Most people heard about Project 2025 during the 2024 presidential campaign. Far fewer understood what it actually was. The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote the definitive book explaining the sweeping conservative policy blueprint.
In today’s episode, Graham speaks with EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook on how what seemed like a Republican policy wishlist was actually a meticulously engineered, four-part plan for seizing control of the federal government.
They discuss how the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, helped accelerate the wrecking-ball agenda, why the architects of Project 2025 always assumed Congress would capitulate to their plans, and whether the damage being done to American institutions can ever be undone. The conversation helps us understand what the 2028 presidential election could mean for the project’s next chapter.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
Ken: Hi, I am Ken Cook and I'm having another episode, this episode, and I'm very excited about it. If author David Graham had asked me to write a forward to the project, how Project 2025 is Reshaping America, I wouldn't have hesitated for a single second. In fact, I would've considered it an honor. Not only has his book helped me understand what has happened to my world of environmental protection and public health in the first year of the Trump administration, it's also helped me understand the very disturbing ambition of the ideologues behind the Trump administration's wholesale assault on our government institutions and traditions.
There's no book I've urged more people to read in the past year. Friends, colleagues, strangers, at dinner parties, and yes, every single member of my board of directors. I've pestered people about this book to the point where I suspect some of them are now actively avoiding me. What David Graham has done here is pretty rare.
He took a document that many of us dismissed as just another conservative policy wishlist and revealed it for what it actually was: a meticulously engineered blueprint and action plan for the swiftest most sweeping transformation of the American government in modern history. Project 2025 was a plan with four interlocking pillars — a policy platform, a database of ready to hire personnel for hundreds of key positions in the Trump administration, a training program for those recruits and a detailed playbook for a massive right wing overhaul of the federal government starting on day one.
Now, I've spent my career as an environmentalist fighting regulatory battles in Washington. I thought I pretty well understood the terrain. I was wrong about the scale of what was coming, and this book is the reason I finally understood it.
David doesn't just catalog policy changes Trump wanted to make happen. He gets inside the worldview, shows you why they moved so fast, why speed itself was the strategy, and why the damage being done right now will be so extraordinarily difficult to undo. That also was the plan. Read this book, whatever your issue, whatever your concern about the direction this country is taking, because it is essential context.
David Graham has done the work, so the rest of us don't have to wonder what's happening and why. We just have to pay attention. Yes, it's exhausting, but we do have to pay attention. David Graham, welcome and thanks for being here.
David: Oh, thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. And, and I mean, it's good to hear too, I think that's what I want the book to provide. And, and it's good to hear that that is how people are, are, uh, receiving it.
Ken: Well, you know, I'm a professional environmentalist, so I'm way in, but for me it was more stepping back and understanding the, the broader agenda and where the environment fits. You know, en-environmental policy is often at the bullseye when Republican administrations come in.
Because that's where the so-called regulatory overreach, the deep state, the administrative state to them, I think it engenders the most response from oil companies and chemical companies, the deep pockets that Trump was relying on to help him get elected
But your book really by describing how Project 2025 seeks a cultural makeover too: women's rights, uh, DEI, uh, a whole set of precepts that this is taking on beyond rolling back a few Clean Air Act regulations. This is much, much deeper and you have to understand it. I think that way to really appreciate what a threat it is and to understand the, the momentum that started on day one.
I have a million questions for you. One of them though is, you know, the book didn't anticipate DOGE, but DOGE really became a force vector of to accelerate so much of what was in Project 2025, animated by Musk's personality. The young people he brought in who knew nothing about government, but could look at a spreadsheet and call something waste, and off they went.
As you were putting this together, what was the biggest surprise about Project 2025? And then how did you, uh, regard DOGE when it came about, because it's sort of Project 2025, uh, on steroids.
David: Yeah, I mean, I think what you're saying about the broader cultural agenda is what surprised me as I was working on this, and I think I was slow to grasp what was going on here.
I don't remember when I first encountered Project 2025, but I thought of it as, you know, you see these white papers that come out every four years, and I thought, oh, it's a policy wishlist. And
Ken: Democrats do it too.
David: Right, exactly. And you can guess what's gonna be on there. And a lot of that stuff is on there.
