The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Project 2025 Would Have Supercharged Trump's War Against the Deep State, Ken Cuccinelli Says

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

Former Virginia AG and deputy head of the Department of Homeland Security breaks down important new project. If Project 2025 had existed in 2016, former President Donald Trump would have achieved more faster, a leader in the former administration says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, April 28th. I'm Tyler O'Neill. I sat down to speak with Ken Cuccinelli, who is the former Attorney General of Virginia and who led the Department of Homeland Security, under former President Donald Trump. He spoke to me about the importance of Project 2025 and how the Trump administration would have gone if they had Project 2025 back in 2016. Stay tuned for our conversation right after this. Hi, I'm John Carlo Canaparo. And I'm Zach Smith.

And we host Scotus 101. It's a podcast where you'll get a breakdown of top cases in the highest court in the land. hear from some of the greatest legal minds. And of course, get a healthy dose of Supreme Court trivia. Want to listen? Find us wherever you get your podcasts or just head toheritage.org slash podcasts. This is Tyler O'Neill, managing editor at The Daily Signal. I have with me, I'm honored to have Ken Cucinelli, former Attorney General of Virginia,

former acting director of DHS. Yeah, the title was awesome. It was senior official performing the duties of the deputy secretary. Soap to us for short. But acting deputy secretary is the easy way. And currently at the Center for America. Yeah, Russ vote. And I lead the Homeland Security effort there.

And also author of the Project 2025 report on the Department of Homeland Security, which starts with the main recommendation that you, should eliminate the department altogether. Yes, that only took a sentence. It was very efficient. But we went on from there playing out all the possibilities. One of the aspects of this project is that it's supposed to offer a menu of alternatives. We start with the best one.

That doesn't mean stopping doing immigration enforcement, of course. It means that the department was a political creation that is difficult to manage because of the disparate missions. and we recommended keeping the, you know, focusing on each mission and placing it where that mission is most effectively accomplished. But in the event, small as that chance may be, that Congress decides not to break up the Department of Homeland Security, that we proceeded on more traditional lines about recommendations within each of the agencies.

And regardless of where they end up, the policies don't actually. the policy recommendations don't actually change based on the structure of the department. They're more about what is best for American security and for American families. Well, so this was really a mammoth task, Project 2025. It was. Well, it is, really. Still going on. The first pillar is done with the book that came out today.

And in just the case of the DHS chapter, that was over 30 authors. So my title's lead author. I'm really more lead editor. I did some writing, not surprisingly, but so did 30 plus other people. And, you know, some of the names you would know, Mark Morgan, Tom Holman, Joe Edloh, and Laura Reese. But there's dozens of others who people might not recognize some of them with legislative perspective that they bring to the table. We brought experience from within the Coast Guards, Secret Service, you know, with DHS. is more than just immigration. That's 100,000 of the 250,000 employees, but you've also got FEMA, you've got SISA. So FEMA, they're spending issues. I'm just zeroing in on one thing for each SISA has become censorship central. And I'll clean off the mic after. But they did that all under the

radar. There's no political mandate to do that. And so that has to be undone. The Coast Guard, one of the best running agencies in the government, Secret Service, TSA, all in addition to the three immigration agencies. So it is a mammoth enterprise. Right now it is the second largest department behind the Department of Defense. By something like double. The next largest department is half the size of Homeland Security. And with all the disparate missions, it's a challenge from a management standpoint, thus the first recommendation of breaking it up. But we cover a lot of ground because there's a lot of ground to cover. And a lot of genuinely and distinctly conservative thought brought to bear, for instance, on shrinking FEMA and focusing on its mission of backing up states. People think of it as a first responder. It's not a first responder. States and localities are the first responders.

FEMA is there to back them up. And if we focus them more, more. narrowly. When they're deployed, they will do a better job. And they'll be deployed in those areas that are highest priority, highest need. So it's conservative, limited government approaches like that that you'll see throughout the chapter. Well, why don't we zoom out a little bit on Project 2025 in general? You've mentioned that this is the first pillar. But what did you see in the Trump administration that convinced you that something like the mandate for leadership and the entire project 2025 was extremely necessary. Well, having a coherent conservative game plan that the conservative movement has already bought into

is absolutely invaluable. I mean, this morning I listened to Rick Dearborn, who was the executive director of the Trump transition, and he said, not surprisingly, boy, I sure wish I had this in 2016. And for lots of logical reasons. Now, it is still heavily dependent because it's up to the incoming president to decide to use these. But as Paul Danz mentioned this morning at breakfast, they sell themselves a bit. These are good ideas coherently presented and well organized, so they're easily digestible by a presidential policy team or a candidate's policy team. And that's where we start.

