Republicans Keep Telling Us What They Will Do. It’s Beyond Time to Believe Them.

For almost two years, I have covered work products of the Heritage Foundation, a far-right “think tank” based in Washington DC and funded by billionaires. Over and over and over, I have warned Americans this crowd intends to do everything they tell us they will do.

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Here’s Russ Vought, a Project 2025 author, now head of the Office of Management and Budget and, in my view, unelected co-President with Stephen Miller:

SOURCE: The Guardian from February 2025.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in the videos obtained by ProPublica.“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

SOURCE: ProPublica linked above.

Project 2025 called for mass firings of apolitical civil servants and replacing them with loyalists vetted by the above-mentioned Heritage Foundation. I wrote about this goal to remove the civil service guardrail on 13 March 2024:

From that newsletter:

Civil servants were a key guardrail in thwarting 45’s dictatorial ambitions during his administration. They used their experience and deep knowledge of how our government functions to resist changes he and his cronies demanded. Many stood up and said “No” to their assault on the rule of law, expertise, and ethics.

The framers of Project 2025 learned an important lesson from this experience: Career civil servants whose politics do not align or who resist following the President’s agenda must go.

Yet the federal bureaucracy has a mind of its own. Federal employees are often ideologically aligned—not with the majority of the American people—but with one another, posing a profound problem for republican government, a government “of, by, and for” the people. As Donald Devine, Dennis Kirk, and Paul Dans write in Chapter 3, “An autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy.”

When it comes to ensuring that freedom can flourish, nothing is more import-ant than deconstructing the centralized administrative state. Political appointees who are answerable to the President and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task. The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan “experts,” who pursue their own ends while engaging in groupthink, insulated from American voters.

Project 2025, pages 20 – 21

Project 2025 doesn’t provide an author credit for the introduction to Section One (pages 19 – 21), but I suspect it was written by Russell Vought. Here’s a photo of my marked up copy of Project 2025.

In my March 2024 newsletter, I outlined four ways Republicans would dismantle the civil service and thus the federal government:

• Abolishing public-sector unions that protect federal employees from being terminated at will.

• Terminating federal employees that do not support the President’s agenda.

• Expanding the number and role of political appointees across government departments, including the use of “acting” agency heads that can dodge Congressional approval.

• Establishing a merit-based performance appraisal system that will continue to root out civil servants who resist Christo-fascist directives.

Again and again and again and again, Republicans tell us what they will do. And millions of Americans, including many of our leaders, sit on their hands and say, “They’ll never do THAT.”

Project 2025 also called for using the Insurrection Act to invade blue states and cities to suppress “dissent.” I highlighted this in my Project 2025 coverage multiple times last year.

So when Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, said THIS in July, he was telling America what Republicans intended to do:

SOURCE: Esquire 30 July 2025

From the Esquire article:

In a speech to a gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council in Indianapolis, [Heritage Foundation president Kevin] Roberts asserted, “We are in the second American Revolution,” which he explained by saying “we are renewing sovereignty and self-governance and faith in fellow man.” Roberts showed no apparent recognition of the glaring inconsistency between his declared support for “sovereignty and self-governance” and his demonstrated contempt for the democratic choices made by voters in cities who disagree with Heritage’s agenda.

Heritage Foundation directives are responsible for military and paramilitary occupations of Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and more. If any group should be charged with domestic terror, it is them.

In May 2025, I did a deep dive into Project Esther, another Heritage Foundation manifesto. I warned Americans that Project Esther basically does away with First Amendment protections and seeks to label all dissent “terrorism.”

Millions of Americans said, “You’re hysterical. They’d never go that far.”

A few days ago, the President signed NSPM-7. I wrote about it last Thursday and Friday and warned Americans that anyone to the left of a Christian Nationalist like Kevin Roberts is “THE LEFT ergo A TERRORIST.” It seeks to label the following types of dissent “terrorism:”

• anti-Americanism

• anti-capitalism

• anti-Christianity (which in this list means anti-Christian Nationalism)

• support for overthrow of the United States government

• extremism on migration, race, and gender

• hostility toward those who hold traditional views on the family, religion, and morality (NOTE: “Traditional views” is code for “Christian Nationalist views.”)

Over the weekend, Stephen Miller, the other unelected co-President in this regime, tweeted this: