and Department of Defense, among other departments and agencies. 

Peter Navarro — who advised Trump’s 2016 campaign, served as director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and recently reported to prison for refusing to cooperate with a congressional inquiry into the January 6 insurrection — drafted a chapter on trade policy.

People close to Trump also contributed to the Project 2025’s effort to recruit conservatives for administration positions, including appearances in promos and training videos. 

Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, is featured in a promotional video for the Project 2025 academy, along with Stephen Miller and other former Trump administration officials. According to the Project 2025 recruitment website, “The Presidential Administration Academy is a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration.”

According to the academy syllabus, Leavitt also co-teaches a video module in the academy titled, “The Art of Professionalism.” 

“I appeared in a video for Heritage the year before I started working on the Trump campaign,” Leavitt told The Intercept when asked how the Trump campaign could claim ignorance of Project 2025. Referring to Trump’s campaign platform, she said: “Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda of the President Trump and our campaign.”

Other former Trump administration officials listed on the Project 2025 academy syllabus include Dearborn, Roger Severino, Hugh Fike, and Bethany Kozma. 

The post Trump’s Camp Says It Has Nothing to Do With Project 2025 Manifesto — Aside From Writing It appeared first on The Intercept.

In a post to Telegram announcing the hack, SiegedSec called Project 2025 “an authoritarian Christian nationalist plan to reform the United States government.” The attack was part of the group’s #OpTransRights campaign, which recently targeted right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice, the Hillsong megachurch, and a Minnesota pastor.

In his foreword to the Project 2025 manifesto, the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, rails against “the toxic normalization of transgenderism” and “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology.” The playbook’s other contributors call on “the next conservative administration” to roll back certain policies, including allowing trans people to serve in the military.

“We’re strongly against Project 2025 and everything the Heritage Foundation stands for,” one of SiegedSec’s leaders, who goes by the handle “vio,” told The Intercept.

In its Telegram post, SiegedSec said it obtained passwords and other user information for “every user” of a Heritage Foundation database, including Roberts and some U.S. government employees. Heritage Foundation said in statement Wednesday that SiegedSec only obtained incomplete password information.

The remainder of more than 200GB of files the hackers obtained were “mostly useless,” SiegedSec said.

The Intercept reviewed copies of files provided to the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets. They included an archive of the Heritage Foundation’s blogs and a Heritage-aligned media site, The Daily Signal, as of November 2022.

This is at least the second hack against the Heritage Foundation this year. In April, Heritage shut down its network following a cyberattack tentatively attributed to nation-state hackers. SiegedSec targeted the Heritage Foundation in early June, according to vio, who denied involvement in the earlier attack.

A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation said Wednesday that the files were not obtained by hacking its systems, but that SiegedSec discovered them on a third party’s site.

“An organized group stumbled upon a two-year-old archive of The Daily Signal website that was available on a public-facing website owned by a contractor,” said Noah Weinrich, a Heritage spokesperson. “No Heritage systems were breached at any time, and all Heritage databases and websites remain secure, including Project 2025. The data at issue has been taken down, and additional security steps have since been taken as a precaution.”

SiegedSec’s other recent operations have targeted NATO and Israeli companies to oppose the war in Gaza. 

Update: Wednesday, July 10, 6:36 p.m. ET

This article was updated to include comment from the Heritage Foundation disputing that the files released by SiegedSec were the result of a hack of its systems and were hosted instead on a third party’s website.

The post “Gay Furry Hackers” Claim Credit for Hacking Heritage Foundation Files Over Project 2025 appeared first on The Intercept.

Republicans and their allies are eager to expand capital punishment, and U.S. Supreme Court cases that currently limit the crimes that can lead to executions are a prime target.

Conservatives’ eagerness to create more capital crimes is laid out in the sprawling Project 2025 manifesto, a road map for the first 180 days of “the next conservative administration.” Project 2025 urges the next administration — presumably, a second Trump White House — to throw the Justice Department’s weight into overturning the constitutional limits established by the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Republican legislators are laying the groundwork to expand the death penalty to crimes beyond murder by passing “trigger laws” that would spring into effect once these Supreme Court Court guardrails are eliminated.

“They have a very high hill to climb.”

So far, Florida and Tennessee have enacted laws that allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty for child sex abuse. The laws’ proponents flaunted the contradiction with a Supreme Court decision from 2008, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which bars the death penalty for crimes other than murder based on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Similar bills have been introduced by conservatives in Congress and a handful of other states, with an eye toward challenging the Supreme Court’s Kennedy ruling just as state laws challenged Roe to overturn abortion rights.

“To the extent there is an effort by folks in the state systems to challenge Kennedy,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, “they have a very high hill to climb.”

Project 2025 shows Republicans are gearing up for the climb.

The Kennedy Precedent

The Kennedy case, decided in 2008, saw a divided Supreme Court strike down a state law that allowed a jury to impose the death penalty for rape of a child under 12 years old.

