Author of Project 2025 says in leaked video that Trump “blessed” his agenda

Donald Trump has tried to claim he has no connection to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's dystopian policy agenda that seeks to drastically reorganize and destroy large parts of the federal government. However, a recently leaked video shows one of the plan's main architects telling undercover journalists that Trump funded the project and “very much” supports its muddled agenda. The plan would have far-reaching effects on American culture, including drastic changes in science and technology policy.

Undercover journalists from the Center for Climate Reporting recently used hidden cameras to record a private conversation with Russell Vought, one of the leading minds behind Project 2025. Vought is also president of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank dedicated to turning back “the tide of progressive liberalism” in the United States. In the conversation, the journalists got Vought to admit that Trump, despite his public rhetoric, still supports Project 2025's policy agenda.

“He was in our organization, he raised money for our organization, he blessed it,” Vought said of Trump. He added that the former president was “very supportive of what we do” despite Trump's public denials. “I expect to hear 10 more times … the president distancing himself from the left-wing bogeyman of Project 2025 — I'm not worried about that,” Vought said. Vought further claimed that his organization was quietly drafting hundreds of executive orders and legal opinions that could be used by a future Trump administration. In the midst of his first term, the Heritage Foundation boasted that 64 percent of its policy proposals were “included in Trump's budget, implemented through regulatory guidance, or under consideration for action consistent with the Heritage Foundation's original proposals.”

“President Trump's campaign has made clear that only President Trump and his campaign, and NOT other organizations or former staff, represent second-term policy,” a campaign spokesperson told CNN.

Vought, like many other people associated with Project 2025, has close ties to Trump. In addition to being a regular guest on Trump supporter Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, he played a major role in the first Trump administration when he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget. In that role, Vought was tasked with “implementing deregulation agendas across the executive branch,” as he put it. A CNN review found that, like Vought, as many as 140 people who formerly worked for Trump were involved in the project's policymaking.

The list of disturbing measures that Project 2024 advocates is long. The initiative’s 900-page manifesto, Leadership mandateis full of passages that seem more at home in a pamphlet distributed by a crank on a street corner than in the policy agenda of a major think tank. Most notorious is the project's statement that it favors a nationwide ban on pornography. In a confused passage that equates pornography with transgender identity and pedophilia, Project 2025 cannot help but expose the right-wing radicalism at the heart of its crusade to reshape American government:

Pornography, as manifested today in the ubiquitous proliferation of transgender ideology and the sexualization of children, is not a political Gordian knot that inextricably links disparate demands for free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child protection. It is not entitled to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child molesters and misogynistic exploiters of women. Its product is as addictive as any illegal drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be banned. The people who produce and distribute it should be put in prison. Educators and public librarians who offer it should be classified as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology companies that facilitate its distribution should be shut down.

Project 2025 is not only committed to banning something the vast majority of Americans do on a regular basis, but also to mangling U.S. environmental policy beyond recognition. In a series of recent leaks, ProPublica recently revealed that the project aims to “eradicate references to climate change absolutely everywhere” and ban officials across the government from using the term. But that's small compared to the project's other environmental policy plans, as it also advocates for gutting the Environmental Protection Agency.

We've already mentioned that the project wants to cut public funding for a number of scientific agencies, including the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Such drastic measures would have downstream effects on consumers – such as the end of free weather reports from these agencies. In Project 2025's perfect world, weather science would probably be privatized and Americans would have to pay to get their weekly weather forecasts.

At the same time, Project 2025 would go full throttle on dumber applications of technology, such as weaponizing space. The project states that with regard to the US Space Force, the interplanetary military wing that emerged during the Trump administration, it is necessary to reverse “the defensive posture of the Biden administration” and “restore offensive capabilities to ensure a favorable balance of forces, efficiently manage the entire spectrum of deterrence, and seriously complicate the enemy's calculations regarding a successful first strike against US space assets.”

Vought's organization, the Center for Renewing America, has equally bizarre ideas about how the federal government should handle technology issues. While some of the think tank's positions seem almost reasonable (its anti-monopoly efforts are fine, for example), many are downright insane. In April of this year, the organization filed an amicus curiae brief to end the FCC's funding of Wi-Fi service on public school buses. At the time, the organization argued that this funding was not, as one might imagine, government intervention to ensure that schoolchildren have access to the internet, but rather a “ploy by the left-wing FCC chairman” to “subsidize the big tech companies and brainwash kids with government-funded Wi-Fi.” At the same time, the organization has sought to repeal Section 230, the law that grants internet platforms broad immunity for the content they host. This policy is largely credited with preventing the internet from being destroyed by lawsuits.

Gizmodo reached out to the Trump team, the Center for Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation, but received no immediate response.