President Donald J. Trump killed it, not because it was bad but because it was misrepresented by both corporate media and Democrats as HIS plan. It is not his plan. It was never his plan. He never read the 900-pages of the plan. But that didn’t stop the left from trying to attach it to him and his running mate, J.D. Vance.

“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,” said Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two senior campaign advisors.

To be fair, I actually like much of what I know about Project 2025. It leans to the right of Trump’s “Agenda 47” in some key areas, most notably its call for federal abortion restrictions. But both Trump and the campaign are correct that nobody should be putting out policy “recommendations” unless they make it abundantly clear that they are nothing more than recommendations.

The Heritage Foundation overplayed their role as a think tank. Even the name, “Project 2025,” insinuates that it’s a plan intended for immediate implementation. This negates their claim that it’s for “any” Republican President at any time. By naming it “Project 2025,” they intended for it to be used by President Trump… unless they really thought Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis could have won the nomination which would eliminate their credibility as a think tank.

The moment corporate media, Hollywood, and Democrat politicians started attaching Project 2025 to Trump, it became Heritage President Kevin D. Roberts’ responsibility to immediately debunk the notion. He should have lambasted anyone who even insinuated that Trump would implement it. Instead, he allowed the lie to be perpetuated and did damage to the Trump campaign.

He should have said he never presented it to Trump. He should have announced that Trump and his campaign summarily rejected and denounced the project. He should have given it a less official-sounding name. But they made the decision to let the charade continue while they soaked up extra attention.

This is why we had headlines just yesterday that read, “How Trump and the GOP Are Plotting to Transform the State of Reproductive Care in America.” The article is about how Trump plans to end all abortion rights. They took NOTHING from Trump’s actual plan of allowing states to make their own decisions. Instead, the article pulls everything from Project 2025’s playbook. The only minor tidbit that allows a sliver of distance between Project 2025 and Trump is that they claimed it was a “920-page blueprint for a possible second Donald Trump administration.”

“Possible.”

To the average reader who is not politically savvy (and let’s face it, that’s the vast majority of voters), this article from NBC News is “proof” that Trump wants to outlaw abortion completely.

Even Joe Biden’s defunct campaign and Kamala Harris’ current campaign try to attach Trump to Project 2025. The image above is taken from Biden’s website.

Project 2025 is dead. It wasn’t really killed by Trump. It wasn’t really killed by corporate media. It was killed by the Heritage Foundation’s poor decision to pretend it was more than what it really was.

From the COVID-19 pandemic to abortion funding and transgender mandates, HHS has twisted federal law and the pursuit of public health to marginalize people of faith and promote bureaucrats and leftist activism, warns Roger Severino, former director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights under President Donald Trump. He argues that the next conservative president must reverse these abuses and return HHS to its proper role: the promotion of public health.

“Few areas of life are more important, and more subject to abuse, than public health,” Severino, vice president of Domestic Policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “Unfortunately, our public health agencies have replaced science and medicine with politics and ideology, and Americans now face shorter life spans as a result. Reform can only happen if entrenched special interests, from lawless bureaucratic leaders and Big Pharma, are reined in and rooted out.” (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)

Severino’s report in the book “Mandate for Leadership,” compiled by the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, notes that after the COVID-19 pandemic was over, U.S. life expectancy continued to drop precipitously. A copy of his report on HHS was provided exclusively to The Daily Signal for this article.

The Heritage Foundation helped launch the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (also known as Project 2025) to equip a potential conservative president to govern effectively from Day One.

HHS has an outsized impact on the federal government, from its role in declaring public health emergencies to its management of Medicare and Medicaid to its $1.6 trillion annual budget. Under Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, HHS has also used its power over health policy to promote abortion and transgender ideology.

Severino lays out five overarching goals for a conservative president intent on reshaping HHS: (1) protecting life from conception, protecting the rights of conscience of health care workers, and defending biological reality against gender identity ideology; (2) empowering patients to make their own health care choices, enabling providers to offer more options, and unleashing markets to drive down costs and improve quality; (3) promoting stable and flourishing married families instead of LGBT activism and single motherhood; (4) correcting the errors of the COVID-19 pandemic and preparing for the next health emergency; and (5) closing the “revolving door between government and Big Pharma,” where regulators leave government and work for companies they have regulated and pharmaceutical executives move from industry into regulatory agencies.

Severino breaks down the massive bureaucracy of HHS and presents specific recommendations for each branch of the behemoth agency. This article focuses on a few of the specific issues that motivate the major changes he recommends.