The majority’s decision built on decades of precedent interpreting the Eighth Amendment under “evolving standards of decency” — an approach that stands in firm opposition to conservative “originalist” jurisprudence.

The five-justice majority weighed heavily the risk of wrongfully executing offenders based on a child’s testimony and the documented negative effect on victims’ willingness to come forward if the death penalty is on the table for their abusers.

Under the Kennedy decision, the death penalty is unconstitutional in “instances where the victim’s life was not taken.” The court left open the possibility that execution might still be permissible for non-homicide crimes against the state, such as treason, espionage, or terrorism.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the conservative dissenters — including Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and late Justice Antonin Scalia — criticizing earlier death penalty rulings. Alito pointed to a handful of states that had enacted capital child-rape laws, which he suggested might be “the beginning of a new evolutionary line” for interpreting the Eighth Amendment.

At the time, the Kennedy ruling drew plenty of criticism, including from then-Sen. Barack Obama in the lead-up to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Public opinion, though, has shifted against capital punishment since Kennedy was decided, most starkly among Democrats and independents, according to Gallup polls. In 2008, a slight majority of Democrats and two-thirds of independents were in favor of the death penalty as a punishment for murder, compared to just under a third of Democrats and about half of independents in 2023.

By comparison, Republicans have consistently endorsed the death penalty, with support hovering around 80 percent since 2000.

On the campaign trail in 2020, Joe Biden promised to end the federal death penalty, but his Justice Department has sought death sentences for at least two defendants and urged appellate courts to uphold earlier sentences.

Project 2025’s “Priority”

Like Roe, Kennedy is a reviled decision among many conservatives, not least because of its non-originalist approach to the Eighth Amendment. And if Donald Trump wins the election in November, the conservative legal movement hopes he will prioritize overturning Kennedy.

The Project 2025 manifesto, spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is a 900-page document compiled by a “who’s who” of the conservative legal movement. It touches on everything from gutting the administrative state to restoring “the family as the centerpiece of American life.”

The manifesto’s chapter on the Justice Department was drafted by Gene Hamilton, the vice president and general counsel of America First Legal who served in the Trump DOJ. Hamilton calls capital punishment a “sensitive matter” while urging the “next conservative Administration” to “do everything possible” to execute all prisoners currently on death row.

Project 2025 also calls for pushing the limits of capital punishment. The Justice Department should “pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes,” Hamilton writes, “particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children—until Congress says otherwise through legislation.”

In a footnote, the Kennedy decision is quietly raised as a target.

“This could require seeking the Supreme Court to overrule Kennedy v. Louisiana,” reads the footnote, “but the department should place a priority on doing so.”

Maher, of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The Intercept this section of Project 2025’s playbook puzzled her.

“Congress has spoken very clearly, as has the Supreme Court,” about the limits of the death penalty, she said.

“There’s no evidence the public is clamoring for more executions.”

“Roe was about a single issue, but this is about a standard of review that has been applied to decades of cases, anything that applies to the death penalty,” Maher said. “It would be the kind of abrupt change that would be unprecedented.”

“There’s no evidence the public is clamoring for more executions.”

Legislators Gunning for Kennedy

Conservative legislators are eager to tee up legal challenges to the Kennedy decision. Much of the pro-execution momentum so far has come from Florida Republicans.

In early May 2023, shortly before announcing his ill-fated bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a trigger law that makes child rape a crime eligible for the death penalty “notwithstanding existing case law which holds such a sentence is unconstitutional.” The law says Kennedy was “wrongly decided and an egregious infringement of the states’ power to punish the most heinous of crimes.”

“This bill sets up a procedure to be able to challenge that precedent,” DeSantis told reporters at the time, “and to be able to say that in Florida we think that the worst of the worst crimes deserve the worst of the worst punishment.”

In December, local prosecutors announced the first attempt under the new Florida law to seek the death penalty for a man indicted for child sex abuse, which DeSantis lauded as the potential “first case to challenge SCOTUS.” Prosecutors later accepted a plea deal under which the defendant accepted a life sentence in prison. Last month, a Florida appellate judge noted the new legislation and urged Kennedy to be overturned.

Another Florida Republican has sponsored similar legislation in Congress. In April, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, introduced a pair of bills that would turn various child sex abuse offenses into capital crimes, including possession of child pornography.

“I don’t know why we’re going to go down this path of passing something that’s blatantly unconstitutional. Because that’s what it is.”

“If someone commits horrific crimes against children, they deserve the death penalty or life in prison,” Luna said in a statement to The Intercept. “The Supreme Court did not make the right decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana.”

Earlier this year, Tennessee followed Florida’s lead. In May, Republican Gov. Bill Lee quietly signed a law to make aggravated child rape a capital offense, which goes into effect on July 1.

