President Donald Trump says he’s never read Project 2025. But his advisers sure have.
Monday’s memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget ordering a sweeping freeze of federal financial assistance is the boldest, and clearest example of the administration not only leaning on the people who wrote Project 2025 but employing its strategies.
The memo, which throws into jeopardy billions of federal assistance for programs like providing school meals and supporting homeless veterans, hews closely to the strategy Trump’s pick for OMB director Russell Vought sketched out for bringing the federal bureaucracy to heel in Project 2025’s second chapter. That includes ensuring that the executive branch’s spending aligns with the president’s priorities — regardless of what Congress decides. And it tees up a constitutional fight over the separation of powers, with Vought long arguing that a federal law that prohibits the executive branch from withholding dollars appropriated by Congress is unconstitutional.
While Vought has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, multiple people close to the administration told POLITICO that both he and Trump policy chief Stephen Miller have played key roles in the funding freeze. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, during her first briefing Tuesday, said she spoke with Vought Tuesday morning about the memo and that “the line to his office is open for other federal government agencies.”
It’s not the only example of how Project 2025 promises are coming to fruition. The president has moved to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs, re-up his previous “Schedule F” initiative that allows him to more easily fire career employees and reinstate service members who had been dismissed for failing to receive the Covid-19 vaccine at the height of the pandemic.
These quick moves, many of which have been enacted by executive action and have had immediate and drastic impacts on day-to-day governing in Washington, demonstrate a key difference between the early chaotic days of Trump’s first term, when directives were often hastily written, and his second. His moves this time are more coordinated and better executed, in more than one case with memos released late in the day that have caught career employees, Democrats and the media off guard.
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily halted the spending freeze from taking effect, saying the courts needed more time to consider the impact. But Trump and his team say they’re prepared for the inevitable legal fight.
But Trump allies, still sensitive about the way Project 2025, the 922-page policy roadmap, was used as a cudgel by Democrats on the campaign trail — including by toting around a larger-than-life version of the book at the Democratic National Convention — argue that the moves reflect his campaign trail promises and should surprise no one.
“The ideas that are being implemented are the ones that the president has been talking about throughout his campaign,” said Roger Severino, director of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation and one of Project 2025’s many authors.
He pointed to video statements Trump released pledging to rein in bureaucracy, attack the so-called deep state and upend the Justice Department, which Trump and his allies accused of abusing its power by prosecuting him for his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
“That’s what he was elected on,” Severino said. A president following through on his promises “has never happened before, and that’s why some people are surprised. But they shouldn’t be surprised if they paid attention.”
Polls consistently showed Project 2025 was a political loser that risked dragging Trump down before he disavowed it.
But for Democrats, the message Tuesday was clear: We told you so. It’s a point Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others hammered home on Tuesday in response to the chaos caused by the OMB memo, as Senate Democrats also called on their Republican colleagues to hold Vought’s nomination in committee over the freeze.
“Plain and simple, this is Project 2025 — Project 2025 by another name. They knew how unpopular Project 2025 was. The right-wing idealogues are still in control so they had to do it in a different way but it has the same consequences and will have the same horrible, negative, overwhelming reaction from the American people,” Schumer told reporters. “And who is going to be the implementer of this? None other than the chief cook and bottle washer of Project 2025, Russell Vought.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the Project 2025 connection. But Leavitt, during the Tuesday briefing, defended the spending freeze.
“The reason for this is to ensure that every penny going out the door is not conflicting with the executive orders and action that this president has taken,” Leavitt said. “This is a very responsible measure.”
The memo also underscores the free rein Trump has given to his allies in the administration to run free within the broad contours of his agenda while he devotes his personal energy to things like tariffs and immigration. The OMB memo, for instance, comports with Trump’s overall goal of bringing the attack to the “deep state,” which he blamed for thwarting some of his first-term agenda and for the impeachments and prosecutions that nearly derailed his political career.
“People tend to freak out,” said Scott Jennings, a GOP strategist who has been a vocal Trump defender on CNN and who was at one point considered for Trump’s press secretary post. “The alternative is we allow the machinery to keep turning, no matter whoever the president is, and that doesn’t seem right either.”
Vought previously said that OMB is the most important tool the president has to “tame the bureaucracy and the administrative state” and sees the office as being able to “turn on and off any spending” going on at the agencies.
“We can do that in foreign aid. We can do that in all sorts of places,” Vought previewed to Tucker Carlson in November.
For all the prior planning, an energy executive familiar with discussions around the OMB memo, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, told POLITICO that the freeze appeared to also have caught the administration off guard.
“The White House is scrambling to figure out how to explain this,” the person said.
In an attempt to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the memo, the OMB released a second memo underscoring that agencies are only required to pause funding for any activities that may conflict with a handful of executive orders the president has signed, including those relating to foreign aid, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and the environmental spending approved by Congress during the Biden administration.
The second memo also said the freeze would not impact any direct assistance to individuals, including SNAP and Medicaid, though access to Medicaid’s payment system appeared to have been turned off Tuesday afternoon in what the White House said was an unrelated issue.
Other social safety net programs that get indirect money from the federal government, including some housing assistance and drug treatment programs, were not addressed in the memo.
Trump has yet to embrace some of Project 2025’s more controversial elements, including its expansive strategy for restricting abortion access in the country, which Democrats notably seized on. It gives credence to the argument from Trump allies that it is the president, not Project 2025, that is driving policy.
“It’s the president who announced what he was going to do,” Severino said. “We finally have a president who’s fulfilling his promises.”
Ben Lefebvre, Katherine Tully-McManus and Sophia Cai contributed to this report.
CLARIFICATION: The original version of this story did not provide the full context of a quote from Roger Severino, director of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. The story has been amended to reflect his full sentiment.
