Undercover in Project 2025

Last month, in the Presidential suite of a five-star hotel in Georgetown, Washington DC, two men – members of a wealthy family from New Mexico – anxiously awaited an important guest. The family’s patriarch, Joe, had hoped to be at the meeting but he was recuperating from surgery. He sent his brother, Tom, and his son-in-law, Edward, in his absence.

Joe is a deeply religious man, concerned about the direction of America. He’s given some money to political candidates in the past but, in recent months, he’s pored over a controversial 900-page blueprint for a second Donald Trump term published by a coalition of conservative groups, called Project 2025. He wanted to offer his support to the project and, more importantly, his money. Joe had dispatched his relatives to DC to meet one of the project’s key architects and scope out a possible donation.

At least, that’s what their guest thought.

Tom and Edward were not, in fact, relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. They were working undercover for the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) – one is an investigative journalist, the other a paid actor. In the moments before their guest arrived, they strategically placed cameras around the hotel suite. One went into a bag placed on the dark, wood floor; a second on a side table. Another sat discretely inside a reporter’s suit jacket. As the cameras rolled and the men laid out refreshments, the buzzer sounded. Their guest had arrived.

Russell Vought, with his clipped grey beard and glasses, looks more like an accountant than a MAGA radical. He is the founder and president of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank he described to his hosts as “the Death Star,” which alongside the Heritage Foundation has been at the heart of Project 2025. The head of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s White House, he is known for his fierce dedication to the former president’s cause. He’s a frequent guest on War Room, a popular podcast for MAGA diehards hosted by Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon. He told the undercover reporters he’d had to miss an appearance on the show to be at the meeting.

There are people like me that have his trust

For months, CCR has been investigating powerful populist movements, in the US and Europe, that have set themselves against action to tackle climate change. Trump himself has repeatedly dismissed the threat and sent a clear message to the fossil fuel industry should he win in November: “We’re going to drill, baby, drill,” he said last month. The architects of Project 2025 – which Trump has tried to distance himself from in recent weeks – call for the US to reverse Biden-era green subsidies and “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

But our conversation with Vought covered far more than climate change. Over the course of nearly two hours, he revealed previously unreported details of the next, secretive phase of Project 2025.

Vought said he is overseeing the drafting of hundreds of executive orders, regulations and secretarial memos, to help make the US conservative movement’s radical goals a reality. These include plans for the “largest deportation in history” – a promise also made by Trump – and a proposal to use the military against US citizens to suppress large-scale protests in response. This will, Vought said, help to end multiculturalism in the United States.

Vought, who told the undercover reporters he had a deep relationship with the Trump campaign, even dismissed his former boss’s disavowal of Project 2025. He said his close relationship with Trump means that he can put these transition documents directly into his hands. “There are people like me that have his trust that will be able to get it to him in whatever position we’re at,” he said. “The relationships will be there. The trust level will be there.”

Vought also pointed to the fact he was recently chosen as the policy director for the Republican National Convention’s Platform Committee, as evidence of the Trump campaign’s trust in him and his ideas.

But, according to Vought and a close aide, also secretly recorded as part of CCR’s investigation, the public won’t get to see these documents before the next Presidential election, or potentially ever. They are top secret. The plan is to share them clandestinely with Trump’s transition team, to avoid them being obtained by journalists via freedom of information requests.

“They’re very, very close hold,” Vought said, using a term used in the US government for documents that cannot be shared with the public.

Responding to the investigation, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign said: “Trump’s Project 2025 allies are admitting what voters know to be true: Project 2025 is Donald Trump’s plan to rip away our freedoms, raise costs on the middle class, and rule as a dictator one day one – written for him, by his closest aides, and with his ‘blessing.’ Trump’s unhinged Project 2025 dream is voters’ worst nightmare. They’ll make their voices heard by electing Kamala Harris this November.”

The Center for Renewing America and the Trump campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment but in a  statement on social media CRA’s communications director sought to downplay the findings: “None of this is secret. Would’ve been easier to just google to “uncover” what’s already on our website & in countless media interviews.”

To understand how Vought, a former Trump cabinet member, ended up in the Presidential suite of the Rosewood Hotel with two undercover reporters, we need to go back to the National Conservatism Conference held in DC in early July, when Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee and JD Vance had not yet been picked as Trump’s running mate.