During debate in April in the Tennessee state Senate, Kennedy came up frequently. Sen. Ken Yager, one of the bill’s Republican sponsors, read from Alito’s dissent and affirmed that his aim was partly to overrule Kennedy.

“We have a bill that is unquestionably unconstitutional,” said Sen. Jeff Yarbro, a Democrat from Nashville. “I don’t know why we’re going to go down this path of passing something that’s blatantly unconstitutional. Because that’s what it is.”

Sen. Janice Bowling, a Republican, suggested her colleagues should think of overturning Kennedy “in terms of Roe v. Wade.”

“Maybe it’s time for this to be changed,” Bowling said. “And maybe the atmosphere in the Supreme Court is different now. We’re not violating the Constitution. We’re simply challenging a ruling.”

Republicans in a handful of other states have recently floated similar legislation. One bill introduced in South Carolina in December, echoing Florida’s law, calls Kennedy “wrongly decided” and characterizes the decision as infringing “upon the power of the State to punish what it determines to be a monstrous and evil crime and punish those convicted as the State determines to be necessary and just.”

The South Carolina bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Jordan Pace, told The Intercept he used the Florida statute as a model. Asked whether he also hoped to challenge Kennedy, Pace said, “The aim is to provide swift and righteous justice for victims and their families.”

Bills that contradict Kennedy were also introduced last year in Arkansas, New Mexico, Missouri, Iowa, Idaho, and South Dakota.

For now, at least, Maher is skeptical that the trigger law playbook that tossed out Roe would also work to overrule Kennedy and other death penalty precedent. She said, “We’re all watching very closely to see what the court is willing to do.”

The post Can Conservatives Expand the Death Penalty Using the “Trigger Law” Playbook? appeared first on The Intercept.

When Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, demanded that Disney/ABC jump, the influential media conglomerate replied, “How high?”

That’s effectively what happened when Carr, an ardent Trump loyalist, offered harsh criticisms of late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel’s statements about Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer. The comments, Carr said, were “sick.”

“These companies can find way to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” Carr said, adding that they could handle situation “the easy way or the hard way.”

Within hours, Disney/ABC opted for the easy way, suspending Kimmel’s show “indefinitely.”

In his effort to bring the media to heel, Trump could not invent a better ally than Carr.

Disney took the action in the crosshairs. Its move can’t be separated from Carr’s threats — or years of Trump’s criticism of Kimmel. The president quickly let the truth slip when he said, after Kimmel’s suspension, that television networks providing him “bad publicity” should have their broadcast licenses revoked.

It was the latest salvo in the war on freedom of speech waged by the MAGA movement, a war in which Carr has been Trump’s most loyal lieutenant. The FCC holds tremendous sway over broadcast media, but few administrations have pushed the boundaries of its power — and few appointees at the agency have openly talked about doing so with such nakedly political aims the way Carr does.

In his effort to bring the media to heel, Trump could not invent a better ally than Carr, who has laid out a program for weaponizing the FCC against Trump’s enemies.

It’s not hard to see the extraordinary depth of Carr’s dedication to Trump: While many officials wear American flag pins on their lapels to show loyalty to the country, Carr has proudly posted photos of himself wearing a gold Trump bust — demonstrating such total fealty that it won admiration on X from Benny Johnson, another Trump loyalist.

From Plan to Action

Carr jointed the FCC as a staff lawyer in 2012 and was appointed by Trump as a commissioner in 2017.

In 2024, amid the presidential campaign, Carr waged an unabashed campaign to be named FCC chair. He appeared on Fox News espousing Trumpist talking points and authored the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for a new Trump term. Already a commission member, Carr ignored the FCC ethics attorney’s warnings about becoming the first sitting government official to work on a political document like Project 2025, and he brushed off admonishments to not use his official title in doing so.

As the Biden administration wound down, then-FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel dismissed four complaints before the commission, including one against Fox affiliates and the Murdochs from the Media and Democracy Project, which I co-founded.

As soon as he became chair, Carr began implementation of a Trump-inspired agenda. He reopened three of the complaints — those with a conservative bent — against ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates. He left ours in the trash, even though it was based on the same public interest standard that that Carr now claims to be championing in his case against Kimmel. (Our case is currently under appeal.)

Carr’s fellow commissioner, Anna Gomez, called out the moves: “I am concerned that this is a clear attempt to weaponize our licensing authority, to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions.”

Instilling fear to influence editorial decisions is exactly what Carr is doing. He has also bullied companies into making moves that suit the Trump agenda.

After he threatened to hold up Paramount/CBS’s merger with Skydance, Paramount paid a $16 million lawsuit settlement to Trump, and the merger was soon approved. After a meeting as part of the deal, David Ellison, the billionaire Trump ally who owns CBS’s new parent company, made a series of pledges to Carr, including a promise to scrap diversity initiatives at the channel. Making good on another pledge, after the merger Ellison installed an ombuds at CBS with strong conservative credentials.

