Trump’s Agenda Is Shaped by Project 2025 Author, Not Elon Musk

Cat Farman realized in January that her job might be at serious risk. It was the night she learned that a small group of engineers close to Elon Musk had forced their way into the headquarters of the US Agency for International Development. In the days that followed, they would gain access to sensitive employee records and bar staff from the building. The legality of all this was questionable—USAID exists because of an act of Congress, meaning it can only be dissolved the same way—but that didn’t deter Musk from declaring victory. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he posted on X on Feb. 3.

Farman works for a different government agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but she understood that the USAID news suggested she might be next. The CFPB, like USAID, is fairly obscure, with a do-gooder mission that conservatives, including Musk, have derided as wasteful and excessively woke. “I could see we were vulnerable in the same way USAID was,” says Farman, who’s president of the CFPB’s union.

Union members set up a table in the lobby, scoured news reports for names of anyone connected to Musk’s White House office, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and looked for any sign of them within the CFPB’s employee directory. On Feb. 7, Farman’s union issued a press release noting that it had discovered three “dodgy DOGE bros” working at the CFPB. They were Chris Young (formerly of Musk’s political action committee), Nikhil Rajpal (formerly of X and a college libertarian group) and Gavin Kliger (who’d worked with Musk on the attempted closure of USAID). The DOGE bros had been given access to the CFPB’s human resources, finance and procurement records, ostensibly to conduct an audit to identify services to cut. The same day, Musk seemed to confirm what Farman feared: The plan was to cut them all. “RIP CFPB,” Musk posted on X, adding the tombstone emoji.

Farman knew those words didn’t necessarily mean her agency was dead. Musk’s tenure in President Donald Trump’s second administration has been defined by chaos as much as cost-cutting. Musk has claimed to have cut $150 billion from the federal budget, a substantial sum if true. But independent analyses have suggested the real number may be much lower than advertised. Critics have accused his team of exaggerating or simply misunderstanding its impact, and its most dramatic defenestrations, USAID included, were blocked (at least temporarily) by federal judges. Musk’s own antics on social media, on podcasts and in public settings have at times come off as politically unproductive, ineffective, clownish or all of the above. The press release from Farman’s union hinted at some of this. “CFPB Union members welcome our newest colleagues and look forward to the smell of Axe Body Spray in our elevators,” the union wrote.

But the following day, it became clear to Farman that her adversary wasn’t Musk, or any engineers who might have doused themselves with Axe’s unique eau de middle school. She was really up against Russell Vought, the Trump loyalist who’d just been named director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as well as acting director of the CFPB. Farman hadn’t heard of Vought before he became CFPB director, which is pretty much how Vought likes it. A self-described “boring budget guy,” he’s best known for co-authoring the 900-page policy playbook of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has become something of a bible for Trump’s second term. Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, has produced numerous policy papers that advocate for such Trump fixations as the annexation of Greenland (“a prudent aim,” according to a CRA paper) and enacting broad tariffs (“just as sometimes a nation must go to war with guns and bombs, so sometimes are trade wars necessary”), among others. At the center of Vought’s ideology is the unitary executive theory, which critics say amounts to an argument that Trump should have wide latitude to do whatever he wants.

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