Paul Dans sits down with Jenny Beth to discuss The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 - a presidential transition project to help usher in conservative Americans into the new presidential administration in 2025. Paul served as the Chief of Staff for the Office of Personnel Management in the Trump administration.
Paul Dans sits down with Jenny Beth to discuss The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 - a presidential transition project to help usher in conservative Americans into the new presidential administration in 2025. Paul served as the Chief of Staff for the Office of Personnel Management in the Trump administration.
Twitter/X: @Prjct2025 | @JennyBethM
Website: https://www.project2025.org/
Paul Dans (00:00:00):
It's a permanent government blob here they have marched through the federal government much as they have every other institution, and it's on us now to take the thing back.
Narrator (00:00:13):
Keeping our republic is on the line and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she's most proud of is Mom To Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:00:44):
My next guest is heading up the plan to drain the swamp in Washington DC and he will hit the ground running as soon as Donald Trump is reelected next year. Paul Danz is the Director of Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which is a presidential transition project that will help put in place the right personnel to clean up the mess in our nation's capital. Are you ready to drain the swamp? I know that I am Paul Dan, thank you so much for being with me today. We got to know each other near the end of the Trump administration, and I learned that you were working with the Office of Personnel and Management and now you're doing the Project 2025, which is a project of the Heritage Foundation with a lot of coalition partners. Let's talk a little bit about a lot about Project 2025 and then we can talk about lessons learned from your experience with OPM later.
Paul Dans (00:01:35):
Sure, it's great to be with you, Jenny Beth and with all the two party Patriots here online. Fantastic organization of yours and it's been an honor to kind of work alongside your group over the years. But now with Project 2025, you are one of our 75 groups that are now joining forces to prepare for day one of the next administration, which will be a conservative one, January 20th, 2025. Hence our name is Project 2025, but what we're really doing is coming together as an entire conservative movement to be ready to go to work with the right people and the right policies on day one. So this takes a lot of pre-preparation and planning. We have to recruit the talent to get to Washington. That's what's been critically missing for many years. And even when we got President Trump in there and we got some hope for change, the reality is that he can only do so much. It's really the entire team underneath him that needs to make things happen. So ultimately what Project 2025 is a call to action for Patriots to come serve in Washington.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:02:51):
We really need a lot more Patriots in Washington, don't we? The places infested with the liberals and
Paul Dans (00:02:57):
Leftists. Look, it's a permanent blob here. It really is. I don't know if Americans, and I didn't really appreciate this, I'm a lawyer by training. I give you some of my background. I sometimes say that I'm a pure deplorable through and through. Really my parents were both working class families. My dad came up in a cold water flat in the lower east side of Manhattan and their family did all the dirty jobs, but he went on to medical school and graduated top of his class and ultimately was a professor at Hopkins. My mom's very similar mill workers in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, textile people, the folks marched off to fought the wars, came back, built the country, basically saw in the late eighties and nineties this great country of theirs taken away, whether they were closing down the shipyards or essentially infesting neighborhoods with drugs and crime.
(00:04:01):
So myself, I went off with this kind of blue collar roots, but much more focused on academics and policy. I went to MIT undergrad in graduate school and eventually made a wrong turn, if you will, went to law school. But I kind of made a conscious decision. I went to a great school, university of Virginia, but I felt like the law was the one thing people could lure over me if I didn't have a handle on what was going on. If you want to make change, the sad part is they call it lawmakers up here. So many of them are lawyers for a reason and not saying you should be a lawyer to be a politician, but it does give you a kind of a helpful hand up. So that's what I saw. Maybe the value of kind of going to law school. But when you go off to law school without a definite plan in mind, what you end up with is a massive debt and the only way to service that debt is going into in many cases a big firm and working your way out of it.
(00:05:05):
So that's what I did. I went up to Manhattan, worked for about 20 years in what they call white shoe law firms, but that would be very top end corporate law where people bill hundreds of dollars an hour to a company. All those companies that build your products and charge you so much, pay thousands of dollars an hour for their attorneys. And I worked, my big case was called Chevron, Ecuador, I'll put that aside for now. But I did help unravel massive fraud against the oil company because in that case, some progressive lawyers, these are the same people that we now do battle with in Washington. Literally the plaintiff, the kingpin in that case was Obama's law school buddy and basketball classmate at Harvard Law School. But they were essentially trying to shake down Chevron for billions of dollars. And I came up with a theory that we could get documentary film outtakes.
(00:06:07):
Basically caught them doing their nefarious acts on video. They brought a video camera on, here's a pro tip, if you're going to commit a crime, do not bring a film crew along with you because I will get the outtakes at some point. And that's what we did. That was a great case, but if nothing else, it was kind of a proof that things can happen for the better. But it takes an enormous amount of energy. It takes some vision, but really just more hardheadedness and some faith in God that the right thing's going to happen, which I always believe will. So with the Chevron case, what I learned is that we have a very clever adversary that we're fencing off against and they're relentless and they are always improving their game. And unfortunately on our side, our numbers are small. We have to build up our numbers of people who are ready to come and join this fight.