1. COVID-19

Many of Severino’s critiques and recommendations for a future HHS trace back to the department’s abuses during the COVID-19 pandemic. His report notes that while the HHS secretary declared a public health emergency, “the threshold for what constitutes a public health emergency—how many cases, hospitalizations, deaths, etc.—was never defined.”

Severino recommends that Congress “restrict HHS’s ability to declare indefinite public health emergencies,” in part by establishing a set time frame for any emergency.

He also recommends that the HHS secretary “investigate, expose, and remediate any instances in which HHS violated people’s rights by” colluding with Big Tech companies to silence dissent on COVID-19.

Severino says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be broken up into two separate organizations: one dedicated to gathering scientific data and one responsible for making public health recommendations—”an inescapably political function.” He notes that the CDC previously held back public health information on COVID-19 partially due to “fear that the information might be misinterpreted.”

“CDC should report on the risks and effectiveness of all infectious disease-mitigation measures dispassionately and leave the ‘should’ and ‘must’ policy calls to politically accountable parties,” he writes. “Congress should ensure that CDC’s legal authorities are clearly defined and limited to prevent” an “arbitrary and vacillating exercise of power,” as the U.S. experienced during the pandemic.

He recommends that the Food and Drug Administration, not the CDC, should regulate vaccines, and he calls for reforms to prevent the National Institutes of Health’s “inappropriate industry ties that create serious conflicts of interest.”

He notes that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—Anthony Fauci’s division of the NIH—”owns half of the patent for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, among thousands of other pharma patents.” According to NIH documents, NIH Director Francis Collins, Fauci, and Fauci’s deputy director, Clifford Lane, all received royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies between 2009 and 2014.

He faults NIH for funding “gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.”

2. Abortion

Severino recommends HHS change many policies to protect unborn life and maternal health and to honor the religious convictions of Americans who object to the use of aborted baby body parts in medical research.

The CDC “should fund studies into the risks and complications of abortion” and require states to report abortion complications and babies born alive despite an attempted abortion, he writes. It should prohibit research on aborted baby body parts, since such research can be “easily” replaced with research on adult stem cells. And it should avoid promoting abortion as health care.

Severino condemns the CDC’s current abortion and maternal mortality reporting systems as “woefully inadequate,” since states provide those statistics on a voluntary basis. “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

The former HHS leader urges the FDA to reconsider its approval of chemical abortion drugs, an approval that currently faces a court challenge. He notes that the complication rater for chemical abortion is “four times higher” than that of surgical abortion and that the chemical abortion drug mifepristone has been associated with 26 deaths of pregnant mothers, over 1,000 hospitalizations, and thousands more adverse events. He calls the approval of this drug “politicized and illegal from the start.”

Severino also calls for the FDA to loosen its restrictions on foreign-made vaccines that were not derived through or tested on aborted baby cells, reinstituting a Trump-era waiver for Japanese-made vaccines.

He urges the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds and to redirect funds to “health centers that provide real health care for women.”

Severino urges HHS to audit the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for compliance to the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funding of abortions, and to perform a “full review” of HHS efforts to promote abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade.

He also urges various HHS departments to rescind “ideologically motivated fearmongering” guidance that the Biden administration released in the wake of the court’s ruling, such as warnings about state governments “targeting” women for getting abortions.

3. Transgender Ideology

“Radical actors inside and outside government are promoting harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of ‘gender identity,’” Severino warns. He urges a potential conservative president to reverse this trend.

Biden’s HHS has interpreted Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in health care, to forbid discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” and sexual orientation as well. Severino urges a future HHS secretary to explicitly revoke this guidance, as HHS did under Trump.

He says that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should reissue and expand upon its 2016 decision that it cannot recommend “gender reassignment surgery” for Medicare beneficiaries, citing the “growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous.” (Many doctors recently testified in favor of a Florida rule blocking Medicaid coverage for experimental transgender interventions.)

He also urges HHS to withdraw guidance allowing taxpayer funds to pay for cross-sex transitions.

He faults the NIH for having been “at the forefront in pushing junk gender science,” and encourages the agency to “fund studies into the short-term and long-term negative effects of [cross-sex] interventions, including ‘affirmation,’ puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, and the likelihood of desistence [abandoning the desire to change one’s sex] if young people are given counseling that does not include medical or social interventions.”