The Capital Hilton sits just a few blocks from the White House. For a couple of days in early July, US Senators rubbed shoulders with Hungarian culture warriors and far-right influencers at a gathering of religious nationalists in the hotel’s ballroom. NatCon’s speakers included Vance, Josh Hawley and Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 leader, Kevin Roberts. Bannon, the event’s headliner, couldn’t attend because he is in prison. Also among the attendees was Edward, the undercover reporter working for CCR. With a bag of NatCon-branded merchandise in hand, he soon made the acquaintance of Micah Meadowcroft.

Meadowcroft was an official at the Environment Protection Agency during the Trump administration. But more recently he’s been working at Vought’s Center for Renewing America (CRA) as its research director and has been involved in Project 2025.

Meadowcroft and our undercover reporter exchanged stories about their faith and their family. After a while, the conversation turned to Project 2025. The 900-page document – or “book” as Meadowcroft referred to it – published on the group’s website was just phase one of the project. There’s a secretive next phase, he explained. And not only is CRA heavily involved, it’s being led by his boss, Vought.

But you don’t actually send them to their work emails

“The second phase, after the book came out, was to break down actual policy packets and executive orders and agenda items and things like that. And that’s been supervised largely by Russ,” Meadowcroft said. “He’s the team lead behind the scenes, just putting all that together… I have colleagues who officially work for CRA, but like 35 out of their 40 hour work week is Project 2025 stuff.”

But these documents won’t be made public, Meadowcroft said: “It’s a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period, but not as part of the transition. Because obviously, you want as little of it to be FOIA-able… as possible.”

The Freedom of Information Act enables the public to request information from government agencies. Although transition teams are not federal agencies themselves, in 2016 the Trump team operated under the assumption that any transition plans brought into an agency could be requested under FOIA, according to the Center for Presidential Transition.

Instead, the Project 2025 transition plans will be shared with Trump’s transition team clandestinely: “The goal is to familiarize all the transition team people with these plans. But you don’t actually send them to their work emails,” Meadowcroft said.

“You could just give the handbooks to everyone. And be like, ‘This is the game plan for the admin.’ If the press knows that that’s what you’re doing, that they’re going to immediately just say, ‘I request all of your emails from Heritage.’”

Meadowcroft also revealed to our undercover reporter that Vought and other CRA staff are expecting to leave the organisation to go work for Trump if he wins in November: “I’d say probably a quarter to a third of staff, myself included, if there is a second Trump administration, would go in.”

During the conversation the importance of finding out more about this secretive phase two of Project 2025 became clear. Before the two parted ways, Meadowcroft said he could help set up a meeting with his boss.

Two weeks later, Vought is sat on a plush sofa in the Presidential suite of the Rosewood Hotel, with three hidden cameras trained on him. Edward, the undercover reporter Meadowcroft met at NatCon, introduced him to Tom. Tall and slender with grey hair, Tom sat reclined, one leg crossed over the other, on the sofa opposite Vought. He told Vought he’s more into classical music than politics but was there on behalf of his brother, Joe, who had seen Vought on War Room. Vought laid out his vision for Trump’s second term as simply as he could.

A key part of Project 2025’s plans is to give the President more powers, removing the independence of agencies like the Department of Justice and FBI. Vought has dedicated his time to helping make this a reality if Trump wins in November.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said, “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agency’s notion of independence — they’re independent from the President — whether it’s bringing back concepts that ruled until Nixon of impoundment — the ability to not spend money — whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work. Those are all the things that we are working on predominantly right now.”

Vought said he is overseeing a large team that is developing 350 different transition documents, consisting of draft executive orders, secretarial memos and regulations. His priority, he said, is to provide detailed plans for enacting policies he already knows Trump wants to carry out, based on the former President’s campaign speeches.

They’re not running from all of the negativity that I get from the press

He is confident that these plans won’t end up in a White House shredder, despite the Trump campaign’s insistence that they have nothing to do with Project 2025. He suggested that Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 is a pre-election political ploy rather than anything substantive: “He’s running against the brand. He is not running against any people; he is not running against any institutions,” Vought said. “It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”

Contrary to the increasingly aggressive public stance of the Trump’s campaign managers towards Project 2025, Vought said he actually enjoys a close relationship with the campaign: “I spent much of this week unpacking it for my own team, the Heritage team. But I think the best example is the campaign selected me to be the [RNC] platform [policy director] because [of] their views on my policy ideas,” he said.

