The Infernal Triangle: Project 2025 … and 1921, and 1973, and 1981

It’s Hot Project 2025 Summer here at the Infernal Triangle!

First things first: The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the anchor of the marquee right-wing think tank’s Project 2025, is not what you’ve heard. It’s not some book of magic spells for President Trump’s minions to cast, and poof goes away every last vestige of truth, justice, and the American way. For one thing, much of it is too dumb to accomplish anything at all.

Consider the part on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in the chapter on the Department of Homeland Security, bylined by OG MAGA superfreak (and former Trump DHS official) Ken Cuccinelli. I turned it over for review to an acquaintance with 16 years’ experience devising disaster management plans for states and municipalities. They immediately spotted that one budget recommendation contradicts another, such that the first (intended to defund humanitarian functions at the border, naturally) would be “useless if both recommendations were to carry.” Also, they said this: “The reorganization recommendations are 100% insane. CISA in DOT? FEMA in DOI? Shewwww!”

And did you know some chapters consist of multiple authors debating opposite interpretations of basic public questions? (“The Export-Import Bank Should Be Abolished” vs. “The Case for the Export-Import Bank”; “The Case for Free Trade” vs. “The Case for Fair Trade.”)

And the author of the Federal Reserve chapter, like a college student tackling a term paper assignment, summarizes every theory on monetary policy, from the status quo ante, to Milton Friedman’s monetarism, to “commodity-backed money” (the gold standard), all the way to outright Fed abolition, before throwing up his hands at the notion that a future conservative administration could possibly agree upon any satisfactory reform at all.

The section about Russia in the State Department chapter—the author is an old hand of the High Reaganite wing of the Republican foreign-policy guild; a “globalist,” if you will—emphasizes that the Russia-Ukraine conflict “starkly divides conservatives,” with one faction arguing for the “presence of NATO and U.S. troops if necessary,” while the other “denies that U.S. Ukrainian support is in the national security interest of America at all.”

This misunderstanding is important. The silence, so far, on those parts, indicts us. These are great, big, blinking red “LOOK AT ME” advertisements of vulnerabilities within the conservative coalition. Wedge issues. Opportunities to split Republicans at their most vulnerable joints, much as when Richard Nixon cynically expanded affirmative action requirements for federal building projects, in order to seed resentment between blue-collar building trades Democrats and Black Democrats.

And yes, there is plenty of blunt insanity, too. But, bottom line, this is a complicated document. “Conservatives in Disarray” is precisely the opposite message from that conveyed by all the coverage of Project 2025. But it is an important component of this complexity, and why this text should be picked apart, not panicked over, and studied both for the catastrophes it portends and the potential it provides.

So, yes, like George C. Scott in Patton, I’m here to say: Heritage Foundation, you magnificent bastard. I read your book!

But I only saw what I saw. I brought my own particular knowledge and expertise, most especially upon its resonances with right-wing lunacies past. Since no one can possibly grasp the thing whole, I’ve also recruited some random experts of my acquaintance: the FEMA expert, an air traffic controller, a nuclear weapons buff, etc. You should, too. Hand it off to your brother-in-law at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (p. 256), your pal at the Interagency Council on Homelessness (p. 548), etc. If this is our opponents’ battle plan, thank them for the opportunity—and take it.

ME, I’LL START WITH SOME DECONSTRUCTION of what it means for the deconstruction of the administrative state. One thing that especially grates on me as a historian is how much of the discourse treats Project 2025 as if it’s some novel thing. I mean, what about Project 1921?

I refer, of course, to the administration of Warren G. Harding, who intoned in his inaugural address of dedicating himself to “the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business.” As an ally in the project over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce put it seven years later: “A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast—a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world—the black plague is a housepet by comparison.”

The best part so far about the journalism about Project 2025 is how it has documented its cataclysmic aim of destroying the very notion of an expert and independent civil service—the people Trumpies call the “deep state.” I don’t point to antecedents to minimize that danger. I point to them to maximize it. The fact that conservatives have been trying so hard for so long is what makes it more dangerous. It’s our good luck that each time, some accident of history stood in the way of the worst right-wing plans. The Great Depression prevented Project 1921. Phew. But not a good accident! Better for us to nip this thing in the bud on our own. And that takes a deeper understanding of antecedents.

WATERGATE SAVED US, the next time.

Call it Project 1973: Richard Nixon took his 49-state re-election triumph as a mandate to operationalize the drunken boast of his campaign manager John Mitchell to move the country so far to the right “you won’t even recognize it.”

It’s one of the things people get most wrong about Nixon: his supposed liberalism. That was a political artifact of his first term, and largely instrumental—to preserve power to do what he really wanted to do, which was profoundly conservative. At the heart of his vision was just what Project 2025 wants to do: devastate the independent civil service, in his view a nest of left-wing conspiracists, with far too many Jews. His version of the Heritage plan was later dubbed the “Malek Manual” when it was introduced as an exhibit in the Senate Watergate Committee hearings. If it wasn’t, we might have just been living it, not reading about it.

Its author was a young bureaucratic genius named Frederic Malek. He was awarded the plum job heading the White House personnel office because he had so successfully run a similar project during the 1972 campaign: finding and deploying invisible levers within the federal bureaucracy to punish those believed to be hurting Nixon’s chances for re-election, and to recruit those he thought could help. (For instance, one document recorded that an official of Philadelphia’s Dock and Wharf Builders Local 454, “an active backer of this administration,” got records subpoenaed by the Justice Department returned to them in exchange for being “very helpful to the administration in impacting the blue collar vote in a key county.”)