4. Restoring Religious Liberty

Severino notes that under liberal administrations, the office of HHS that he led, the Office for Civil Rights, “has amassed a poor record of devoting resources to conscience and religious freedom enforcement and is often complicit in approving or looking the other way at the administration’s own attacks on religious liberty.”

He encourages a prospective conservative president to direct the Office for Civil Rights to return to the Trump-era policies that “initiated robust enforcement of these conscience laws.” He urges HHS to reestablish waivers for state and child welfare agencies, especially for faith-based adoption and foster care agencies, which had previously been excluded from federal programs because they were unwilling to place children with same-sex couples.

5. Restoring Medicare and Medicaid

Severino warns that Medicare and Medicaid operate “runaway entitlements that stifle medical innovation, encourage fraud, and impede cost containment, in addition to which their fiscal future is in peril.”

He urges the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to increase Medicare beneficiaries’ control over their own care; reduce regulatory burdens on doctors; ensure sustainability and value for both beneficiaries and taxpayers; and reduce fraud, waste, and abuse. He favors Medicare Advantage and urges Medicare to pay the same amount for outpatient procedures that it does for inpatient hospital services. He also encourages Medicare to reform payments along the lines of intensity and value of service, as opposed to a fee-for-service model.

Severino warns that Medicaid has a higher percentage of improper payments than any other federal program, and encourages the program to stop covering nonmedical services like air conditioning and housing. He says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should give states more flexibility to strengthen program integrity and to incentivize personal responsibility through work requirements and private insurance.

6. Medical Ethics

Severino encourages HHS to decommission the CDC and NIH Foundations, nonprofit entities “whose boards are populated with pharmaceutical company executives.”

“Private donations to these foundations—a majority of them from pharmaceutical companies—should
not be permitted to influence government decisions about research funding or public health policy,” he writes.

“We must shut and lock the revolving door between government and Big Pharma,” he adds. “Regulators should have a long ‘cooling off period’ on their contracts (15 years would not be too long) that prevents them from working for companies they have regulated. Similarly, pharmaceutical company executives should be restricted from moving from industry into positions within regulatory agencies.”

Severino recommends more changes to HHS, including a prioritization of fatherhood in the many social programs HHS controls, and the elimination of the Head Start preschool program and the NIH Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal. Image by WEBN-TV via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0.

“The great challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Donald Trump, writes in the book “Mandate for Leadership,” compiled by the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Copies of his report on the Executive Office of the President and the report on “Central Personnel Agencies” were provided exclusively to The Daily Signal for this article.

The Heritage Foundation helped launch the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (also known as Project 2025) to avoid the pitfalls Trump faced in 2017. The incoming president struggled to keep his promises to the American people, facing stiff headwinds from a hostile federal bureaucracy Trump often referred to as “the deep state.” The project aims to equip an incoming conservative president with policies to rein in this bureaucracy. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)

While the Constitution makes it “abundantly clear” that the executive power of the U.S. government “is not vested in departments or agencies” but in the president himself, Vought warns that “a president today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

Vought encourages some changes to the Executive Office of the President of the United States—notably the elimination of the pro-abortion and pro-transgender Gender Policy Council—but the bulk of recommendations for combatting the deep state appear in the report on “Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy.” Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management under Trump and director of Project 2025 at The Heritage Foundation, co-wrote the report with Ronald Reagan-era OPM Director Donald Devine and Trump-era OPM staffer Dennis Dean Kirk, Project 2025’s associate director for personnel policy.

Dans, Devine and Kirk urge a future conservative president to reinstate many of Trump’s executive orders and issue new ones. A future president should speed up the time it takes to discipline and fire employees; restrict the power of public-sector unions; bring the salaries of federal employees more in line with private-sector workers; reassign entrenched federal employees to “Schedule F,” thereby making them at-will and easier to fire; and work to prevent members of the outgoing administration from “burrowing in.”

The status quo

Dans, Devine and Kirk trace the problem of unaccountable bureaucracy back to the progressive movement of the 20th century, which aimed to elevate professional and scientific bureaucrats. This had serious “unintended consequences,” such as making it difficult to reward good employees, hard to analyze applicants, and “almost impossible to fire all but the most incompetent civil servants.”

Federal employees often win big bonuses, even amid scandal, the authors warn. Veterans Administration executives who encouraged false reporting of waiting lists for hospital administration during the administration of Barack Obama nonetheless received “outstanding” ratings, for example. Pay increases have become automatic rather than based on performance.

To make matters worse, management cannot screen applicants for basic qualifications such as intelligence.

