Project 2025 and US monetary policy
Plus, life below the Sahm threshold; and the US June CPI
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project is so heinous even Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from it, although as Rick Wilson noted in this regard ‘when Donald Trump denies something, you should always take it as a full confession of his absolute guilt.’
It should be recalled that the Heritage Foundation was once a respected think tank. Its Mandate for Leadership publication has gone through eight previous iterations since the first in 1981. But Heritage took an activist turn more or less coincident with Trump’s first run at the Presidency in 2016, leading some Heritage employees to resign and disassociate themselves from the organisation. Much of its output is now difficult to distinguish from Russian disinformation narratives, which have captured more than just one right-wing think tank.
Project 2025 is motivated in part by lessons taken from Trump’s unpreparedness for government in 2016. Among other things, this left his first administration chronically under-staffed and lacking policy direction. The intention behind Project 2025, of which Mandate is a part, is to remedy those deficiencies, although there is a big difference between planning and delivery. Some former Trump administration officials have suggested to me that Project 2025 is a bit of a paper tiger, but we should still take seriously its policy intent.