We will pitch this to whomever. the nominee is. It's written to be candidate agnostic. But what I learned in the Trump administration is that it had such a slow start. Personnel was such a problem. And Pillars two and three, you know, seek to address that, the training and the personnel pieces. We're pillar one, the book is the policy piece. And that would be just a game changer. for the ability to get started faster, to be having impact sooner, and to use those limited years to get more done, and to get more of better, higher quality, longer-lasting policy done

that really improves Americans' lives across the board. When Rick Dearborn recently told me that a conservative president usually doesn't get to these substantive changes, learning how to restructure the government until toward the end of a first or sometimes even toward the end of a second term, because it's so hard to actually achieve this change and the bureaucracy is so entrenched. What did you see when you were there in the machinery of government?

So these kinds of structural changes that you and I are touching on, we really were planning for a second term. We didn't do any of them in the first term. and DHS. And now part of that was that, you know, the people the President Trump brought in at that time were definitely not universally conservative. His personnel selection improved as time went along, but they had already lost the time. They'd lost the first year or two, not completely, of course, by any means, but they had slowed themselves down and they didn't have a resource like what we're building here

available to them so hopefully if we go back and look at that time again if the resource we're building in project 2025 it existed then they'd have gotten a much faster start there would have been structural change going on in the first term as opposed to just fights with the bureaucracy that never really resulted in structural change in many parts of the government and we really need as conservatives. We need to shrink the government and we need to restructure it to run on a smaller basis. And that's universal. That isn't the DHS chapter. That's all of government. We're bankrupt in case anybody didn't notice. And we have to take that seriously. Yeah. Well, I think that is

when we saw the Trump administration come in, a lot of great ideas, a lot of great promises, and they kind of struggled to get off the ground, naturally faced a lot of headwinds from the Democrats in Congress. Well, and the bureaucracy itself. Yeah. There's no question about that. And Project 2025 seeks to address that particular piece very aggressively with personnel screening and vetting up front and training them,

telling them this is how the federal government operates. There'll be training video. on all of this. CPI is, you know, the best in the world on the conservative side at preparing personnel. And they're going to, I have a lot of faith in Ed Corrigan and all the work he's done. He was also in that transition in 2016, leading personnel, working on personnel, and trying to anyway. But that doesn't mean they come in knowing how to operate. I came from Virginia. Virginia is an at-will employment state. when I was Attorney General, I could fire anyone in the office for any reason as long as it wasn't unconstitutional, you know, gender, color of skin, et cetera.

Right. pregnancy status. But all those things. But that's not the way the federal government works. On the other hand, it is not true that you cannot fire people. And I know that because I did it. I averaged about one every four days at USCIS before I moved up to be the deputy. And that was without Schedule F.

That was with no Schedule F. Yes, no. I don't even know that the discussion had begun at that point on Schedule F. But, you know, in different agencies, there are different ways to accomplish that. And there is dead weight in all these agencies. There are truly dedicated public servants. Public servant in a civil service to me means you actually implement what the politically elected, you know, electorally chosen leadership of your government seeks to implement, not blocking it. The firings are needed for one, the people who are incompetent and who are

just collecting government check as a form of workfare. And two, for the people who are oppositional, they aren't public servants. They're there to serve their agenda, and those people need to go. That's the deep state. That's the deep state at work. That is, that part is the deep state. And we will be far better prepared come January 2025 to clear those people out very quickly on an as-needed basis than we ever were at any point in the Trump administration. When I suspect this project wouldn't exist, if we didn't have the Trump administration where you had a new Maverick candidate who didn't have the machinery of the party necessarily like lining up and everybody from previous administrations helping out. And so you had this situation

where it became clear that something like this is very necessary. Well, that's quite true. I would say even more necessary in kind of the circumstances you describe. Because even a, even a old called an establishment candidate where everybody just sort of wanders back in, but they're not particularly conservative. Then, you know, they're more open. They know what to do more. There's less chaos, but they're less likely to actually seek to implement conservative policies. So there's a trade-off there, and we're trying to overcome the downside of that trade-off.