Carr also launched investigations into NPR and PBS, the public broadcasters lambasted by the right for a purported liberal bent.

Overall, it has been a particularly active year for the FCC — not least because of the campaign waged against Disney/ABC.

Relentless Pressure

Disney/ABC is learning that if you give in to a bully once, they will come back for more. The company already paid off Trump for his claim to have been defamed by news anchor George Stephanopoulos. Trump threatened ABC reporter Jonathan Karl just for asking impertinent questions.

And Carr played a pivotal role in the Kimmel affair. It was only after his threat of FCC action that Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcast Group, two media conglomerates that own a host of local ABC affiliates, said they would be pulling Kimmel’s show. Under duress, ABC quickly fell in line.

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Trump and Carr’s ability to push corporate media into doing what they want demonstrates how badly we need a diversity of media organizations — not the industry consolidation in the hands of billionaire Trump allies we are seeing today.

Carr is taking aim at an independent media by pushing consolidation forward. The FCC is considering removing the rules restricting consolidation of TV station ownership to give right-wing networks like Sinclair the latitude to increase their dominance in the distribution of information.

It’s a disaster in the making for media in this country — and Carr is doing it faster than anyone could have expected.

The post Why FCC Chief Brendan Carr May Be the Most Dangerous Man in Media appeared first on The Intercept.

Even taking legislators’ stated aim of protecting minors from “harmful” material at face value, there is little dispute most of these laws are unconstitutional, as free speech advocates have argued successfully to lower courts around the country. “This case is not close,” wrote a federal judge in December, in an opinion blocking Tennessee’s age-verification law. The judge noted the “unwavering” line of Supreme Court precedent about the strict constitutional scrutiny needed for any law that restricts speech based on its content.

Applying this same precedent, a district court judge blocked Texas’s age-verification law, H.B. 1181, in August 2023. But the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that decision and upheld H.B. 1181’s age-verification requirements last year under a more relaxed standard. The majority ruled such requirements were “rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography.”

The Supreme Court will no doubt focus on whether the 5th Circuit got the constitutional standard right, or whether, as a dissenting judge on that court wrote, the majority “unjustifiably place[d] the government’s interest upon a pedestal unsupported by Supreme Court precedent.”

Lost so far in the legal fight, however, has been the pretextual nature of the push for age-verification laws. In briefs to the Supreme Court, the Free Speech Coalition, an adult entertainment trade group challenging Texas’s law, only fleetingly addressed the law’s “true design” and “censorial intent” — as demonstrated by another provision that required websites to display warnings in 14-point font that porn “weakens brain function” and “increases the demand for prostitution.” These disclaimer requirements were too much for even the 5th Circuit.

But culture war conservatives have connected age-verification bills to the broader push to banish pornography from American culture entirely.

“Pornography should be outlawed,” reads the Project 2025 manifesto, which, in keeping with the Texas law, claims porn is “as addictive as any illicit drug,” not to mention “as psychologically destructive as any crime.”

“The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned,” reads the Project 2025 foreword, written by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. “Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

Russ Vought, a Project 2025 contributor who is slated to serve as the incoming Trump administration’s top budget official, explained the “back door” strategy behind the age-verification laws last summer in a conversation that was secretly recorded.

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“We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?” Vought told undercover operatives from the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting, which shared the footage with The Intercept.

Vought explained that his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, had been promoting age-verification laws as a workaround that sets up “the next fight.” When companies like Pornhub blocked users in Texas and other states that enacted the laws, that was part of the plan, Vought said.

“What happens is the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state,’” Vought said. “Which of course is entirely what we were after, right?”

In another discussion, also secretly recorded, Vought’s research director said his team was in favor of “outlawing” porn. “But right now we’re advancing the age verification stuff,” said Micah Meadowcroft.

Lawmakers in various states have likewise welcomed the porn blackouts that follow age-verification measures.

“I fully support PornHub’s decision to remove their content in Utah,” said Republican Gov. Spencer Cox after Utah’s bill took effect in May 2023.

Last year, the sponsor of Kentucky’s law, which went into effect in July, told reporters she would be “100%” supportive of porn companies blocking their sites. “I hope that’s what this bill does for the state of Oklahoma,” one of the legislators behind Oklahoma’s version told his colleagues during deliberations.

The Free Speech Coalition, the trade group challenging the Texas age-verification law in the Supreme Court, has six more active federal lawsuits against other states’ provisions. And so far in 2025, legislators in two more states — Missouri and Wyoming — introduced similar bills.

“If this case were about age verification for access to Shakespeare, for example, there’d be no question that it violates people’s First Amendment rights,” said Vera Eidelman, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing the Free Speech Coalition, at a press conference last week ahead of the Supreme Court argument. “This really is about how the government can regulate any speech that it doesn’t like.”

