When Donald Trump took office last year, he brought Project 2025 to the White House with him. The Heritage Foundation plan lays out a sweeping conservative playbook for how to govern America, and the Trump administration quickly got to work. The US Agency for International Development was gutted, environmental regulations went up in smoke, and universities found themselves under attack. One year later, the administration is still working through its list.
In today’s edition, we answer the question: What can Project 2025 tell us about where the Trump administration is going next? Plus: How AI is making your tech worse, the movie theater comeback, and a pardoned fraudster. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. |
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What's left for Project 2025? |
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Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images |
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| Noel King
Project 2025 was 922 or so pages. How much of what's in there has the Trump administration accomplished? |
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| David Graham
There's a good tracker out there online that puts the number right above 50 percent. And I think that's useful, but you have to take it with a grain of salt, because some of these things are just hard to equate on a numerical level.
That tracker says Trump eliminated USAID, which is a goal. Project 2025 wanted to reform USAID in different ways, but not to abolish it. So, it doesn't always fit one-to-one.
The other thing that I would say is, so much of what they want to do depends on having this really powerful president — sort of an unfettered, no checks-and-balances situation. And they've made so much progress on that in the first year. I think that will enable more progress towards their goals in the future. |
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| Noel King
How did they get so much done, this administration? |
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| David Graham
A way that I've heard people talk about it is you don't get a lot of chances for a president to try things, leave office for four years, and then get another shot at it.
So many of the people involved were veterans of the first Trump administration or had been closely related to it, and they saw what went wrong and they had theories [as to why]. And they also learned a lot about how the government works.
And so, that meant that they could come in on the first day and be just so ready, so organized, and so energized. I think that gave them the chance to sort of conduct this blitzkrieg that took the courts by surprise. It seems to have taken Congress by surprise. And I think it took a lot of the public by surprise. |
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| Noel King
And I think I hear you telling me that there is still a lot in that big book of ideas and policies that they would like to get done. |
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| David Graham
Oh yes. You could spend years pushing a lot of these things, and the ambitions are pretty big. I mean, they really want to reshape society, and that is a project you can make some work on in a year. But I think they're on a timeframe of years or decades. |
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| Noel King
What did they fail to get done? |
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| | David Graham
There are several areas where they haven't done much.
I think one is in this area of pro-family policy or socially conservative policy. We haven't seen a lot of encouraging higher birthrate stuff either.
We haven't seen the kind of labor policy that would bolster a more pro-family vision, like things that JD Vance was talking about in the campaign. And we haven't seen a sort of major shift of social welfare programs away from the government and towards religious organizations. |
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| Noel King
What do you think we're going to see more of in the year ahead? What maybe have we not been paying enough attention to that they've been banging the drum on and we should? |
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| David Graham
Something that I think is underappreciated even as it has gotten attention is the takeover of the independent regulatory agencies: the NLRB, the FEC, the FCC.
We're expecting a Supreme Court decision soon that seems likely to give the president control over all these agencies with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve. I think that's going to change the way everybody interacts with the government. The FCC, in particular, has gotten some attention. We saw the chair of the FCC basically try to get Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel.
Now, imagine that in so many other areas of life: the way you work through labor protections, the way you interact with the Social Security Administration, the way you interact with any number of walks of your life. I think we're going to see the president controlling that and making it an arm of policy. |
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⮕ Keep tabs
Memory problems: The AI boom is making your tech worse and more expensive at the same time. Vox’s Adam Clark Estes explains what computer memory has to do with it. [Vox] We come to this place for magic: Vox’s Kyndall Cunningham explains why movie theaters are making a comeback with Gen Z. [Vox] Fool me twice: After Trump commuted Adriana Camberos’s sentence in 2021, she concocted a new fraud scheme. Trump just freed her again. [NYT]
[Loud sea lion noises]: The Pacific Northwest’s serious sea lion problem, explained. [The Atlantic]
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| RFK Jr.'s new food pyramid |
Let them eat steak: How Trump's Health secretary hopes to revamp the American diet. |
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The 2026 Winter Olympics are almost upon us. But before we greet new mascots Tina and Milo (a pair of anthropomorphized stoats), I had a great time with this article a colleague shared about the 2022 Winter Olympics mascot, a remarkably spherical panda named Bing Dwen Dwen.
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Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, staff editor Cameron Peters. Thanks for reading! |
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