Huffman Talks Project 2025 

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Over the course of about 25 minutes on July 11, North Coast Congressmember Jared Huffman walked the North Coast Journal through what he sees as an increasingly large and urgent part of his job: efforts to warn voters about Project 2025, a conservative roadmap designed to guide the transition to another Trump presidency.

The 900-page document is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing thinktank, with input from a "broad coalition of conservative organizations" and former Trump administration officials, and proposes sweeping changes needed to "pave the way for an effective conservative administration." Those include everything from doing away with job protections for civil servants to make them political appointees and dissolving the federal Department of Education to placing the entire federal bureaucracy — including independent agencies like the Department of Justice — under direct presidential control.

"It's not enough for conservatives to win elections," the introduction on the Project 2025 website reads. "If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration."

The interview with Huffman took place as Republicans prepared for their national convention, which began July 15 with Donald Trump announcing Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate, and as consternation continued among high-level Democrats over whether President Joe Biden should continue on as the party's nominee after what many consider a disastrous June 27 debate performance. Then, two days after Huffman's conversation with the Journal, Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, with a bullet reportedly grazing his ear.

Huffman took to social media shortly after the shooting, which ended with the would-be-assassin shot dead by Secret Service agents and Trump safely whisked from the scene, to decry the act of violence as "sickening."

"Breaking news that someone shot and injured Donald Trump is terrible and sickening," Huffman wrote in the post. "All of us, regardless of our politics, must condemn and work to end the scourge of political violence. It is NEVER justified, NEVER OK. I wish the former President a full and swift recovery."

In the week prior to the attempted assassination and the opening of the Republican National Convention, Trump issued a statement on social media distancing himself from Project 2025. While the document has been posted online for months, it had drawn increasing scrutiny in recent weeks, in part due to an ad hoc Congressional task force launched by Huffman to raise the alarm about its contents.

"I know nothing about Project 2025," Trump wrote in the post. "I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican platform, had nothing to do with it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."

While Trump's level of direct involvement is unclear, six of his former cabinet secretaries collaborated on the document, reportedly along with more than 100 people who worked in his administration. Trump has repeatedly praised the work of the Heritage Foundation, which is also sponsoring the Republican National Convention. (Russell Vought, a Trump administration official, also wrote a chapter of the document before serving as the Republican National Committee's platform policy director, so the overlap between the document, people in Trump's orbit and the Republican party as a whole is significant.)

The Project 2025 document is designed as a kind of roadmap to enacting a conservative political agenda and eliminating some of the guard rails on presidential power. It includes everything from specific policy priorities — like pulling the abortion pill off the market, banning pornography, eliminating immigration visa categories for crime and human trafficking victims (while allowing the fast-tracking of applications for migrants who pay a premium fee) and replacing carbon-reduction goals in federal law with efforts to increase domestic energy production. The document also would strike a long list of terms from all federal laws and regulations, including "sexual orientation," "abortion," "reproductive rights" and "gender equality" as a part of what it describes as an effort to combat "woke" ideology.

The document also includes a database of potential federal employees and appointees whose credentials and political beliefs have been vetted by the document's authors.

In his interview with the Journal, Huffman talks about the document, its authors and what his Stop Project 2025 Task Force is doing to make them a central issue in the campaign for the White House. He also talks briefly about the calls from some in his party for Biden to step aside as its nominee, which he expounded upon in a social media post a couple days after the interview, offering some insight into a meeting the Congressional Progressive Caucus had with the president on the subject.