The post SCOTUS Won’t Hear the Real Reason Porn Age-Verification Laws Are Spreading appeared first on The Intercept.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made health policy the cornerstone of his failed presidential campaign, critiquing America’s health care and public health systems with bold, often controversial proposals. 

From vaccine “safety” to food and environmental health, Kennedy’s platform challenged the status quo, calling for sweeping reforms to improve transparency, accountability, and personal freedom in medical decision-making.

He’s raised concerns about the chronic disease epidemic that many are fighting in silence and has been a vocal critic of the industrial food system, pointing to the objective dangers it poses to public health.

He’s coined the slogan #MAHA — Make America Healthy Again — a phrase that has gained more traction in the health-conscious corners of the country than the original MAGA. You can often find it boldly displayed in juice bars, wellness shops, and fitness centers, where it has become emblematic of a movement that purports to prioritize health over the politics of the moment.

And honestly, I get it.

I’m hyperfocused on health. After a grueling battle with long Covid following my infection in 2022 and the many, many years I’ve spent uncovering the grave realities of water contamination, air pollution, and disease outbreaks as a reporter and filmmaker, I’ve fully embraced the mantle of an overprotective, fiercely vigilant mom.

Kennedy aligned himself with an administration committed to weakening the protections that have the most direct impacts on our health.

For the most part, my kid eats whole, organic foods, his water filtered to pristine purity eight times over. His clothing is 100 percent organic cotton, and when there’s pollution or we enter crowded spaces indoors, he wears an N95 mask. By our society’s standards, I might seem extreme. But to me, it’s not madness — it’s what happens when you live in a country that’s dangerously out of step with reality.

So, to Kennedy’s supporters, I understand your fervor. But here’s where I’m lost.

Kennedy has aligned himself with an administration — and been announced as Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services as a reward — that is committed to weakening the very protections that have the most direct, proven impacts on our health, particularly the health of our children.

He has paradoxically placed his support behind a president committed to dismantling the regulatory frameworks that ensure clean air, safe water, toxic-free work environments, and uncontaminated food. These are not just abstract concepts — they are the very protections that shield us and our children from the invisible, insidious dangers that lurk in our environment everyday.

By aligning himself with leaders associated with Project 2025’s radical overhaul of environmental regulations, he is effectively endorsing a future in which corporate interests are prioritized over the health of all Americans, especially children.

Clean Air and Water

Project 2025, an ambitious policy agenda crafted by conservative think tanks for the next Republican president, aims to diminish the Environmental Protection Agency’s role in regulating the environment. At the core of this initiative is the plan to remove the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act, the foundation of the nation’s air quality standards. If enacted, this would severely weaken federal oversight of pollution, undermining decades of progress in protecting public health and the environment.

Without the Clean Air Act’s regulatory framework, fossil fuel companies — along with other industrial sectors — would face far fewer restrictions on emissions, particularly those related to particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and carbon emissions. They would operate with less oversight and fewer penalties for pollution, allowing them to prioritize cost-saving measures over environmental protection.

The consequences would be disastrous for everyone who breathes. Air pollution is linked directly to respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

Their assault doesn’t end with our air.

Project 2025 also threatens the Clean Water Act, which regulates pollutants in our waterways and drinking water. The Clean Water Act has been instrumental in ensuring that public health is protected from harmful contaminants like lead, arsenic, bacteria, pesticides, industrial chemicals, and substances like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and dioxins, which are known carcinogens.

Without the law’s protections, municipalities and industries would be emboldened to delay or avoid the necessary actions to replace lead pipes, fix aging infrastructure, or prevent contamination of public water systems.

As a reporter who spent two years in Flint, Michigan, I witnessed firsthand the devastating impact water contamination has on a community. It’s an ongoing public health crisis of epic proportions. Even a decade later, the community grapples with new life-threatening health complications.

Weakening the Clean Water Act would not only exacerbate existing water crises, but also cripple our ability to address emerging and persistent threats like PFAS — chemicals that have already contaminated drinking water systems nationwide, exposing millions of Americans to serious health risks, including liver damage, thyroid issues, infertility, and cancer. Without federal oversight, PFAS and similar pollutants would spread unchecked.

The consequences would be severe for everyone who drinks water.

And without regulations, there’s no objective measure to define what levels of pollution or contamination are dangerous, leaving individuals to navigate complex and often conflicting information on their own.

This creates particular challenges for the 35 percent of Americans who rent, as they are at the mercy of landlords when it comes to addressing issues like lead in water or radon in the air. If a landlord dismisses these hazards as subjective opinions, tenants have little recourse without enforceable legal standards, leaving families vulnerable to significant health risks caused by negligence or greed.

The fight for health begins with the most fundamental right: clean air and water.

The fight for health begins with the most fundamental right: clean air and water. Without them, all else falls away. 

Yet, in a striking irony, the very man championing the cause of public health, which inspired so many to support him and consequently Trump, seems poised to support policies that dismantle the protections vital to preserving that health. So I call on the latest Kennedy to gain power in Washington to address the stark contradictions between the values he claims to champion — our society’s health and well-being — and the policy framework laid out in Project 2025, which threatens to undermine those very ideals. 