And part of what we've talked about is recruiting from far outside D.C. Like there are people out west, you know, and in Texas, in, in the northwest, in California. And there are conservatives in California. They are covered by the Endangered Species Act, but they exist. And that is one species that the Californians are willing to get rid of. But we're going to try to encourage those people

to start thinking now about coming to Washington to change America and be part of that program. So they're not thinking about it after a Republican wins who will adopt a conservative. conservative agenda, and then they've got a month. So is this a call to action? Right. There is a call to action elements.

Right now. Absolutely. You know, if you're a conservative, if you've got professional skills, if you're willing to do battle with the bureaucracy, which I can tell you is fun, then you're willing to move because a lot, though not all of it, is in D.C., and then we want you to start thinking about it now. start ordering your professional life to maybe be available come January of 2025 to move to D.C. Take a hiatus from your professional life and come help change America.

Yeah. So there are four parts. We got a blueprint for you. Yeah, exactly. And we've got training to get you ready. So it's a complete program. And even, you know, there's a lot of talk back to the 1980 mandate for change that Heritage worked on. But it didn't have these other pieces.

It was a policy manual. It was not, it didn't include training. It didn't include pre-vetting and recruiting of personnel. Those elements weren't there. They were left to the transition team to throw together and accomplish in the short period of time they had. And some of it they did well and some of it they didn't. Or a set of executive orders and policies ready to be ready. That's the fourth pillar.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, and that's nitty-gritty work. It really is, but it's invaluable. You know, I was also the chief regulatory officer at DHS, and our regulations were not uncontroversial. To have the factual underpinning, to have some of that legal pre-work done beforehand

would have cut months and in some cases, you know, maybe a year off of moving regulations. through the pipeline. It would have been a big, big deal. So that's the kind of speed we want to achieve. Speed allows volume of decision making. This is Ken management philosophy here. If you don't take all week to make decision number one and you do it on Monday, well, on day number two, you are available to make another decision. And by make another decision, I mean, think about it, consider pros and cons, do everything you need to do as a manager. and a manager and a leader to consider it and then make a decision.

If you do that every day, you make five decisions that week instead of one. And that kind of velocity takes preparation. And Project 2025 is bringing us the personnel and policy preparation. And as you note, Pillar 4, some of the actual products that we can use to bring off those decisions. And some of the, you know, as a former attorney general, I'd love to hear just briefly if you would weigh in on some of the legal issues that we see in the country right now. The Supreme Court considering the abortion pill, the, you know, the charges that Alvin Bragg brought against the former president. Well, and, you know, both of those are interesting because they also incorporate a who should decide sort of a question. Alvin Bragg is a local prosecutor.

Yes, it's New York City, but what is the role of the federal government in contending with this kind of abuse of power at the state level? And one is always money. Is there a spending hook to yank? And often there is. That's part of what's going on with the overspending at the federal level is the money's going everywhere. And, you know, can you bring that back in or use it to? to alter the behavior. Or can you cut the, just cut the money.

Always a good first option when you're bankrupt. Did I mention we're bankrupt? And, you know, so those considerations come into play. And the handoff of cases that are live is always interesting. And there is an institutional presumption, and this is a real problem of the Department of Justice. There's an institutional presumption of defending everything. And there are things.

that should not be defended. When the government is breaking the law, and remember, the federal government is the biggest lawbreaker in America, period, bar none. Government is the greatest breaker of laws in America. Well, why should that be defended? That should be admitted, end the cases, and move on. And reverse. And yes, and where appropriate, get them reversed. So that is a culture change that is really going to be up to a nominee and whoever, an elected president, and whoever they bring in to be the attorney general. And that takes real spine. It takes real experience. But because it's countercultural, I mean, you talk about a deep state battle, the Department of Justice institutionally is going to resist that. Funny, they don't resist

it when it's advantages the left, but they will resist it with their very being when it's our side if we get a president who's willing to go to the mat on that. Yeah, and we saw that under Trump with every. Yeah, yeah, you saw it mostly, most clearly in the intelligence community, for instance, where they were actively working to undermine him. You know, it's a little different for, with others, though be out in the policy spaces. I would still expect to see that with, say, President DeSantis or any other Republican. It's not like it's just a Trump thing. Right.

It's really a left-right thing. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Ken. Always a pleasure. Where can the people follow you and Projects? Well, I'm on Twitter now that it's free speech again, at Ken Cuccinelli. And I work out of the Center for Renewing America. I'm a senior fellow there for Homeland Security.

And that's the best way to get in touch with me there and follow me on Twitter and I'll see you out there. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't gotten a chance, be sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed where we bring you the top news of the day. Also, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcasts and help us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review.

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