The Daily Signal - BONUS | 4 Pillars of Project 2025's Conservative Plan to Undermine the Deep State 'Behemoth' in Washington

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn explains how Project 2025 aims to equip a future Republican president to dismantle the deep state. Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn, now a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, explained the four pillars of Project 2025, a project aiming to equip the next conservative president to dismantle the deep state. Read more here: https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/20/4-pillars-conservative-plan-undermine-liberal-behemoth-washington Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Tyler O'Neill, managing editor at The Daily Signal. I have with me, Rick Dearborn, former White House deputy chief of staff to President Donald Trump, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and contributing author to the project 2025, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Really wonderful to have you with us, Rick. Tyler, it's great to be with you. Thank you so much for having me on. So I wanted to zero in on. on Project 2025 is all about preparing the next conservative president, whoever he or she may be, to take on the administrative state, to make it more reliable for the American people and responsive to the will of the people.

And you specifically with your experience on the Trump transition and in the White House have a focus on the, I believe it's the executive office of the president, That's right, White House office. Yeah. It's distinct, right? There's the White House office. It's part of the executive office of the president, but it isn't exactly the same. So it is a subset, but it operates a little bit different. And then the executive offices of the president, a large number of those are also over in the new executive office building.

I'm kind of an old guy, so I still call it OEOB, which is the old executive office building. But yeah, the White House office is part of the executive office of the presidency. And is that in the old British embassy? No, the executive office of the president has always been part of the old executive office building in terms of, I think, where it's been housed. I don't know where it was housed prior to that. It may have been housed somewhere prior to the building being built. But that beautiful piece of architecture that sits right next to the entrance to the west wing of the White House, West Executive Drive, is the street that separates the two.

But that whole building contains predominantly all of the staff that also help each of the senior advisors that are part of the White House office for the president. There are some other unique offices within the executive office building, or the Eisenhower executive office building, I guess is what's called now. All of OMB is there.

So the Office of Management and Budget, the head of which is housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office building along with many of its staff. White House Council has a ton of staff in there. A lot of the National Security Council has its staff in there. Both the National Economic Council and the Domestic Policy Council have their staff in there. The Vice President's actual ceremonial office is in there, but in modern times, at least for the last multiple presidents, There's been an ask by each vice president going back several decades of the president if they could have an office, you know, in the West Wing. And most presidents have granted that. I can't remember exactly how far back that goes. But I think it goes back at least to Cheney and maybe prior to that. It could go back to possibly to Gore. I don't know how far back it actually goes. But that's a really a little bit more of a recent event, to be honest. honest. Well, so how do you see the basic problem that Project 2025 is trying to address? You know, what did you see in the Trump transition and in the Trump White House? I think we hear a lot about

a deep state that was undermining Trump's agenda from within the government. And how, what's the big picture of how we address that, the next conservative president? Look, the biggest advantage that the next, the next, the next, the next, the next, the next, conservative president is going to have he or she is that this project does all the legwork that no president elect has had the chance to do, at least on the conservative side. You know, the liberals for a long time have had the machinery of government help them. Even some of the programs that are set up with the funding that come with it tend to lean more towards helping a more liberal and more pro-expansion of government-inclined,

administration than the conservatives and a conservative model of government. So I wish we would have had this brand new mandate for leadership, the conservative promise book in 2016. I mean, that would have been amazing. Could you imagine getting an updated roadmap like Reagan had in the 19, early 1981, when he first came into office, when the Heritage Foundation put out its mandate for leadership? I mean, this is an updated version of that, that 55 plus conservative organizations, it's not just heritage. This is the entire conservative movement, over 450 authors that have all contributed to the book. The book's well over close to 200 pages, but it's all chock full of, you know, what are the roles of the White House office? Who sits in what seat?

What is that position designed to do? What are you looking for in terms of staffing that particular White House counsel or head of your domestic policy council or your senior advisors? And then it breaks it down by the executive office of the president. It goes a little bit like in Chapter 2. That goes further into the Office of Management and Budget and a lot of the executive offices for the president, inclusive of the U.S. Trade Rep, counsel and economic quality. And then it goes into the departments. So State Department, Interior, et cetera. So that's the book.