And there, there are surprises, but I, I don't think I had grasped, first of all, like how carefully they had thought about how they were gonna get these things done and then what the, the underlying goal was, which was this real huge shift in the way American society as a whole works. You know, when I had written about Project 2025, previously had been on a sort of policy by policy basis.
So I'd pull up the document
Ken: Yeah.
David: Read about a particular thing and think, okay, I've got that. But it, yeah, I feel like looking at as a whole helped me to understand what they were trying to do. DOGE is an interesting case. Again, it's not something that I anticipated and I think it worked mostly, I would say mostly, but not entirely to the benefit of the Project 2025 agenda.
Ken: Yeah.
David: You know, you had people, Musk and these other guys who came in who didn't really understand very much about the federal government at all. They didn't have experience. They didn't bother to learn. And when you have somebody like Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and a, a key architect of project 2025, there, he can sort of point them in a direction.
Ken: Yeah.
David: The Project 2025 authors were thinking, how can we go carefully through, uh, regulatory channels to make this huge change? And the DOGE people are like, what if we just use a wrecking ball? And so they were able to sort of put the DOGE people in a direction to do what they wanted. There's some interesting reporting about frustrations that Vought and other project 2025 people had in some cases where basically DOGE went too far or,
Ken: Yeah,
David: DOGE did things they didn't anticipate.
So there, there was a little bit of that, but I think overall it just made them able to do a lot of these things much faster than they expected.
Ken: Yeah, and I think of the architects of Project 2025 as think tank types in a way, right? They're thinking something very different than I think, but they're operating in more of a button down mannered fashion, right?
Where they're, they're thinking, well, okay, well if we're going to, um, put Schedule F into effect and be able to fire. 50,000 people at will. What are the steps we're going to have to take? Whereas DOGE came along and just said, let's just get rid of them. To me, that infused the Trump administration across the board with a kind of wildness or a boldness.
Many folks on the Republican side speak to that as maybe the most important attribute is to go fast. That was Musk's approach at, at Twitter, right? That was what really emboldened. This rather fairly bureaucratic agenda. I mean it was, there were still plenty of things in there that were legally questionable.
I think they knew going in, they were going to face a lot of lawsuits and lose a lot of 'em. That wasn't a, a problem for them.
David: Right. Yeah. They, I mean they, if you look at the way they think they are, they're very legalistic in their approach and they're often taking, I think, pretty utre interpretations of the law.
Very extreme interpretations. You know, you get something like impoundment where their attitude is, there is a law. We know there's a law. We believe this law is unconstitutional. We just gotta get it to the Supreme Court and we'll get the precedent overturned. But the Doge attitude was: we'll just do it and see if somebody stops us.
And I think that has become the MO of the administration ever. I mean, you see it on immigration enforcement, you see it on any number of things that they've realized. That's a really potent way of proceeding.
Ken: But the, the other thing, and I should have foreseen it, but I didn't foresee the depth of it or the consistency of it, I suppose, is that for this to, to have worked as quickly and as smoothly as it did, you had to have compliance on the part of Republicans in the Senate and, and the House.
I'll date myself. I, you know, I used to work with Republicans all the time in bipartisan fashion to pass environmental laws or amendments to the Farm Bill or whatever.
That sort of balanced a desire to be more efficient with government money. Let's not waste it, uh, in certain ways and let's invest in good environmental conservation practices. That that was very common. And I think certainly during the, I'm really dating myself during the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you know, you, you would go into Republican offices and they would coach you, because there were moderate Republicans then.
There was a desire, most major federal environmental laws passed by large bipartisan majorities. So that's, I'm sort of still stuck a little bit in that.
But to see the way in which Republicans in the House and Senate were supine against all of these assaults, not just on the rule of law, but on their role and their power. Was that foreseen you think, in your interviews with, with people, which were, so I thought really what brought this to light was your, your reporting. You're talking to some of the architects and players in Project 2025.
Did that come up as, you know, this is all gonna work if Republicans in the House and Senate give up a lot of their authority or go along with it? Was that a thing?
David: Yeah, I think they understood that better than I did. There's a place where they think they have an accurate diagnosis. They look at Congress and they say: over the last 20, 25 years, we've seen Congress be pretty dysfunctional. Unable to agree on things. Unable to pass budgets. Um, very happy to, you know, yield up its powers in many cases to the executive branch or delegate powers to the executive branch, and I think they thought we can steamroll them.