Under President Jimmy Carter, the Department of Justice and OPM lawyers signed a legal consent decree eliminating civil service IQ examinations, based on the claim that IQ tests discriminated on the basis of race. “Courts have ruled that even without evidence of overt, intentional discrimination, such results might suggest discrimination,” the authors note. Congress or a future administration will have to end the doctrine of disparate impact to resolve this problem.

An entrenched bureaucracy also hampers the will of the people.

While both Republican and Democratic administrations have aimed to “infiltrate political appointees improperly into the high career civil service,” Democratic efforts have tended to succeed because “they require the cooperation of careerists, who generally lean heavily to the Left.”

The Project 2025 authors, who have extensive experience in government, warn that career staff reserve “excessive numbers of key policy positions as ‘career reserved’ to deny them” to political appointees. In practice, this means that Trump’s appointees could not direct federal policy because entrenched staff from Obama undermined the duly-elected president’s initiatives. Career staff also dominate personnel evaluation boards and lead training efforts that can undermine the administration’s goals.

1. Streamline the firing process

Firing bad employees requires a herculean effort, the authors note. They recommend restructuring the process of disciplining and terminating federal workers.

Trump signed an executive order in 2018 requiring agencies to speed up the process of correcting, disciplining, or firing employees who underperform, but President Joe Biden overturned that order. The report encourages reinstating it.

If a private-sector employee faces termination, he or she often has a simple two-step process to appeal it, while federal employees facing termination have a cornucopia of alphabet-soup options to appeal. They can appeal to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, or the Office of Special Counsel—and employees often “shop” for a friendly venue, the report notes.

A conservative president should streamline the process by making the Merit Systems Protection Board the main reviewer of adverse employment actions, the authors argue.

2. Curb union power

Public-sector unions help explain how the bureaucracy has become so entrenched, the report claims. Even Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered federal government union representation incompatible with democracy, in part because strikes would amount to acts against the people. Yet President John F. Kennedy recognized federal union representation and President Jimmy Carter set public-sector bargaining in law as part of an agreement with Congress to pass the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, a reform that itself has been undermined, the authors lament.

Over time, federal agencies narrowed management rights, even though they still exist in law. A conservative president should reinstitute those rights, the report urges.

Trump issued three executive orders to restrain union abuses: one encouraging agencies to renegotiate all collective bargaining agreements, another encouraging agencies to prevent union representatives from using official time for union activity, and one more encouraging agencies to limit labor grievances and prioritize performance over seniority. Biden revoked these orders, but the report urges a future president to reinstate them.

3. Market-based pay and improving efficiency

Federal employees receive wages 22% higher than wages for similar private-sector workers, according to a 2016 Heritage Foundation study. With the value of employee benefits factored in, that ratio rises to between 30% and 40%. An American Enterprise Institute study found a 14% pay premium and a 61% total compensation premium. They receive more vacation and paid sick leave, retire earlier (normally at age 55 after 30 years), enjoy richer pension annuities, and receive automatic cost-of-living adjustments based on where they retire.

The Project 2025 report encourages moving “closer to a market model for federal pay and benefits.”

Republicans in the House of Representatives supported legislation to increase the weight of performance over time-of-service in the federal bureaucracy, but fierce opposition from unions kept these efforts from advancing. The report encourages a conservative president to “insist that performance be first.”

It also encourages a president to streamline the bureaucracy, acting on a Government Accountability Office report finding almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and eliminate duplicate functions across the administration. Congress did not approve the Trump administration’s proposed consolidations.

4. Schedule F

Any conservative president must counter the influence of leftist bureaucrats who have entrenched themselves as career civil servants, the report warns. The president, not career civil servants, has the duty to enforce the law, and therefore “career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms.”

In October 2020, Trump created a new category of federal employee: Schedule F. His executive order directed agency heads to prepare a list of federal employees in “positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character that are not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition.” The order created exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, allowing agency heads to transfer them and make them functionally at-will employees, much easier to fire.

The report encourages a future president to reestablish Trump’s Schedule F order, which Biden reversed.

The report also encourages a future president not to cut political appointees as a cost-cutting measure. It faults the Trump administration for failing to remove political appointees from the Obama administration, instead relying on them and on career civil servants to run the government while Trump’s appointees struggled to receive Senate approval. This “led to a lack of agency control.”

The Trump administration appointed fewer political appointees early on—in part due to “historically high partisan congressional obstructions” but also because some officials said they limited the number of political appointees “as a way to cut federal spending.”