"Since I was fortunate enough to ask one of the questions and speak directly with the president, I can share in general terms what I asked and how he responded," Huffman wrote in the July 12 post, noting his question centered around Biden's comments that he would step aside if the "lord almighty" came down and told him to. "... My question was about whether some combination of his advisors, family or his own famous tenacity is preventing him from objectively assessing damage from the debate and the current trajectory of the race. And specifically since we cannot produce Lord Almighty to advise him, if he would consider the best earthly alternative I could think of: meeting with former Presidents Obama and Clinton, Dem Leaders Jeffries and Schumer, and Speaker Emerita Pelosi, to seek their advice. And finally in the interest of defeating Trump and saving democracy if they advised him to pass the torch, would he take their advice. That was my question. I won't get into the back and forth, but suffice to say the President disagreed with the notion that we are on a losing trajectory. He believes the polls show him either tied or winning, and that polls are unreliable. As for the Lord Almighty workaround I proposed, I felt his answer was mostly a deflection — he said he has met previously and extensively with all of them before, which clearly referred to previous meetings and not the one I was suggesting. The rest of his answer was unclear as to whether he'd take such advice if he got it. He did express some willingness to listen to anyone who can prove there's no way he can win, but it struck me as a standard of persuasion higher than anyone — even my suggested luminaries — could meet even if they tried. I came away grateful for the exchange but not very satisfied with the answer. I continue to believe a major course correction is needed, and that the President and his team have yet to fully acknowledge the problem, much less correct it."

The following is a full transcript of the Journal's July 11 interview with Huffman, lightly edited for clarity.

North Coast Journal: Hello Congressman, how are you?

Jared Huffman: I'm good, thanks.

NCJ: Thank you for making the time today. I appreciate it.

Huffman: Sure. I am at your service.

NCJ: To start out, I'm curious to get your kind of Reader's Digest pitch for someone who to date is unaware of Project 2025 of why it's so prominently on your radar and a point of such concern.

Huffman. Absolutely. Well, the short explanation is Project 2025 is 920 pages of crazy that you have to take deadly seriously.

NCJ: That is very succinct.

Huffman: The more extended explanation is that this is a very specific and very extreme blueprint for destroying our democratic institutions, consolidating unprecedented power in the president, which they hope to be Trump, and imposing a dystopic social order that strips away individual rights and freedoms.

NCJ: I want to hone in on the second part of your very succinct initial statement. Why does this need to be taken deadly serious? Obviously, a lot of these sentiments and goals have been out there in conservative circles, in Heritage Foundation circles, for a long time at this point. What brings an acute urgency to this situation in this moment in time?

Huffman: So this is a lot more than just a thinktank spitballing ideas. This is more than 100 leading right-wing groups, including hate groups, who have aligned behind this and it's been written by the highest levels of Donald Trump's inner circle. In their words, they're calling it their war plan for a second Trump presidency. They're not talking about this as a hypothetical, they are guaranteeing that this is what they're going to do. So this is unlike anything we've ever seen. We've never had such an explicit preview, and we've certainly never had one this extreme. And the reason you have to take it seriously is that many of these things were tried by Donald Trump in his first presidency but he was unsuccessful. There were people and institutions and rules that stood in his way, from the independence of certain agencies like the Department of Justice to the experienced and sober-minded chiefs of staff and cabinet officials in some cases that he had around him to prevent his worst impulses, to ultimately Mike Pence, who upheld his oath of office and refused to be part of a coup. Project 2025 strips all of that away.

NCJ: In that sense, do you feel like this is, for lack of a better term, a course correction from Trump's first term, that this is building on lessons learned?

Huffman: Yes, this is unfinished business and then some. And Donald Trump himself has been very explicit about this but certainly the Project 2025 folks talk a lot about it, that he has to populate the government with people who will do what he wants, and so that's why they're proposing to gut the federal workforce, eliminating essentially the civil service system. Mass firings, tens of thousands of people fired if they've had anything to do with [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] policies, or if they're suspicious or disloyal to Trump in any way — they're gone — and then they're developing what they're calling their army — their 2025 Army — which is a database of vetted Trump loyalists who will then repopulate all of these federal agencies.

NCJ: Especially in the last week or so, Trump has made comments distancing himself from this effort. Do you believe that? And more importantly, does that do anything to ameliorate your concerns?

Huffman: It's laughable. But it does tell you that they're beginning to be afraid of the spotlight on Project 2025. Because as people learn about it, they want nothing to do with it.

NCJ: The fear part is interesting because nothing about Project 2025 has been hidden. It's been a pretty brazen public roadmap.

Huffman: It's remarkable. They've spent the last year swaggering and openly claiming this is their war plan, 'This is what we're going to do.' The public arrogance they've displayed, I mean, boasting of how close they are to Donald Trump and his campaign, and how embedded they're going to be in a second Trump presidency. And all of a sudden, they realize that was probably a dumb idea, and they're trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

NCJ: Do you think that's just a correction or did something shift in the politics surrounding this?