Obviously in first term you get these repeated stories about how in private Republicans in the house and Senate were really critical of Trump and then in in public, they wouldn't say any of those things.
Ken: Oh, they would say it to me on lobbying visits. Much less to one another.
David: Yeah. So you could see how they were a little bit bullied by Trump and it's gotten so much more.
Yeah, since then, partly 'cause a lot of the old guard has left. You have people who've only been in Congress, in the Trump era, people who owe their careers to Trump. And then also you have districts that are getting less competitive. I mean, the number of competitive House districts is, is shrinking down into the double digits.
So I think all of those things make Congress, uh, vulnerable. But I, I expected that Congress would at least act to preserve its own prerogatives. So when I think about something like spending impoundment, I thought they would not want to, to give up their powers in that really specific way, and they'd push back.
There's this very brief moment in, I think the second week of the administration where Russell Vought sends a memo telling agencies not to spend money that has already been appropriated by Congress and dispatched.
Ken: Uh, what, let's just say holy shit.
David: Right? And that's, that's how Republicans in the Senate act too.
You get a handful of Senate Republicans say, wait a second, you can't do that. We appropriated that money and the administration backs down. And I thought, okay, this is going to be a problem for the White House. And then since then, the only two occasions I can think of where we've seen that kind of pushback, one is the Epstein files.
And the other one is when Trump was pushing Republican senators to kill the filibuster. And that's a moment where, again, it's their prerogative and they defend that, but on almost nothing else that they've been willing to stand up.
Ken: Yeah, and just to be fair, uh, Democratic presidents have, uh, you know, tried to get their way knowing that Congress was dysfunctional with, you know, partisan votes on big bills like the infrastructure law and the, the bipartisan, fairly bipartisan votes that they had on some of the spending during Biden.
But this does go back to another one of the themes, uh, uh, which is the theme of, uh, longstanding interest in conservative circles of advancing the idea of the unitary executive, where the president ought to have the power over all of these agencies, even independent ones. And this was also conceptualized in Project 2025 as a set of battles that they wanted the, uh, an incoming Trump administration to take head on.
David: That's right. I mean, they say, uh, Russell Vought says at, at one point in an interview in 2023, I believe, maybe four. There's no such thing as an independent agency. We don't accept that. You know, on the one hand it's things like the Department of Justice, where the guardrails are a little bit informal and, and through tradition, but it's also the alphabet soup, you know, the IRA, the independent regulatory agencies that are established by Congress to be independent in that way.
And their, their view is that's not constitutional, and we're going to take those over and we're gonna assert control. And what we've seen is the Supreme Court basically ratifying that. We don't have a final ruling yet on whether they're overturning Humphrey's executor, but every indication we have is that they will.
And this is this, uh, 90-year-old president that says, in fact, the president can't fire heads of agencies at will. Trump has tried to do that, and it seems like with the exception to the Fed, he will probably be allowed to do that. And that's the end of the regulatory state as we know it. It's, it's a huge shift and I think one that maybe people haven't totally, um
Ken: I agree
David: Grasped yet.
Ken: I completely agree. And you know, again, looking to the Republicans in the House and Senate, they were. Basically good with it, right? You're not seeing, uh, hearings, uh, and investigations like, well, show us your work here. How did you determine that this was necessary to pursue the President's agenda?
I hear from the, you know, the podium and the White House, that, uh, whatever is being done is being done because that was the will of the people who elected Donald Trump.
David: Right?
Ken: Right. Get rid of these regulatory agencies or put them under the president's control and have them implement his agenda, not act independently as Congress intended when they established them.
David: Right. It's, it's a bizarre idea because, you know, all of these laws were passed by Congress, which is elected by the people. I can't imagine many voters, if any voters were voting on the fate of independent regulatory agencies and desiring to see them abolished. In a broader sense, I'd also say Project 2025 is really unpopular and when The Heritage Foundation polled on this in the summer of 2024, they found that voters in swing states were heavily aware of it, which is a little bit surprising for something that's kind of dry and they really didn't like it.
I think one reason Democrats failed to make more, uh, progress talking about it, was voters didn't believe these things would actually happen.
