A key architect of the controversial extremist Project 2025 has been captured on a secret video revealing that presidential executive orders are already being drafted for a Trump administration, according to an explosive report.
Former President Donald Trump has distanced himself from the 920-page far-right manifesto for a radically revamped government created through the conservative Heritage Foundation, saying he knows "nothing" about it. But scores of his White House staff have worked on it and he echoes several of its key points in his speeches.
He also traveled on a private jet with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, and Trump running mate JD Vance has written a forward for Roberts' upcoming book on the plan.
One of the plan's authors and former Trump aide Richard Vought, who was secretly recorded by the British journalism nonprofit the U.K.'s Centre for Climate Reporting, dismissed his former boss' comments, saying they were "graduate-level politics," triggered by an expectation of negative fallout over the plan.
Project 2025 aims to eliminate the federal Department of Education and Medicaid, and would officially support only "intact" heterosexual marriages because all other relationships are "unstable" and create "bad behavior."
It would fire thousands of federal workers to replace with right-wing loyalists, would quickly "dispatch" all prisoners on death row, and would seek to ensure that "all pregnancies come to term"
Trump's election and the enactment of Project 2025 are expected to be so controversial that the plan also aims to use the Insurrection Act to create a national police force of military troops to quell protests, an insider told the New Yorker for a recent article.
Vought told an undercover journalist and actor pretending to be relatives of a wealthy American donor that he had a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump's campaign speeches and Project 2025 plans into government policy.
"We've got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we're planning for the next administration," he was recorded saying.
"For example, you may say, 'Okay, all right, we want to have the largest deportation,'" Vought said. "What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there's an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos."
He emphasized: "Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you're not, you're not having to scramble or do that later on."
Vought added that "80% of my time is working on the plans of what's necessary to take control of these bureaucracies. We are working doggedly on that, whether it's destroying their agencies' notion of independence ... whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work."
Plans would be distributed to Trump's staff, but not to their emails, said Vought ally and Project 2025's Micah Meadowcraft on the video, where they would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
He said a "second phase" of changes would involve a concrete transition plan for each federal agency." These "much more detailed plans" are "confidential," he noted.