And That Includes Gutting FEMA
Year after year, every year and every decade, FEMA spends the most money in just 3 states— Florida, Texas and Louisiana, a dependency on FEMA that follows a pattern reflecting the high incidence of natural disasters like hurricanes and floods. Yesterday in North Carolina, Trump talked about shuttering the agency with an executive order that hasn’t been fully written for him yet. “When you have a problem like this, I think you want to go, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it. I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away and we pay directly— we pay a percentage to the state. The state should fix it.”
Christopher Flavelle reported that “Trump inaccurately characterized FEMA’s role, which is to support state and local officials only if those officials are unable to respond to disasters on their own, and only at the request of a governor. Disaster response work is ‘locally executed, state managed and federally supported,’ Pete Gaynor, who ran FEMA during Trump’s first term, said in an interview. The agency is a backstop, not a first responder, he said. Trump’s statements in North Carolina echoed comments he made on Wednesday night in an interview in Fox News, saying ‘FEMA is getting in the way of everything.’ Referring to Oklahoma, he said: ‘If they get hit with a tornado or something, let Oklahoma fix it. You don’t need— and then the federal government can help them out with the money.’… Project 2025, the blueprint for a Republican administration that was produced by the Heritage Foundation, calls for flipping the financial burden of response to small disasters so that 75 percent is carried by states and the rest by the federal government. Russell Vought, the chief architect of Project 2025, is Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, where he would significantly shape the federal budget.”
The section in Project 2025 on disasters was written by Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of the agency responsible for FEMA in Trump’s first term. In addition to shifting more costs to states for small disasters, the blueprint called for a disaster “deductible”— reducing federal aid to states that fail to protect their communities against disasters. That switch would push states “to take a more proactive role in their own preparedness,” Cuccinelli wrote.
I’m old enough to remember when the media started calling Trump out on Project 2025 while Trump denied having ever heard of them. No one was surprised though, when Trump appointed Project 2025’s chief architect Russ Vought, to upend Washington as head of the Office of Management and Budget. Tony Romm and Jeff Stein reported that Vought “has promised to pursue stark spending cuts, and he’s signaled support for wresting some powers of the purse away from Congress. He’s proposed vast changes to Medicaid and other safety-net programs, and he’s redoubled his commitment to purging the federal workforce, triggering a quiet, early exodus of career civil servants… [shaping] some of Trump’s earliest policy directives, underscoring the longtime lieutenant’s powerful and growing influence… Already, Trump has taken steps to implement policies Vought previously supported: Beginning Monday, the president issued orders to freeze some federal funding, block diversity initiatives and make it easier to fire career government employees. Some of the ideas resemble Vought’s past work, but he declined this week to speak about his think tank’s prior recommendations— and Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025.”
Almost immediately, Trump’s early directives sparked lawsuits from opponents and triggered unrest among federal workers. Some of the White House’s own career employees also appeared to revolt, leading to an unusually large wave of staff departures ahead of Vought’s expected arrival…
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump pitched voters on dramatic budget cuts, linking federal spending to rising inflation. His advisers, including the tech billionaire Elon Musk, often measured the magnitude of their preferred reductions into the trillions of dollars, raising the potential that they could affect virtually every agency and program except defense.
Ultimately, Trump and his GOP allies hope to produce savings that can help offset the cost of their still-evolving plan to extend, and possibly expand, tax cuts adopted during Trump’s first term. They also face rapidly approaching fiscal deadlines: Republicans must act to prevent a government shutdown, with funding set to expire in March, and raise the nation’s debt ceiling to ensure that Washington does not default on its obligations this spring.
…Throughout his tenure, Vought pushed aggressively for spending reductions, even as the national debt soared under Trump. In past White House budgets, he proposed hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and other programs that Democrats see as critical for low-income families. And Vought sought major reductions to the Education Department, Interior Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, though some of the changes he recommended never became law.