Ken: Right.
David: So you get polling where people are like, “I hate these things. I don't think Trump will do it.”
Ken: Yeah.
David: So it, it's certainly not what people were voting for and maybe they should have been paying more attention, but I don't, I don't think there's any case to be made that this is a, this is the will of the people.
Ken: Yeah. And I'm constantly impressed by the failure of my own imagination to see these things coming. I don't feel like I'm alone. That's the only, that's the, that's the only salvation in it all is that I think a lot of people feel that way.
David: Well, I think that's right, and I think you have the burden of expertise in this case, uh, because you understand how the system works and you know how it has worked.
And to imagine that these, these systems that we are all used to in one way or another could be so quickly destroyed. With so little check on it, I think is really, that does really test the imagination.
Ken: Yeah. I, I love Timothy Snyder's work, but the first thing he says in, in his, uh, book about tyranny is, you know, protect institutions.
And my reaction, uh, to that immediately was, I think the institutions will take care of themselves. They'll adapt to the new people coming in to tell them to do the exact opposite that they've always done. The institutions, they can't turn on their own lights. They can't open a file drawer. They're just there.
They're pretty inanimate. And to think that they had a life of their own outside of the people that ran them. Well, I don't think anyone should ever think that again. So were there moments that stood out where you did an interview with someone and a light bulb went on and you really, you learned something.
Were there any specific moments during your reporting where you sort of thought, oh my gosh,
David: You know, I think a lot of it was was connecting the dots between the things I saw in the text and things that they said to me, or things that they had said in other settings. And getting to understand this is not simply about, uh, the power of the federal government. This is not simply about, you know, the deep state.
It is about this feeling that suddenly, we're in the late stages of a Marxist takeover. This idea that the constitutional order is falling apart and that these actions are really drastic, but we have to take them and just kind of seeing all those things come together and create the whole, it took a little bit, it was pretty staggering to see that.
I think I, I guess the other thing is even just in the text, there are moments that, they would, uh, you know, bring me up short.
Ken: Yeah.
David: There's a moment where Kevin Roberts, who's the head of the Heritage Foundation now, somewhat embattled, um, says that, you know, we, we have the freedom not to do as we want, but as we ought.
And I remember that really stopping me. I mean, it's what is a what an idea that the freedom to do as we ought. Exactly. And putting it that plainly in print for everyone to read really caught me up short as a, um, as a sign of what they were looking to do.
Ken: Yeah. And you know, in the course of working on environmental issues, my colleagues and I, over the years, regulatory issues in court, uh, certainly battling things out in the media, I think I've taken a pretty good measure of what motivates them.
Mostly it's vested interest. Mostly it's, you know, a desire to be free of regulatory constraints that you know, delimit their profits and their market opportunities. You know, it's all, but underneath Project 2025 and, and some of the things that Vought has said, there's an antipathy toward the, the very notion of a government worker, right, and the day-to-day commitment that they make as really a source of malfeasance and almost evil that needs to be stamped out.
These people need to be let go immediately. We don't care about their families. We don't care what they're leaving work, they're leaving behind. I've had people tell me that they, they got kicked out so quickly from, uh, their job as research scientists that they had to euthanize the animals in their lab because they weren't gonna be allowed into feed them.
And I guess Vought’s famous phrase, we want, what is it he wanted them to?
David: We wanna put them in a trauma. We want them to be traumatized.
Ken: Who says shit like that. I mean, really.
David: It's really shocking. I mean, Vought is an interesting character too, because he is, well, his experience is very Washington, very inside.
He spent a lot of time working on the Hill on both sides. He spent working time working at Heritage. He's very mild mannered in the way he, he comes across, he looks like sort of a budget wonk, and then he says these things in that very calm voice that are just wild and, and so, so bellicose.
Ken: Yes. I think of the Heritage Foundation.
We've worked with the Heritage Foundation on issues before, particularly in agriculture policy, where they were worried about the subsidies in the same ways we were. But the notion that you would have someone, uh, coming in and pushing the unitary executive, seeing the government workers, the bureaucracy as, as not just an impediment or an inefficiency, but as enemies, it sidles right up next to you.