The memo authorizing the Malek Manual to politicize the civil service managed somehow to make the work sound patriotic: “a project to improve executive branch responsiveness to the voting public.” That’s a good example of why it’s important to study Project 2025 antecedents. Even amongst themselves, wing nuts often speak in code that obscures their malefaction. The more you familiarize yourself with it, the easier it is to decode. You also know to pay attention for the moments when they let their guard down—as in the manual’s conclusion, where Malek quoted “one of the ranking members of the administration,” who said, “You cannot hope to achieve policy, program or management control until you have achieved political control. That is the difference between ruling and reigning” (emphasis added).

The Malek Manual was saturated with the same sort of wing-nutty tropes one finds in Project 2025, as we’ll see. The fantastic projection of diabolical cunning within previous Democratic administrations (“Lyndon Johnson went a step further … Naturally, there wasn’t a ripple of concern from a Democratic Congress, only the covert clapping of hands and salivation at the opportunities that now were theirs.”). An inability to imagine even the possibility of good faith among those claiming to uphold the ideal of procedural neutrality (the “so-called ‘merit system’”).

All in service, of course, of the rankest skullduggery. My favorite is SECTION III, Chapter 3, Section a, Subsection 3: “Special Assignment Technique (The Traveling Salesman).” It is noted as “especially useful for the family man and those who do not enjoy traveling.” It consists of giving a competent employee one wishes to fire for political reasons a “promotion” that requires “criss-crossing him across the country to towns (hopefully with the worst accommodations possible) of a population of 20,000 or under. Until his wife threatens him with divorce unless he quits, you have him out of town and out of the way” (emphasis added).

(Malek, after a bump in the road in 1982 when Reagan withdrew his nomination as governor for the U.S. Postal Service after Senate critics complained about this stuff, went on to thrive within the Republican firmament. For conservatives, figuring out legal ways to cheat is a fantastic career move.)

Project 1973 also had a public face: Nixon’s FY1974 budget proposal. The Washington Post called it “unprecedented in scope.” One of its liberal columnists compared it to the Weather Underground’s threats to “bring the system down”—only by someone with the power to do it. One of the scariest proposals—a halt to all federal housing subsidies—was scotched by Nixon’s outgoing, relatively liberal HUD secretary George Romney. That’s a good model for how important it is to dig into the specifics of Project 2025: Bad publicity matters.

I should add that Romney was “outgoing” because immediately upon his re-election, Nixon fired his entire Cabinet. No longer saddled with the requirement that his secretaries be in the ideological mainstream, his intent was to impanel one that could not stand in his way. Point being, Americans have empowered radical deconstructionists of the administrative state before. That it wasn’t radically deconstructed that time was because the first revelations tying Watergate to the White House drained Nixon of his political capital, just in the nick of time. Phew, part 2.

THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE WAS ONLY moderately deconstructed by the next guy, with radical deconstruction only happening in pockets (for instance—sorry, Secretary Romney—a 75 percent cut over eight years in the public-housing budget). Then as now, the Heritage Foundation gave a Republican president a blueprint to do it. Indeed, Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership shares the same name, and same format, with the volume Heritage published in 1981. That volume sported about a thousand pages, with chapters for each major executive branch unit—accompanied with 2,000 more pages of supplementary volumes, including one devoted to banning Earth Day.

It was just as kooky (did you know officials at the Department of Health and Human Services were secretly instituting a guaranteed annual income?), just as conspiratorial (“World Order Education” was one of the deep staters’ plans they went after), and just as full of dangerous contributors (the intelligence chapter is authored by the protofascist eugenicist Sam Francis, whom John Ganz argues was the ur-theorist of Trumpism). That it didn’t come off as planned owes to the peculiar weakness of Ronald Reagan as a tribune of conservatism: He let himself be surrounded by establishment moderates who largely devised his agenda, to which he largely reacted as if a passive spectator. Phew, part 3.

Heritage kept trying. It’s another thing you wouldn’t know from much of the coverage: This year’s Mandate for Leadership is the ninth edition in the series. I’ve never seen the “Mandate V” and “Mandate VI” volumes from 2000 and 2005, so I can’t say how much they contributed to George W. Bush’s own unique contributions to the deconstruction of the administrative state, the debacles of deregulation I documented back then as a blogger under the heading of “E. coli conservatism.” But I can report, thanks to Wikipedia, that the one in 2005 was a mere 156 pages, because “according to Heritage, the shorter length reflected that policies and ideas from the early Mandate editions had, by the time of this publication, largely become part of the mainstream debate.”

So what of this edition in the series? What is same old same old, what’s uniquely MAGA? What’s an accumulation of decades of momentum, what’s a veering from the Reaganite course? Where is the “Special Assignment Technique (The Traveling Salesman)” buried within, only this time for some constitutionally fastidious attorney general or Geneva Convention–besotted four-star general?

Bottom line: How much of it renders reasonable the fears we’ve been hearing, that this time, they finally have the federal government figured out?

There’s plenty. Tune in next week. Same wing-nutty time, same wing-nutty channel.

It’s Project 2025 Summer here at The Infernal Triangle! I’m studying the whole thing for a series of columns. If you want to share your expertise on one of the federal departments the Heritage Foundation wants to weaponize or gut, contact me at infernaltriangle@prospect.org.