Kennedy speaks of prioritizing the health of the American people, but Project 2025’s proposals promote deregulation and weaken critical environmental protections, putting our air, water, food, and future at risk.

Now that his chosen candidate empowered him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, it’s time for Kennedy to confront this glaring dissonance head-on and make clear where his true priorities lie.

The post RFK Jr. Talks About Public Health, but He’s Joining an Administration That’ll Make Us Sicker Than Ever appeared first on The Intercept.

The Project 2025 co-author, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump 1.0, downplayed the impact and intent of one of the administration’s most controversial policies, Schedule F — a tool that would enable the federal government to mass fire civil servants and demand their political loyalty. 

On the eve of the 2020 election, Trump signed an executive order intended to reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees as political appointees, stripping their federal protections and making it easier to fire them. The executive order was never implemented and was eventually rescinded by President Joe Biden.

With Trump’s imminent return to office, however, the likely reimplementation of Schedule F is one of several moves that will put countless federal jobs on the line. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, Trump’s picks to co-lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, have also vowed to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and slash 75 percent of the federal workforce. 

During the hearing, Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., questioned Vought about his previous attempts to implement Schedule F and his support for the policy while at OMB, in subsequent interviews, and as a co-author of Project 2025, which calls for the procedure to be reimplemented. 

“Senator, that was not to fire anyone. It was to change their classification,” said Vought. He later added, “The purpose for changing that classification is to ensure that the president, who has policy setting responsibility, has individuals who are also in confidential policy-making positions, who are responding to his views, his agenda.” 

Experts on federal labor policy aren’t buying his assurances. “That’s just bullshit,” said Elaine C. Kamarck, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings Institution. “I mean, you’re taking away the protected status of civil servants, and that means, in practice, it’s easy to fire them.” 

David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in administrative and constitutional law, said that Vought’s description of events “does not” line up with his understanding of the policy. “What Schedule F proposes to do is dramatically increase the number of people who would be considered subject to firing at will,” Super said, noting that there are legal barriers to mass firing these employees immediately. 

Schedule F would politicize the workforce in a way that would impact even the federal employees who don’t get fired, Super added. “What we would then see is some federal employees who value the non-partisan tradition of the civil service resigning and being replaced by political operatives, campaign workers, donors, and other supporters of the president — and other federal employees feeling obliged to follow instructions, even ones that are contrary to law,” he said. 

Vought’s comments on Wednesday are an about-face from his recent statements on federal workers and Schedule F. In a November interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought vowed to implement Schedule F on “day one,” while also calling for widespread firings.

“There certainly is going to be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist,” Vought told Carlson.

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There’s also his record in office to contend with. Vought led the budget office during the last two years of the previous Trump administration. During that time, he was clear about his desire to eliminate countless federal jobs. For example, he repeatedly pushed for budgets that slashed funding for non-defense agencies and eliminated protections for federal workers. 

Karmarck said that if anything, eliminating large swaths of the federal workforce will only make it harder for the administration to implement its policies. “This is not smart,” she said. “This is going to come back and bite them.” 

The post White House Budget Office Nominee Tries to Whitewash Trump’s First Term appeared first on The Intercept.

Police ultimately blocked many of the Trump supporters from entering the room where the poll workers were fulfilling their duties, but the crowd gathered outside the room, banging on its windows.

“Stop the count!” they chanted. “Stop the count!”

The protests that day were encouraged by operatives from the Trump campaign, which sought to prevent the president’s imminent election loss in Michigan by claiming that the vote count was fraudulent. According to court filings from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s election interference efforts in 2020, a campaign operative whose name was redacted “tried to sow confusion when the ongoing vote count at the TCF Center in Detroit Michigan looked unfavorable” to Trump’s chances.

When the unnamed campaign operative in the court filing — later identified by the Washington Post as Mike Roman — learned that there might be unrest at the TCF Center, he told a colleague present at the convention center: “Make them riot.”

Five years later, Gustafson’s loyalty to Trump paid off.

The TCF protest was part of a broader effort by the Trump campaign to “create chaos, rather than seek clarity, at polling places where states were continuing to tabulate votes,” according to Smith’s filing.

Among the pro-Trump protesters at the TCF Center that day was a man named Daniel Gustafson, according to NBC News.

Five years later, Gustafson’s loyalty to Trump paid off.

He served as a public liaison on Trump’s inauguration committee, according to his LinkedIn profile, and, in January, landed a top job at the Interior Department. Gustafson is among a cohort of Michigan Republican activists who have received plum positions at Interior, a huge federal agency that manages hundreds of millions of acres of public land across the country, controls vast oil and gas resources, administers the National Park Service, and enforces the Endangered Species Act.