The more extreme conspiracy theories like in Q Anon and elsewhere, right? I mean it, they don't speak about lizard people in project 2025, but it's welcoming to people who do think that way, right? Like, well, yeah, if this, this deep state is a cabal,
David: Right
Ken: Uh, and it's controlled by these powers and so it, it kind of helps recruit those more extreme interests without having to parrot exactly their diagnosis.
David: Right. I mean, the idea that the Marxists are about to take over doesn't accord with anything. I'm seeing you get Vought espousing the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the, the projects in Project 2025 was to bring together as much as they could of the, the, the MAGA and MAGA curious right in one place and to sort of be able to subsume all those things and then shape it and, and push it in a particular direction. And that's one reason they got started so early in 2022 doing this so that they could kind of grab the agenda before anyone had a chance to do so. And I think they were very effective at that.
Ken: Yeah, no question. And, and I, I've heard any number of people, everyone from RFK Jr to Gingrich to others to say, you know, say, look, we, we have to go fast. We only have a certain amount of time. There's no obligation, obviously, that they feel or exhibit to show their work to justify what they're doing.
They don't write anything down. Maybe on an Instagram or a Tweet, that's often what you're left with. I think that's one reason why some of these decisions they've made won't hold up over time. Um, I don't think Kennedy's gonna prevail on the science long term to say the very least on his vaccine jeremiad, and I think he's not gonna hold up under law. We're already seeing him losing in court on the challenges brought by the Academy of Pediatrics and others to reverse the decisions he's made on the vaccine schedule. You know, it's plausible in the longer term, these things will be undone, but the damage meanwhile…
David: Yeah, I think those are both good points.
I mean, it's, it's not just that they aren't using legislation that they're trying to do everything through executive action, it's that they're not following the regulatory process in the executive actions they're taking. So they're doubly fragile and then exactly as you were saying, there's gonna be so much damage that even if you can unwind them on face, it's gonna be very hard to put things back together and to rebuild these things when they do lose power.
You talk about the euthanized animals. These, these labs are closed, these experience are, are done. It's gonna be very hard to put them back up. People have moved on to other jobs and other things and you know, the federal government will not be seen as the, um, stable, reliable employer that it was in the past.
It won't be seen as a place where, whatever else, even if you're not the highest paid, you're, you're doing a public service. I think people's faith in all of those will be shaken.
Ken: Yeah. Which is really a deliverable for Project 2025. That kind of chaos. Let's leave it in ruins, even if it's causing some problems for, you know, industries like the chemical companies that want speedy approvals of their toxic products, um, that's gonna be complicated by the fact that you don't have enough scientists.
Even to rubber stamp the approvals. But that's okay. That's worth leaving enough in wreckage that can't be fixed. And I've, I've had, I had a former EPA administrator on Bill Riley served under, uh, Bush one.
We talked about the fact that, um, early on in, in his campaigning within the Bush administration to get things done, one of the things that most bothered some of the more conservative members was all the science that EPA was coming out with that was seen as a subsidy for advocacy and and activism, both within the government, for people who wanted to do their job, who went to EPA and thought, I wanna protect the environment as the name on the door suggests.
But it was also an, you know, a subsidy for the likes of me who were going to use a data on air pollution, data on contamination of wildlife, whatever the case might be, to advance the administrative state's arguments that we need to be taking care of these things.
Sometimes Trump will brag, just come out and brag out “we got rid of a lot of bureaucrats,” but mostly they're, they're trying to be careful and say, no. Everything we're doing at EPA. In the interest of protecting the environment, it's in the interest of making things stronger. We, we're getting people off the food stamp program by the millions so that we conserve the people who remain 'cause we are concerned about hunger.
David: Right.
Ken: It's really fascinating.
David: Yeah. I mean, this is one of the things about when you start talking about bureaucrats, I think it's fair to say that in the general population even, people who are not Trump voters, you know, bureaucrats get a bad name. But people actually do like these policies. They like to have clean air and clean water.
Ken: Yes.
David: They like to be able to call the Social Security office and get an answer. You know, there's a whole range of services that people take for granted and have been safe to take for granted. And, and that's one reason it's very hard to brag about taking those things away. They're just not all that popular.
