Ex-RNC Chair Confronts Republican on Project 2025 Plan to Gut Government

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) confronted Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, on Saturday over Project 2025—a plan that includes firing up to 50,000 federal government workers.

In August 2023, conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, in collaboration with other right-leaning groups, published its “Project 2025.” According to its official website, the project aims to “pave the way for an effective conservative administration” by using “a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook,” should the GOP win the 2024 election.

Proposals include reintroducing legislation making it easier to fire federal workers; prosecution for distributing abortion pills by mail; and abolishing recently established diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at the Department of Defense (DOD). However, one of the most significant proposals is a plan to reintroduce Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order rescinded by President Joe Biden that would see tens of thousands of federal workers reclassified, making them easier to fire.

While the Trump campaign has previously said that outside groups do not speak for the former president, Project 2025’s 1,000-page proposal was drafted with input from a long list of former Trump administration officials who are poised to fill the top ranks of a potential new administration, according to the Associated Press.

Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s campaign via email for comment.

During Saturday’s MSNBC‘s The Weekend, Steele, who is a co-host on the program, discussed the specific proposal of replacing federal workers, asking Roberts, a Republican, about who will be replacing them.

“Talk to us about what that looks like if Heritage is calling for removing 50,000 federal employees. Who are you replacing them with and where do they come from? I suspect a lot of those people you are talking about have been in the federal service for a long time and have served not just Republican administrations, but also Democratic administrations,” Steele said.

Roberts mentioned political contributions as he claimed federal workers contribute to the Democratic Party.

“They have and 95 percent of them who give political contributions give them to the Democratic Party,” Roberts said.

However, Steele interjected and asked, “So you’re going to fire someone because they wrote a check to a Democratic candidate?”

Roberts continued by doubling down on the efforts to replace civil servants, calling them “unelected bureaucrats.”

“No, we’re going to fire someone and the number needs to be more than 50,000, considering there are more than 2 million federal employees because over the last century the radical left has seen the administration state as the fourth branch of government. They’re unelected bureaucrats…but ultimately we have to devolve power from the imperial city of Washington back to the people,” Roberts said.

Steele asked Roberts again if they would fire someone who “wrote a check to a Democratic candidate. If they are doing their job why does that matter?”

According to Roberts, it matters because “they’re doing their jobs about a mission that is misaligned.”

Thomas Gift, a political scientist who heads up the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, previously told Newsweek that this policy kills three birds with one stone for Republicans.

Gift stated the proposal would be “making it easier to root out the alleged liberal ‘deep state’ that’s become a boogeyman for the party since Trump; cutting bloat in the administrative bureaucracy that many think is excessively wasteful to taxpayers; and stopping ‘mission creep’ in federal departments and agencies that often operate with minimal accountability or oversight.”

During this year’s election cycle, polls have so far shown that the results will be tight as Trump and President Joe Biden are statistically tied in most surveys or hold only marginal leads.

Project 2025 has become a consistent talking point amid the 2024 election as House Democrats have warned against it, recently launching a task force to start fighting the proposal and stop it from becoming a reality if Trump is reelected.

Representative Jared Huffman, a California Democrat, unveiled The Stop Project 2025 Task Force earlier this month as it is composed of about half a dozen Democratic lawmakers. The group aims to begin briefing fellow lawmakers about Project 2025 by holding a forum on Capitol Hill and informing voters about its ideas.

In a statement emailed to Newsweek on Saturday, Huffman reiterated the dangers of Project 2025 as he condemned the idea of it.

“Project 2025 is nothing short of a blueprint for an aspiring dictator to become an actual dictator,” the congressman wrote.

According to the AP, Roberts called the effort “unserious,” adding that the left is “in a frenzy.”

“Project 2025 will not be ‘stopped,'” Roberts said in a statement to the AP, adding that Democrats fighting Project 2025 are “more than welcome to try. We will not give up and we will win.”

Update 06/22/24, 5:08 p.m. ET: This article was updated with a comment from Huffman.