“Whatever the reasoning, this had the effect of permanently hampering the rollout of the new President’s agenda,” the report notes. “Thus, in those critical early years, much of the government relied on senior careerists and holdover Obama appointees to carry out the sensitive responsibilities that would otherwise belong to the new president’s appointees.”

The report recommends “a freeze on all top career-position hiring to prevent ‘burrowing-in’ by outgoing political appointees.”

Any conservative president elected in 2024 or 2028 will face immense challenges from the bureaucracy, and this report presents a roadmap for combatting any deep state efforts to block his or her agenda.

Article cross-posted from The Daily Signal.

Article by Mark Tapscott from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

The Heritage litigation stems from the conservative non-profit foundation’s April 18 FOIA request to DHS for all agency documents in which appear the terms “Babel X,” “Babel,” “Babel Street” or “PanAmerica.”

Babel X is a controversial software program that allows users to monitor social media posts around the world in 200 languages, as well as listen to smart phone conversations in a specified geographic location.

The FOIA also requested copies of all DHS emails in which appears the term “@babelstreet.com” addressed to or from a lengthy list of agency officials, including Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, John D. Cohen, DHS’s Acting Under Secretary and Chief Intelligence Officer, and 11 other officials in the agency’s Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) operation.

Finally, the FOIA sought all communications “regarding the procurement, award and implementation of the award to PANAMERICA COMPUTERS, INC. regarding award 70T02021F7554N002.”

The FOIA request was submitted, according to the complaint, because “Heritage understands DHS uses Babel X to monitor unknown entities, groups, and individuals in a manner similar to that of the FBI.” The FBI spent $5 million earlier this year to buy 5,000 user permits for Babel X from PANAMERICA COMPUTERS, INC., with an option for further purchases up to $27 million.

The maker of Babel X claims, according to the Heritage suit that the powerful scraping software is capable of multiple avenues of digital surveillance, including “persistent cross-lingual search and discovery across multiple data sources with advanced statistical and crowd-sourcing techniques,” deciphering “relevant insights across 200+ languages with state-of-the-art, linguistics technology,” performing “sentiment analysis in 50+ major world languages,” filtering “by a wide range of variables including keywords, hashtags, language, authors, emojis, dates/times, regular expression,” conducting “ad-hoc research for in-depth insight on entities,” analyzing “themes, entities, and categories as well as detect relationships,” and “integrating all available data on a single platform.”

The complaint added that “DHS has purchased and continues to purchase a large number of Babel X products and uses those products for a variety of functions.”

The Heritage complaint said the FBI contract indicates that “the FBI solicited for a product that was able to gather and analyze information from the dark web and a number of common applications, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.

“The FBI expects to run 20,000 discrete keyword searches a month through the collected data. The FBI contracting documents stated that the FBI’s ‘intent’ was to look at past events, but that ‘predictive analytics’ that would allow the FBI to ‘point to possible actions of a subject or group’ were ‘desirable.’”

The software’s maker told The Washington Post that the product does not listen to cell phone calls, according to the complaint.

In response to the Heritage FOIA, DHS officials acknowledged receiving it but then asked the foundation to narrow its request because its initial review indicated that a huge number of responsive documents were potentially involved.

After further delays, the complaint said the litigation was necessary because DHS “has failed to promptly review agency records for the purpose of locating and collecting those records that are responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request.”

In addition, DHS is “wrongfully withholding non-exempt records requested by Heritage by failing to produce any records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request,” and is further “wrongfully withholding non-exempt-agency records requested by Plaintiffs by failing to segregate exempt information in otherwise non-exempt records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request.”

The suit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, asks that DHS be ordered to conduct another search for all relevant records, as well as to “produce, within 20 days of the Court’s order, or by such other date as the Court deems appropriate, any and all non-exempt records responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA Request and indexes justifying the withholding of any responsive records withheld in whole or in part under claim of exemption.”

A spokesman for DHS could not be reached for comment in time for publication of this news story.

Joining Heritage as a plaintiff in the litigation is Heritage Senior Adviser Mike Howell, who manages the foundation’s oversight project. Howell joined Heritage in 2018 after serving at DHS in the General Counsel’s office, where he was “the chief legal point of contact for the department’s 3,000-lawyer office for all congressional oversight and investigations that concerned any of the department’s headquarters or component offices,” according to the foundation.

Before going to DHS, Howell worked on Capitol Hill from 2013 to 2017 as an attorney for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

The present FOIA lawsuit is only the second one ever filed by the nonprofit since its founding in 1973.