Ken: Yeah. No, that's. Now humor me, I, I, there's part of this that meshes so well with the coarser side, as it were, of this sort of the manosphere. The ambition to go quickly. Uh, the focus on, on health. Uh, these all have deep roots in authoritarian thinking, uh, and practice in history.
What is it about, uh, this presentation of ideas that is tied up with you know, being strong and being virile and acting quickly and being conditioned and ready to take on even more. Am I just sort of drifting off here or do you feel that too?
David: No, I think you're onto something and I think it works in a bunch of different ways. There's this sort of effect, which is what, what you're talking about.
There's this, the fact that most of these guys are men. There are very few women involved in Project 2025.
Ken: Yes, yes.
David: They would like to restrict abortion. They would like women to be leaving the workplace. They would like men to be bread earners and women at home with large families. So it's very traditionalist in that sort of attitude.
And I also think that the milieu that many of these people are coming out of is this Christian, conservative right-wing Christian worldview that is very um, it's very masculine. It, it focuses on the masculinity. And finally, we can't separate this from the kind of media environment in which all of these people exist, which is the manosphere and, you know, right wing talk, uh, radio, podcasts, other media, which also focus on those things.
And I, I think that's really torn, you know, it, it's tied up in it. And Trump also has always made virility a big part of his sell. And I think that the first Trump administration really fired the imagination of a lot of these folks. Who felt like suddenly there was a moment where they could do things that they had wanted to do for decades, but had not thought were really possible.
Yeah. Yeah. And so suddenly they, they're like, this is our moment. We're gonna do it. And it's given them this kind of messianic vibe.
Ken: Yeah. And you opened the book, the, and the opening pages I was really taken with, uh, where you started, which is, you know, this sense of, um, using Trump's sense of betrayal about the 2020 election that it was stolen from him that seemed to really energize.
I, I was shocked when Heritage came out as strongly on election denial as they did. Yeah. I mean, this is not the Heritage Foundation that I grew up with. They sort of vibed off of this sense of betrayal to, and enlarged it to say, look, we've, we've been betrayed, not just in the election, but in the whole way the government's been constituted and run.
We've been, you know, the president in the first term was betrayed by RINO Republicans. Republicans In Name Only. He was betrayed by the bureaucracy. The ultimate betrayal was he was denied his second term in 2020 because the whole system was rigged against him, notwithstanding the 70 plus court cases and all the other proceedings, including his own people saying, “you lost brother.”
That fusion of attitude seems to me to be really key to what gave this liftoff at the very beginning of this term.
David: Yeah. There's a sense of being embattled.
Ken: Yeah.
David: That I think is not it. It, it's a strange situation where you have a movement that has control of the White House, the House, the Senate, narrowly, but nonetheless, uh, and really the Supreme Court too.
And yet they feel very much like they are a minority. That is, on the back foot and they have to fight really hard and throw some punches in order to get what they want.
Ken: Yeah. And it serves them well too.
David: Yeah.
Ken: To constantly have that, that the enemy's still out there. We haven't gotten rid of all the bureaucrats.
The science is still marching on and picking up rocks and looking underneath them and finding these problems that we're supposed to deal with, like climate change. It's interesting to see it across other dimensions, other issue areas that you, you cover in the book. So the last thing I wanna ask you about is to go back to this blitzkrieg idea, which you describe as the the fourth pillar of what Project 2025 was.
So it's the document. It's a giant Rolodex of people who are gonna come in and play these roles. And then Doge just added to that as we discussed that no one saw that coming. But, this notion of acting quickly of if you make an omelet, you're gonna break some eggs kind of thinking. Can you say a little bit about how that emerged as for you, as a, a theme that they had to not just do these things, but they had to, if they didn't start right away, it wasn't gonna work out.
David: Yeah. You know, they write about the, the need to act really quickly. I think that's partly out of the sense that it's a lot of unpopular things, but I also think they were really reflecting on the first Trump administration.
Ken: Yeah.
David: Where Trump came in. He didn't really have a transition team because of infighting between Jared Kushner and, and Chris Christie that got Christie and his whole plan, uh, tossed in the trash and they were very slow to act.
It was a real disappointment. They thought there was so much more that could have gotten done. They also understand having many of them having worked in government for so long, they understand that the process of government is, you know, by design, deliberate and they needed to be able to move very quickly, overwhelm defenses and it where they weren't able to overwhelm them, move through them as quickly as they could.