Gustafson did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Interior Department did not provide a comment by press time.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Gustafson is currently serving as the Interior Department’s deputy director of the office of intergovernmental and external affairs, which acts as a liaison between the Interior secretary’s office and state and local governments.

His rapid ascent to a powerful government post aligns closely with the vision GOP operatives laid out in Project 2025, the sweeping policy blueprint meant to guide a second Trump term. Among other things, Project 2025 called on a future Republican administration to “dismantle the administrative state.” Trump allies spent months ahead of his inauguration compiling and vetting a list of Trump loyalists to install in government positions.

A review of Gustafson’s LinkedIn profile shows that he has little if any experience in land, wildlife, or resource management. What he does have is years of experience working as a Republican operative.

“Stop the Count” Unrest

At the time of the Michigan unrest, the afternoon following Election Day 2020, Gustafson was working for the Michigan Republican Party in the key swing state. According to his LinkedIn profile, he served as “Regional Field Director — Trump Victory,”an apparent reference to the behemoth fundraising operation that involved the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and numerous state-level Republican parties during the 2020 election.

Like thousands of other Republicans around the country, Gustafson sprang into action as Trump’s chances of victory dwindled.

On the morning of November 4, Trump tweeted that he was leading, often solidly, in many key states run by Democrats.

“Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted,” he wrote.

At the TCF Center, Gustafson can be seen in videos banging on a window and recording on his cellphone.

What followed were protests and disruptions at vote counting sites, including in Philadelphia and in Detroit. According to Smith, the special counsel who investigated interference in the 2020 race but shut down his work in December 2024 after the election, Trump “sometimes used these confrontations to falsely claim that his election observers were being denied proper access, thus serving as a predicate to [Trump’s] claim that fraud must have occurred in the observers’ absence.”

At the TCF Center, Gustafson can be seen in videos banging on a window, recording on his cellphone, and wearing a baseball hat emblazoned with an American flag in the shape of the state of Michigan. The same hat is visible in several photos on Gustafson’s personal Facebook page.

Also present at the protest was Meshawn Maddock, the former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party and one of the 16 “fake electors” in the state charged with multiple felonies for their parts in trying to overturn poll results. (Gustafson hasn’t been accused of involvement in the fake elector scheme; the case is winding its way through court.)

Gustafson’s role in the Trump campaign’s effort to cast doubt on the will of Michigan voters appears to have gone well beyond simply protesting at the convention center in Detroit. A Daniel Gustafson was one of several poll challengers in Michigan who signed a sworn affidavit alleging Election Day misconduct or interference.

“Large quantities of ballots were delivered to the TCF Center in what appeared to be mail bins with open tops,” Gustafson’s affidavit read. “These ballot bins and containers did not have lids, were not sealed, and did not have the capability of having a metal seal. The ballot bins were not marked or identified in any way to indicate their source of origin.”

His affidavit was among several that the right-wing Michigan legal group Great Lakes Justice Center submitted as part of its failed voter fraud lawsuit against the city of Detroit and surrounding Wayne County. Rudy Giuliani, who at the time was Trump’s personal lawyer, cited those affidavits to advance his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump.

One case filing notes that Gustafson “has taught numerous Poll Challenger training classes.” A Facebook post from Michigan Republicans, dated October 29, 2020, lists Gustafson as the contact for anyone interested in attending a training for poll watchers and challengers.

In a November 13, 2020, ruling, Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny rejected the lawsuit brought by the Great Lakes Justice Center and threw cold water on claims that Gustafson and other poll challengers made in their affidavits.

“Mr. Gustafson’s affidavit is another example of generalized speculation fueled by the belief that there was a Michigan legal requirement that all ballots had to be delivered in a sealed box,” Kenny wrote. “Plaintiffs have not supplied any statutory requirement supporting Mr. Gustafson’s speculative suspicion of fraud.”

The post Pro-Trump 2020 “Stop the Count” Activist Lands Top Job at the Interior Department appeared first on The Intercept.

That was then.

In a repeat of the last time Trump took power, Republicans are changing tune to insist that independent agencies like the FTC work in lockstep with the president.

The newest example was a dissent from Republican FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson — who won Trump’s nomination to chair the agency after Khan by promising to take on the “trans agenda” and Big Tech — on a new rule clamping down on concert and vacation rental junk fees.

“They can punish Trump’s enemies through the powers that they hold.”

Ferguson did not complain about the rule itself. Instead, he carped that the commission should have waited to give a say to Trump. His dissent could signal how he plans to lead the FTC — and how the Trump administration plans to run the independent agencies put in the crosshairs by the Project 2025 plan.

An FTC beholden to Trump’s whims could pose a special danger given the agency’s sweeping power over business, said James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform.

“They can punish Trump’s enemies through the powers that they hold. They can reward Trump’s friends through the powers that they hold,” he said. “When you imagine what the FTC is willing and able to do in the service of an authoritarian Trump administration, that takes you to some really terrifying places.”