(00:07:10):
So that's kind of what we're doing with Project 2025. The good news for us as conservatives is we are the majority in this country. And I think that with the grassroots, particularly like groups like Tea Party Patriots, you see the groundswell, but most people, they have as conservative as we think about God, country and family, not government, we're focused on these various spheres. And the liberals, by contrast, are always thinking about government. So what's happened in the interim is they have marched through the US government, the federal government, much as they have every other institution, and it's on us now to take the thing back, which can be done. But the Chevron case is going to be a lot of work and it's going to be like Steve Bannon talks about putting your shoulder to the wheel. This is going to take really an army of people coming up here to Washington to serve,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:08:14):
And we need to have that happen. And I want to get into 2025, but let's step back for just a minute because what you just said is true. Most conservatives think about God, country and family, and they are not thinking about the government. And you have worked for the government, you've helped manage the personnel in the government when you worked for President Trump. Explain what the Office of Personnel Management is and explain how does the government function like this awful permanent government blob that is up here. What does that mean?
Paul Dans (00:08:49):
Yeah, and I was going to say along that same lines is I learned this recently. I was saying I was in attorney in private practice and to back up, I was always interested in politics and working, walking here today, it's a cold, windy day in Washington. I'm like, Hey, that feels a collection day with the wind swirling, the leaves blowing and you're out there and the smell of bumper stickers and the exciting and the old days working the polls now I guess it's election month or election months, months, whatever. We have to change that. We will change that. But when we as patriots or ground people on the ground get an election result, we're like, that's the beginning. That means the starting gate just opened, right? You got to the starting block and the race started. Everything happens afterwards. All those campaign promises have to happen.
(00:09:44):
And so who is the team behind the president is the critical thing. And President Trump came in and he didn't have a team. He was an outsider where the parties typically have their machine, if you will, the Republicans, this old guard conservative ink certainly had theirs. And Democrats, like I say, have a permanent machine. But to make change in Washington means that you're going to bring in a group of people who are going to direct the blob and to back up, we got to understand what the blob is. And the blob is this permanent ecosystem that exists here in Washington. If you think about the amount of money that's flowing out of the spigot here in Washington, trillions of dollars, why is all of the wealthiest neighborhoods within Maryland, Virginia, and dc it is because this is where all the decisions for that money are made.
(00:10:45):
And that said, the people who come up to this kind of feeding tube have an interest in staying here. So either they're going to get in the government with the idea of one day getting out of the government and monetizing it, or they're going to get in the government and somehow help people on the outside. Very few people come up here to do good, and we need to bring more of those people up. But the way the government's framed out right now is this extraordinary mass of 2.2 million federal workers. We call 'em FTEs, full-time employees that's spread out across the country. But there's various levels. Everyone from a groundskeeper in public park to the deputy administrator for nasa, everyone in between. There are two types of federal employees. There are what we call the competitive service, which you might know as a civil service. But those jobs in theory are supposed to be like civil competed for.
(00:11:55):
They were supposed to be merit based in selection. And that's the whole essence of this civil service reform that happened in the late 19th century. It's called the Pendleton Act. And that grew out of the Tammany Hall kind of mischief that was going on in the late 1870s in New York and the graft that you saw even later on through teapot dome scandal up here in Washington. But the idea there is a progressive one at heart. We got to establish what the civil services is. It's a progressive ideal and it's that you can take politics out of politics, if you will, that there's going to be a class of experts who are essentially going to be divorced from political or insulated from political pressure and they're going to make decisions in the better interest of all of us, if you will. And this idea was propagated at the turn of the century, particularly through people like Woodrow Wilson and has grown through FDR and the Great Society to an area now where initially in the 1880s, all the jobs were at will, right?
(00:13:14):
Pretty much everyone listening to this broadcast who works could maybe get fired by the end of the day. And that was certainly the case that I always, when I was a lawyer walking the office in the morning, I wouldn't know that I had my job at the end of the day unless I performed. It's every day you're on. And that's not the case in the federal government. Now, the jobs initially when they were set up were supposed to fence off about 10%. Now fully 99.5% of the federal jobs are essentially full tenured positions. Only one half of 1% of the federal workforce is dismissed on an annual basis. So we have this 2.2 million workforce that basically is solid and they're not moving. And then you have a group of about 18 million federal contractors, which do a lot of the administration to push out this $5 trillion that get spent every year.
(00:14:18):
And how is that done? Well, those are through companies and contracts. So the majority of those federal workers are just managing contracts now they're delegating all their work out to the, so-called private sector. It's not really the private sector. But what's important to understand is that those government contractors think of Boeing, for example. Boeing gets 49% of its revenue from federal government. So whether it's a military contractor or person social security, it's going to be done through a company. And those contractors can be controlled through the federal government. They have to abide by certain regulations in their contracts. So that is another way over time that the progressives have wrestled control of the government through those contracts. But the flip side is that we can marshal a lot more pressure on federal contracting world. So that's when we talk about the permanent government, it starts with those federal employees with those contractors, and then you spread out and you got the major media groups, you have all these interest groups, the lobbyists that work on behalf of corporations.