Ken: Yeah.
David: I think they know that there is backlash coming. We see Trump talking about the fact that, you know, he thinks his party will do poorly in the midterms. Uh, we see him talking about how his polling is bad. And that's a reflection. Yeah, I think to a great extent of the policies in Project 2025. And I would say also the things that are not in it, I mean, there's no plan to fix inflation.
There's no real serious plan for the economy besides cut taxes, which they've done, abolished the Fed, which they haven't yet, and return to the gold standard, which is extremely remote. So I mean, you see the, the failures coming back to bite them, but I think they're okay with that to some extent. They understand themselves to be in this long-term battle.
And so they want to push things as far to the right as they can, as quickly as they can so that it's hard for anyone to push it back. And they wanna keep pushing on that for 10, 20, 30 years and create the society that they imagine, uh, is the right one.
Ken: Yeah, no question about it. And it, and it is a view that's not limited to policy.
It's uh, or it's the instruments of policy applied to everything from personal rights, marriage, civil rights, on and on.
David: Yeah. What you eat, where your children go to school, how you interact with your family. All of those things are, are part of the project.
Ken: Yeah. Well, David Graham, thank you so much.
I've, uh, again, uh, there's no book I've recommended more often pestered people. Actually, I think people now avoiding me as if I'm gonna ask them, okay, what chapter are you on? But I hope everyone buys your book who's concerned about civic life and the the direction of our country. Just one, one last thing.
Where do you think we're headed now? Let's say the House and Senate or one of them at least becomes democratic and it hobbles this, the agenda and the velocity of it. Looking in your crystal ball, it's hard to know. 'cause mine, Lord knows mine's been cracked. I have no confidence in my own ability to see the future, but I'll, I'll put it on you.
What's next for the right? What's next for the Republican party if, if there is one?
David: I think one thing we're gonna see, despite that creation of that Rolodex, they have been slow to staff a lot of the executive branch. You know, they're really at only about the same pace as they were in the first term. As you get more people into, uh, executive branch roles and, and not, you know, senate confirmed roles, but the lower ranking ones, I think you're gonna see more progress on some of these, you know, regulatory action.
And I think about that in health and human services. I think about that environmental stuff. Places where they've been unable to act simply by executive action, they're gonna start pushing there 'cause they have their people starting to get in place. In some ways though, like the cabinet is a little bit empty because they have been so successful in this first term.
I think the question is how they move forward and how they build popular support. Now, JD Vance is clearly the Project 2025 candidate now. I think he is ideologically more aligned with it than Trump is.
Ken: Yeah.
David: He is a, a religious conservative. He thinks deeply about policy. These are not things we can say about Trump.
He's also not, he doesn't have Trump's talent as a politician and, and so seeing how they navigate 2028 I think will be really interesting. I mean, to me the, the big issues are as a country, you know, when the Trump term is over, no matter who the president is, what, what are we going to do to make the government work?
Because there's no going back to the way it was. So I think one thing is how do we, how do we make Congress more functional? How does it, you know, work and how does it serve as a better counterweight? And then what do we build to replace the regulatory state we're familiar with? Because these are functions people need and want.
If the executive branch has full control, the old system is broken. So we have to find ways to rebuild those and build a government that maybe works better than the one we, we had. Uh, I, you know, pick a year, 1996, 2008, you name it. But works better than, than what we have now.
Ken: Yeah. And for us, at least in the environmental realm, a big part of the momentum for getting things done has shifted to the states.
It's also happening even in healthcare and medicine. Right. You see the the coalition of states lining up and the medical, uh, professions lining up in agreement supporting continuation of the prior vaccine schedule. Uh, that kind of rebellion against the federal role is I think, going to grow.
David: Yeah.
Ken: Well, David, thank you so much. Uh, again, I'm so grateful for your time and I follow you in the Atlantic. Uh, I'm honored to have had a, a chance to visit with you. This was in a really important work.
David: Well, thank you. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I really appreciate it.
Ken: Thank you to David Graham for joining me today, and thank you out there for listening.
If you'd like to learn more, please be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram at KenCooksPodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about ewg, please head over to ewg.org or check out the ewg Instagram account @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup.
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