Killing Surprise Fees

The rule approved by the FTC on a bipartisan, 4-1 vote Tuesday takes aim at an issue that has long enraged customers of Ticketmaster or Airbnb.

A ticket to a hot show or a rental house in a great neighborhood seems to be going for a great price. At the last minute before checkout, though, a platform tacks on surprise fees that spoil the deal.

The rule against surprise fees, which has been in the works for over a year, requires companies to tell “the whole truth up-front about prices and fees,” according to an FTC press release.

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Although scaled back from an original proposal that would have applied to far more industries, the rule amounts to something of a swan song for Khan, who has become an unexpected celebrity as FTC chair by taking on big consumer protection cases, blocking mergers, and attempting to break up monopolies.

Those moves reversed decades of bipartisan consensus against aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws that had turned the FTC into a sleepy backwater of the legal world. The Biden administration has touted Khan’s leadership at the FTC as a prime example of how it sought to reorient the economy to benefit consumers instead of big business.

Ferguson Dissents

The new rule was supported by one of the two Republicans sitting on the commission, Melissa Holyoak, a former solicitor general for Utah who was once seen as a contender for the chair position herself.

Ferguson was the lone dissenting vote. 

A former staffer for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Ferguson has said that the dream of overturning Roe v. Wade got him into politics. And his Senate work included helping shepherd Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to confirmation.

Biden nominated Ferguson, who was serving as the solicitor general for Virginia, to serve as one of the FTC’s Republican commissioners last year. He was confirmed by the Senate this March. Some progressives have said they were intrigued by the positions that Ferguson has taken that seem to show skepticism of excessive corporate power.

In the dissent released Tuesday, Ferguson did not quibble with the substance of the junk-fee rule, which he said was supported by “some evidence.” Instead, he took aim at the fact that the commission was acting during the final days before Trump takes office.

“His incoming administration should have the opportunity to decide whether to adopt rules that it, not the Biden-Harris FTC, will be called upon to enforce,” Ferguson said.

The dissent was in line with a number of dissents from Ferguson in recent weeks. Democratic Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya had a sharp reaction to a similar dissent from Ferguson and Holyoak in another case earlier this month.

“The American people expect their government to keep working for them even in periods of transition.”

“We are not on vacation,” Bedoya said. “The American people expect their government to keep working for them even in periods of transition.”

While calling on the FTC to stop issuing rules until Trump takes office might win favor with the incoming president, it is sharply at odds with positions on the agency’s independence that Republicans were putting out just weeks ago. As recently as October, the House Oversight Committee released a report dinging Khan for a supposed lack of independence from the Biden administration.

When releasing that October 31 report, Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said that it showed that Khan had “bent the knee to the Biden-Harris White House.”

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Since Trump’s election, however, Republicans have shown newfound enthusiasm for the idea of bringing independent agencies under executive control. That vision was laid out in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy document meant to serve as a road map for the next Trump administration.

In Project 2025, former Trump administration official Gene Hamilton said that, in his next term, Trump should take on the “so-called” independent agencies — such as the FTC, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Communications Commission — by mounting a challenge to Supreme Court precedent that prevents presidents from firing their leaders.

Which Ferguson?

Goodwin, of the Center for Progressive Reform, said Ferguson’s dissent suggested that he takes a dim view of FTC independence.

“Historically, they haven’t always been a rubber stamp for the president,” Goodwin said of the commission leaders. “And the reason for that is they know they can’t get fired. They are different, and they are able to exercise some independent judgment. This just suggests that that sort of tradition is not going to occur under his leadership.”

The question now may be which Ferguson the FTC will get when he takes office next year: the one who has occasionally voted for major antitrust actions, or the one who courted Trump’s selection by promising to fight “wokeness” at the agency.

“Historically, they haven’t always been a rubber stamp for the president.”

While seeking the nomination, Ferguson produced a one-page document first reported by Punchbowl News that ticked off culture-war grievances he could pursue using the agency’s powers. He also promised to “focus antitrust enforcement against Big Tech monopolies, especially those companies engaged in unlawful censorship.”

As Khan’s tenure has shown, the FTC can exert enormous influence over the American economy. Last week, a court sided with the FTC and blocked the merger of grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons. Opposition from the FTC has also scuppered mergers involving Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Nvidia, and Berkshire Hathaway.

Last week, the two Democrats who will remain on the commission next year issued a letter questioning what sort of agenda Ferguson would pursue as chair — and noting glaring absences in his one-pager audition for Trump.

“The document does propose allowing more mergers, firing civil servants, and fighting something called ‘the trans agenda.’” they wrote. “Is all of that more important than the cost of healthcare and groceries and gasoline? Or fighting fraud?”

The post Republicans Said the FTC Was Too Politicized. Now Trump’s FTC Pick Says It Should be Politicized — by Trump. appeared first on The Intercept.