The book is just the first pillar. And then it lays out several things beyond that that the movement itself has put into Project 2025, which I'm happy to talk about further. Yeah. So what does – so I think the main problems that we have is that the federal bureaucracy is very entrenched. It's hard to, you know, make the bureaucracy more accountable to the people when a new president is elected by the people. and then you have all these holdovers that we saw. And the book describes very well, I think, that the early Trump administration leaned a little bit too much on those entrenched bureaucrats and even on some of the political appointees that had been placed there by President Obama. And then, you know, not to single out Trump for criticism, this is a lot of learning that the administration had to do.

and now, you know, this book is putting forth the roadmap for the future. But what are those basic things that, you know, maybe pitfalls that Trump fell into and that we need to address going forward? Look, I think it all starts with the people. People are policy. Pillar 2 and Pillar 3 of Project 2025, Pillar 2 sets up a database. Conservatives have never had a large number collected in one spot of conservative scholars and academia and policy experts that you could just pull off the shelf and say,

okay, if you're going to populate the Department of Defense, here's the five people that really understand the conservative philosophy on how to promote and protect our national security. If you're going to populate the Department of Interior, here's the top three folks that you really need to have in the senior positions. And then who do you need to have? working in the Bureau of Land Management or BOM or some of the other sub-agencies within that department. So it creates a database. I think the goal is to try to juice that beyond, say, 10,000. And then the third pillar is to train all those folks.

The one thing that conservatives probably don't get a lot in terms of training is we're not all working in government all the time, right? I mean, one advantage that liberals have is that they burrow in and they're in the government and they're pushing their agenda and they're pushing what that particular liberal president wants to do. And then if a conservative president is there, they may not be pushing his or her agenda, but they're definitely still pushing their own. So what is it that the Trump administration could have learned that people and picking people and putting them in the right spots is really critical? And I honestly think that they not only learned it, but they started moving forward with different plans on how to work with the federal workforce. There are some incredibly talented people in government that are career staff that will push a conservative agenda.

But there's a whole heck of a lot of others that are very liberal. And the only check and balance on that are the people that a president, in this case a conservative president can put in to help supervise and promote the president's agenda, conservative agenda, and then work with those career staff and that department to push the agenda forward. but you have to find people that, A, know what they're doing, know where the bodies are buried, have their hands on the levers to actually push the programs that help make the agenda move. If you don't have that, you get stuck and you just start running around in a circle. And so most good conservative presidents don't really get it all figured out until the end of their second term. You know, and the advantage that most liberal presidents have is that from day one, that whole behemoth is helping them move their agenda.

It's just kind of the way I always used to say it is is that the liberals, not only are they're very comfortable with government, they're the ones that have built all the layers of government. Conservatives believe in trying to pull some of those layers back, and let's get a lot more of that power like the 10th Amendment says back to the states and the localities. So we're not really that inclined to get in there and try to manipulate all the levers because we don't necessarily believe in all those levers. We think that politics really is kind of local and that there are differences between what the federal government should do and what state and locals should do. So we just have a different

philosophy. And I think that probably doesn't give us the best advantage when we start trying to operate a federal government. Yeah. Well, and how does Project 2025 plan to get both the buy-in from the presidential campaigns and the, you know, to make sure to not, to not, I know it's very, very focused on avoiding any appearance of supporting one. candidate or another, you know, making sure you get buy-in, but also making sure that whoever ends up winning the primary, if there could be a conservative president, that person is going to take this seriously. Well, look, it's the 50th anniversary of Heritage who's helped facilitate this, but every

conservative group is part of it. There's an unveiling of this book. There's a big kickoff that's happening this month. They'll be meeting and holding different meetings with all. all of the different current announced presidential, conservative presidential candidates. They'll be reaching out to those candidates that may not have yet announced, providing them a book, walking through what the different pillars are. The pillars of Project 2025 are very simple.

Here's a book that's a blueprint of how a conservative would run government. Secondly, we want to build a database of great people that can help you promote your policy. Thirdly, we want to train them so they kind of know what to do on day one. so you don't have to spend your time explaining here's where you get around in the department, and this is what the department does. They'll have some sense of what they're going to be doing and finding sharp people to do it. And then pillar four is, here is all of the appendix and information you're going to need when you write an executive order, when you're working on a regulation, if you want to roll back a regulation, if you want to promote a program, if you want

to work with outside government affiliated groups, how does all this work? So giving them some game plans that they can use so that they're not having to build them from scratch from day one. I don't care who you are as a conservative presidential candidate. How incredibly valuable is that? I mean, if I'm any of those campaigns, I'm going to completely just scoop this up and want to learn as much as I possibly can about it and make sure that the Project 2025 team understands we really want your input. They'll tailor it the way they want to.

