Trump name-checks Project 2025 as he threatens to dismantle agencies.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10/02/us/trump-government-shutdown

Trump name-checks Project 2025 as he threatens to dismantle agencies.

During the 2024 presidential race, Donald J. Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, an unpopular right-wing policy plan written by Republican allies that laid out how he could wield power in a second term. The proposals in the 900-page document were widely viewed as extreme, and Democrats warned that Mr. Trump would quickly move to enact those policies should he return to the Oval Office.

Mr. Trump and other Republicans repeatedly dismissed those warnings as breathless hysteria, and his campaign team openly celebrated when the director of Project 2025 stepped down amid criticism from Mr. Trump as the plan became a growing political liability. In his debate last year with the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump was unequivocal: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it.”

But Democrats were quickly proven correct. Days after winning the 2024 race, Mr. Trump tapped Russell T. Vought, an architect of Project 2025, to lead his White House budget office. And just a few days into Mr. Trump’s second term, the president had already unleashed a broadside of executive orders and directives to federal agencies that directly echoed proposals from Project 2025.

Many of the proposals in Project 2025 that Mr. Trump has either already implemented or plans to involve his efforts to drastically shrink or dismantle federal agencies and reshape the federal bureaucracy. On Thursday, amid a government shutdown, Mr. Trump reveled in the perceived opportunity to take those plans even further.

“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “To determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

He added, “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”