“They’re not running from all of the negativity that I get from the press… the relationship is great.”

This relationship, Vought said, has included close coordination with the Trump campaign on media outreach, even as Project 2025 began to generate more and more negative attention. Vought said he was asked by the Trump campaign to speak to journalists from the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine for two major stories about the policies Trump would enact in a second term.

“They featured us prominently as part of [the Time Magazine piece],” Vought said, stating that the campaign had asked him to be included in the article.

Vought used this platform to promote his work on Project 2025: “The President never had a policy process that was designed to give him what he actually wanted and campaigned on,” Vought told Time, “[we are] sorting through the legal authorities, the mechanics, and providing the momentum for a future Administration.”

In contrast to a recent claim by one of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, that it is “complete and utter bullshit” to suggest those involved in Project 2025 will be picked to work in a new Trump administration, Vought said: “I think there’s an expectation that I would go in.”

When asked which job he’d prefer, he said: “I want to be the person that crushes the deep state. I think there’s a lot of different ways to do that.”

He’s raised money for our organisation, he’s blessed it

The undercover reporters asked if he plans to rebrand this next phase of Project 2025, given how poltically toxic it has become: “For what I do, the brand is not important,” he said. “I expect to hear ten more times from the rally, the President, you know, distancing himself from the left’s bogeyman, Project 2025… I’m not worried about it.”

At NatCon, Meadowcroft had offered his own assessment: “I don’t think anyone in the know has felt too spooked by it. He [Trump] doesn’t have other options, right? As far as staffing the transition goes, and then staffing the administration, and then people having policy agenda items.”

Vought’s relationship with Trump goes deeper than his ties to the campaign though. He said that CRA, which is responsible for promulgating some of the most radical Project 2025 policy ideas, has Trump’s “blessing” and that the former President has fundraised for them. He even gave them an “assignment” to get Republican politicians talking about critical race theory, Vought claimed.

“He’s been at our organisation, he’s raised money for our organisation, he’s blessed it,” Vought said. “I remember walking into our last day in office and told him what I was going to do. So, he’s very supportive of what we do.”

The early months of the first Trump administration were beset by inexperienced, underprepared officials. Now with a host of “correctives” already in the works, Vought and Project 2025 are hoping to help them be better prepared the second time around. Among these are promises of delivering the “largest deportation in history,” – something Trump has also spoken about publicly on the campaign trail and which is the number two priority in the GOP policy platform. But it is Vought and his team who are developing the concrete plans to make it happen.

George Floyd obviously was not about race

“What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it?” Vought said on the issue of deportations during the meeting with the undercover reporters. “Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re having to scramble to do that later on.”

Asked whether these plans are coming from him, Vought replied: “Those are– and we’ve got a big team that’s working, not just our organization.”

Later, a reporter asked what will happen if there are left-wing protests in response to the deportations. Vought said that the plan would be to bring in the military: “I think they will attempt a colour revolution, where they have riots, where they have everything you’ve seen in other countries… George Floyd obviously was not about race. It was about destabilizing the Trump administration.”

“Our view is… that the President has the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military,” Vought said.

He explained his belief that the President is not restricted by the Posse Comitatus Act to withhold the use of military force against US citizens to supress such protests: “There’s, you know, laws in the books that people think that bind the president, like Posse Comitatus. They don’t.”

Vought repeatedly came back to the importance of focusing on what is politically possible, for example on abortion he said that he wants abolition but that, as things stand, this would result in electoral annihilation. Instead, Vought said, a lot can be done via executive powers: “I want to get to abolition. But I also– we’ve got to win elections… And so, I think the President’s actually come up with a strategy that works, so long as you are giving people like me in government the ability to block funding for Planned Parenthood, block funding for foetal tissue research.”

He described Trump as the Winston Churchill of the anti-abortion movement: “Cut the guy some slack,” Vought said. “Trust the man. It would be like us questioning Churchill on his views on the end of the Second World War, right?”

“He had the most pro-life record ever. Every decision that got to him, including ones that I thought would go against us, … he went with life. He’s the only guy that overturned Roe v. Wade.”

As the meeting drew to a close, the men shook hands and Tom and Edward promised to report back to the family’s patriarch, Joe.

“It’s been an education,” Tom said.