I don't think any of the conservative groups are under any illusion that they'll do every single thing that's listed in the book. But it's a pretty darn good guide, and they're going to find themselves, in my opinion, always referring back to what we've laid out because it's everybody that they want to put in their administration anyway has had some role or voice or part of putting this project together. And what would you, you know, Rick Dearborn of 2023,

say to Rick Dearborn of 2016, 2017, you know, when you were leading the transition, if you could have one piece of advice to give yourself, what would it be? Buy the book, read the book, understand it, look at it. This isn't just me about trying to sell a project that I've been part of, but James Baker, I think, is the only individual that I know of that has run more than one transition. There may be some others that did it in liberal administrations,

but I think most of the times the person or the people that come in and run a transition, it's their first time doing it. There may have been some examples where, people have done it once or twice. It's hard to do. You're managing a thousand people. You're trying to get it set up for your president. Your president's going to go in the direction that they want to go. But having the tools in place so when they say, I want to do X, you can say, great, here's the executive order that we ought to take a look at. Here's several options for you to choose. It comes up to a presidential decision. Here's some amazing personnel that we've put in front of you.

They've been vetted. You know, they're going to help push your agenda. So my advice would be, if you have resources that you can use that the movement has been able to offer and you're a conservative president, which I'm hopeful we have, this is the type of project that you could only wish for and has now come true. The amount of time and effort that's gone into this has been done ahead of time. So you're getting a jump on what you may want to do for that first 100 days. Think of it as just guardrails, right? Look, if you stay within these guardrails, it's all the stuff you're going to want to do anyway. Now put your special imprint on what that is, but it's really going to help your transition team develop really good personnel that they can pick, hopefully from a database of thousands of folks, and then really help implement all of your policies. My piece of advice is if you don't have to drive a car blind, don't. You know, if you've got a book like this, read it so that you have a chance to really move forward and build an incredible administration and a great presidency that's focused on, you know, the bedrock conservative principles that we all believe in. So these are the tools, if you will, that can help you get from point A to point B. So my advice is if someone's hand, if someone's giving you a helping hand, take it.

Yeah. Can you give, you know, our audience a little bit of a glimpse. at how big and in-depth and monumental this project really is? I don't think there's anything that's ever been like it. Mandate for leadership is the only thing I can think of back in the early 80s in 1981 when Reagan put the book in front of all of his cabinet members, which is a well-known story and basically said, you know, read it, learn it, and push it.

This is what we want to do. That's the only time sense. And the beautiful part about this is it's not just one organization. This is a large number. number, like I said, well over 50-some-od conservative organizations that have all, all contributed. I had the privilege of being the primary author on the first chapter, which is the White House office, but I had, you know, a baker's dozen of contributing authors that, in my opinion, contributed the best parts of that chapter. In some ways, I helped facilitate it, but I had

amazing people that really helped build that book out. And, you know, some, you know, some Some folks aren't as well known that are young conservatives and others, everyone knows, like an Ed Meese or a Don Devine. So, I mean, I just, I just think that this is going to give that next conservative a real good jump because nothing like this has been done for well over four decades. And it is long past due that not only do we do this for this, the next conservative administration. And I would hope that there would always be projects and then insert the four-year number going forward so that the movement always has a voice in helping to contribute to that next conservative administration. Yeah, well, is there anything else you'd like to add that you don't think we covered? I have a call of action.

A call of action is join the movement, sign up for the database, take the training, look at the book. Where are you an expert? expert. If you want to impact your government, if you want to push a strong conservative agenda, join us, be part of the effort. Try to push your view of how you can best help that next conservative president. Read the chapter of the book that really appeals and speaks to you. Become one of the political appointees, one of the next ambassadors, one of the next working critical professional career staff that work in government. Look, we're conservative.

This is probably not something that we're going to be career doing for 20 years anyway. But take some time out of your own life and contribute to your country and help the next conservative president succeed. It's going to help our country in the interim if you can join the effort. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Rick. I look forward to seeing you in person later this week. Look forward to it, Tyler. Thanks for having me.

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