Huffman: Oh no, this is just sort of realizing their hubris is backfiring.

NCJ: I want to shift to the working group you're a part of. Is this mostly an effort to raise awareness about Project 2025 or are there action elements to this task force?

Huffman: It's both, for sure. But the most important action that we've undertaken is to bring Project 2025 out of the shadows and make sure that more than just 12 percent of the American people have heard about it and understand it. The polling showed that two months ago just 12 percent of the people had heard about it. We wanted to make sure that something closer to 100 percent of the American people have heard about it, and also because it was so largely unknown, we have a chance to explain it and define it for people in a way that will be meaningful to them. We're going to explain what it's going to do to their lives. And in this regard, we've just been wildly successful in the last couple of months. We went basically from nowhere to last week, when Project 2025 surpassed Taylor Swift as the most talked about thing on the internet. So yeah, it's going pretty well.

NCJ: And I imagine you draw some connections between Trump distancing himself from this effort in the last week, as we just talked about, and this effort at raising awareness getting a foothold?

Huffman: Oh yeah. They understand that Americans learning about this toxic plan is not good for them. But they've got a record from the last year that they can't run away from. And just obvious facts they can't run away from. Trump's super PAC has been out there promoting Project 2025. They've got a website, trumpproject2025.com. The Heritage Foundation is sponsoring the Republican National Convention, which is starting on Monday. And on Monday, they're going to have a Heritage teach-in for the delegates about Project 2025. So to suddenly try to pretend there's no connection? I mean, the guy Trump tapped to write the Republican platform is an author of Project 2025. These things are one and the same, and no one seriously believes Donald Trump when he says, 'I know nothing about it.' But even if you take that statement he put out, read the second sentence. He's such a sloppy liar he then goes on to say, 'I disagree with parts of it.' How do you know nothing about it while disagreeing with parts of it?

NCJ: OK, so that's the education and awareness component. Is there an action component of things you can do now in Congress to try to safeguard against Project 2025 should Trump come into office? What are those things? What does that look like?

Huffman: The first of those is beginning to catch our Republican colleagues in the act of Project 2025 right now. In some respects, you don't have to wait until November to see if this agenda goes forward because we have Republican colleagues moving parts of it forward every day, so in our various committees we are starting to call them out. I did it yesterday in the Natural Resources Committee, where they were kind of piggybacking on the Supreme Court's Chevron deference decision to advance all of this stuff that strips away regulatory authority on fish and wildlife, and advances their industry-friendly agenda. That's right out of the Project 2025 playbook.

Over in the Appropriations Committee, I have colleagues that are calling them out now for the different ways they're trying to defund certain programs and certain agencies right out of the Project 2025 playbook. And you're going to see more and more of that, Democrats in Congress calling out these Project 2025 implementation actions that have already started.

There's another even more sinister way they're doing it. Donald Trump is out there promising revenge and retribution and even violence for his political enemies. Project 2025 is very aligned with that and it would kind of weaponize the Department of Justice and kind of turn it into a legal enforcement arm of the presidency. Then you give him this absolute immunity gift that the U.S. Supreme Court just handed to him. Well, he now has this friend of Mike Flynn running around calling himself the 'Trump secretary of retribution.' And he has this list of over 300 political enemies that he hopes to work with vigilantes and connotational county sheriffs to just round up and detain and take retribution against as soon as Trump is in office. So this stuff is very real, it's deadly serious and some of it is starting to happen already.

NCJ: I'm also hoping you can give me a little insight into just the origin story of this task force. Obviously, Project 2025 has been a source of concern for some for some time, but how did the effort to come up with an official body to combat it come about?

Huffman: Well, this was an idea I had after a briefing by some outside groups that had been doing a deep dive into Project 2025, it was the ACLU, the Center for American Progress and a few others, and the more I learned about the way the different parts of it kind of linked together, especially with this radical Supreme Court and its agenda and some of the decisions that were starting to come down, and the things that Donald Trump was promising, I became sufficiently concerned that Congress wasn't talking about this enough, that the American people weren't hearing about this enough.