Over two confirmation hearings this month, Vought reprised his calls for austerity entering Trump’s second term, promising to “begin to tackle our spending and debt,” as he said Wednesday. But he said the new administration has not yet set a target for fiscal year 2026, which begins in October.
He specifically pointed to welfare reform, and programs including Medicaid, arguing the government had set up a “benefit hammock” that allowed low-income Americans to obtain health insurance and other aid while unemployed.
“You can get sizable levels of savings and reforms,” Vought told the Senate Budget Committee.
His vision broadly delighted Republicans.
…Hours into his second term, Trump signed an initial battery of executive orders that signaled his willingness to test the limits of his spending powers. One directive this week halted the disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ 2022 health and climate law, which already had been designated to a contractor, said David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School. That is a separate issue from impoundments, according to Super, who noted the policy still amounts to going back on an existing commitment.
“When the federal government breaches its contracts, it calls the entire sanctity of contracts into question and makes it impossible for anyone to trust the federal government,” Super said. “Once it starts defaulting on its contract obligations, vendors will charge it much more— and taxpayers will end up footing the bill.”
Vought this week said some of Trump’s early actions impose only a “programmatic delay” on federal funds, noting the administration would soon begin a legal review on the issue. (He and his allies have articulated a detailed explanation for why they believe the existing spending law is unconstitutional.) But Democrats led by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) still questioned the president’s directives, warning that Vought’s proposed tactics threaten to undermine dealmaking in Congress
“And I have to say that your answer to this should be disconcerting to every single member on this committee,” Murray added.
Even though the Senate has not yet scheduled a vote on Vought’s nomination, some budget staffers have quietly departed OMB, a tension that former officials attributed to friction between the incoming leader and the career civil service. Dating back to Trump’s term, Vought has supported efforts to reclassify federal workers in a way that would allow the president to fire them more easily— a designation, known as Schedule F, that Trump revived as one of his first acts in office.
You’d have to be an idiot to miss the fact that virtually all of Trump’s early actions— the blitz of executive actions— mirror Project 2025. Jonathan Tamari and Brandon Lee reported that an analysis found that dozens of executive actions rolled out by the new administration this week mirror recommendations in the sweeping plan. In all, more than 30 out of Trump’s 47 initial executive actions as of Thursday afternoon match or partially align with ideas promoted in Project 2025, the analysis found.
“Democrats,” they wrote, “argued that Republicans deceived voters when distancing themselves from the policy document.
“Republicans across the country lied to the American people by claiming that they knew nothing about Project 2025 and have spent the first few weeks of this year implementing Project 2025,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said Thursday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) invoked the project while railing against Russ Vought, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget and author of part of Project 2025.
“Donald Trump has made it official: Project 2025 is coming to the White House,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Thursday.
…Trump during his campaign repeatedly said he knew nothing about Project 2025, despite several authors having served in his first administration.
“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it,” he said at a Sept 10 debate against Harris. Writing on his social media platform Truth Social Trump said some of the ideas were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Still, it was clear that much of what Trump promoted during his campaign overlapped with the vision outlined in Project 2025, even if he was more vague on details. The blueprint called for lower taxes, tougher border enforcement and slashing regulations— much like Trump.
Criticism of Project 2025 featured heavily in Democratic campaigns, but Republicans said few people are even aware of the policy book.
Project 2025 was the de facto GOP 2024 Party Platform. That point was never effectively made by Dems (who had a $1.5BN warchest). They spent $450k/day on an ad on the Las Vegas Sphere, but I saw no ads highlighting the GOP plans to gut what remains of the social safety net (that they hadn't gutted in the prior 44 years).
I further note that, as egregious as Trump is, he's as much of a symptom as a cause of the present distress. He accelerated a decline of the GOP that began in Reagan's time. Were Trump to keel over tomorrow, the lunacy of the GOP and the fecklessness of the nominal opposition would remain.