And so I had this idea for essentially an ad hoc task force — I thought I would just grab a few of my colleagues from the different caucuses you would think would care about this, like the Hispanic Caucus, the Black Caucus, the Progressive Caucus and the New Dems. There're parts of Project 2025 that are really upsetting to the whole spectrum, really, of politics on the Democratic side. And everybody just said, 'Yes, let's do this.' And pretty soon, as I'm talking to you today, we've got more than two dozen members on the task force and I have people coming to me daily wanting on.

NCJ: Has that involved or necessitated an education component for members of Congress or did you find that most members approached were already well aware of this?

Huffman: They know a little bit about it but we're taking them deeper. The first meeting that we had was on messaging, where we went over a bunch of recent polling so we know where we're starting from, what people understand about it, what are the descriptions of it that resonate the best. That was really important. Then we're taking different parts of it.

Today, we're having a deep dive on the authoritarian threats to democracy, and that's being led by Jamie Raskin and Dan Goldman, and they're bringing in some top attorneys and experts to walk members through that. We had one on what it means for the safety net of government and for labor protections and other things with some experts last week. And we're going to have one on women's reproductive choice and marriage equality. I'm going to lead on one that involves church state separation and this Christian nationalist agenda that's really throughout Project 2025. And we're just going to do all of these deep dives.

We'll probably only have opportunities to explain it at a very high level to people. When we do our media hits, when we do our interviews, you're not really going to have a chance to really wonk out about civil service reform or the impoundment act, or some of these more technical and obscure details. We'll hopefully develop crisp messages to meet those needs, but we also need members of congress to be experts on the deeper implications of it, and that's what we're trying to do.

NCJ: When you say there's a need for members of Congress to be experts on the deeper implications, is that simply for the messaging effort or is that to be prepared in case next steps need to be taken with a change in administration?

Huffman: It's both. It's also so that we can begin to identify as we do our committee work when our Republican colleagues are already starting to push the Project 2025 agenda. But it's absolutely with the future in mind because regardless of what happens in this election, this right-wing blueprint is not going away. It'll be rebranded as Project 2029 and they'll come back again. So we've got work to do here and I think the task force that we created has really gotten the ball rolling.

The success that we've had has been so quick and so significant that we've sort of been absorbed up onto the mother ship. I had a meeting this morning with [House Minority] Leader Hakeem Jeffries and our caucus leadership very much wants to embrace this and adopt it. Our Democratic messaging arm, the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, is now fully partnering with our task force and kind of doing some of its own initiatives. So this went from being a little ad hoc thing to being probably the central closing argument that you're going to hear Democrats make in the next 100 days. And I've seen the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee, they're all talking about it. And cable TV is talking about it. I'm really pleased that the conversation is happening and I think we will continue to add a lot of value to that.

NCJ: Squarely on Project 2025, I think that's the ground I was looking to cover with you. Is there anything that we haven't touched on that you want to stress or make sure I'm aware of?

Huffman: No. I appreciate your interest in the subject and I bet you've got a lot of readers interested in it, too. I'm surprised every day when I hear how many people are asking about it.

NCJ: Congressman, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask: I saw your comments regarding the Biden campaign over the last couple days, just kind of laying out a timeline that you feel a decision should made within and kind of validating some of the concerns of others, but not really wading into sharing a firm opinion of what you think should be done there.

Huffman: That's fair. Look, I'm not going to gaslight anyone about this. I've tried to be real candid about my concerns, and I've tried to explain it in the context of this election that we have to win for all the reasons we've been talking about with Project 2025. This is it. This is the big one. It could be the last free and fair election we ever have if we get it wrong. I believe that. And I've also kept some of my powder dry because the ultimate decision is President Biden's, not mine, and the best I can do is just kind of share my opinions and, with a little bit of humility, try to steer things toward success. So that's what I'm trying to do, mostly behind the scenes, where I've been very active in these conversations back here in Washington ... I think all I can say is stay tuned, because this is still very fluid.

NCJ: I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us, and I imagine one way or another that's a subject we will continue to revisit with you.

Huffman: Could be tonight — there's a huge press conference coming up in a few hours. Could be a few days from now. But yes, this is all very fluid and you certainly haven't heard the last of it.

Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal's news editor. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, extension 321, or [email protected].