(00:15:35):
You have big law. The part that I was part of, the big firms K Street, if you will. So there's this entire ecosystem that exists up here, and what unifies them is their distrust of outsiders. So anyone who's going to upset the apple cart as they say up here is a threat and they have a very advanced way of dealing with that. But what I'm telling you is strangely not new. I'm recycling thoughts that were actually set forth. I talk about a book called Staring the Elephant. Maybe someone's heard of that. That was put up at the Heritage Foundation in 1987, and it was six years into the Reagan revolution where you read a lot of the Reaganites who had been engineering a revolution in part were frustrated at how little they were oddly able to accomplish. And that is the case when they talk about staring the elephant.
(00:16:36):
It's not the GOP elephant, it's a wild animal that's kind of marauding through a forest. And your hope, think of the animal as the federal government. You're trying to direct it in one way or the other. And most appointees just want to stay on the elephant and think they're successful at the end of the four years because they didn't get fired or get tattooed too hard in the popular press. But the reality is most of the people who managed to push the elephant one way or the other are going to fall off, possibly get trampled. So it's really that same government service. The reality that we as conservatives face now was noted back in the Reagan era too. It's just a lot more acute, I think now with sophistication of the progressives and social media and the like.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:17:27):
How many, you said there are 2.2 million full-time employees. How many contractors do you think there are working for those 2.2 million?
Paul Dans (00:17:38):
Yeah, there may be as many as 16 to 18 million contractors. Yeah. And OPM, the Office of Personal Management, as I was saying, there were two types federal workers. So there's the 2.2 million federal workers. But wait, the president does get a basis to control the people. Here's the fun part, 4,000 people, 4,000 above 2.2 million and ultimately 18 million. So that's a ratio of one to 500. That's what typically has been appointed. And of those 4,000, the Republican presidents have managed barely to point 2,500 of them. 1000 of those require senate confirmation, so that can get slow rolled. And the others, it's a difficulty between finding talented people, encouraging them to serve, and then just some really bad takes In the past, oddly enough, I heard conservatives wanted to espouse limited government and essentially lead by example. We don't want to grow government, therefore we're going to not appoint any political appointees. We're going to come in here lean and mean and have a skeleton crew. Well, that doesn't work. If they're not working for you, that means they're working for somebody else, but those spots are going to get filled by a career or a holdover. So that's really like penny wise pound foolish. The counterintuitive thing is we have to flood the zone with political appointees to gain control of this organism and then ultimately reduce the size of the federal government and push the power down to the states and the people.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:19:25):
And you said with the 4,000 appointees, it winds up being about one to 500, so one appointee to 500 employees and contractors, but if you're only filling 2,500 of those, then you're looking at one to almost 1,001 to 900. No one person can manage 900
Paul Dans (00:19:45):
People alone. No, and when we're saying one, we're talking about the junior assistant out of college is one of those 4,000. So not all these people are the ones who manage the company or whatever. So it's extraordinary. You get in there and you have to rely on the career staff. But first of all, what we need is that the career staff has to be accountable to the political officer. Now, if they can't be hired and they can't be fired by the political officer, what does a personal political officer have? And in many cases, that political officer they know is coming in for the wrong reason. That political officer may want to advance his career somewhere by gaining entree into the federal government and then later monetizing it, like I said, or they want to gain stature and then go out to their law firm and tout their assistant secretary or whatever thing.
(00:20:46):
So when you find a true believer in there who wants to go to bat, that's the critical person to support. But we can find those people. So we're really recruiting for the battle hardened conservative kind of warrior. We talk about, let us see what that you bled for the movement that you've been successful, whether it was confronting a school board or maybe you managed the program for a state or locality or you've been successful in private life and you want to take a crack at this, or maybe you haven't been that successful. Maybe you're the person who's not the organization person. That's actually a good thing. I think you want to say, oh, I want the corner office partner that everyone respects. Well, that's good in some cases, but in other cases that might be the person who goes along to get along and we don't need kind of need the person who bops around and gets knocked down and keeps coming back up to the surface. But we'll take all different stripes of people, but the bottom line is they have to be willing to come to Washington serve and then ultimately go back to their farm metaphorically, that this should not be your full-time vocation up here in Washington.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:22:05):
No, it really shouldn't. We have way too many people who make it their full-time vocation and it takes away civil service. They're not servants anymore. They're just lifelong employees who never have to worry about getting fired. And that I think creates a lot of problems. I think that there are a lot of people who are probably listening who have called their member of congress at one point or another. I know they have because they've told me about this. I called and that kid who answered the phone, because half the time it's an intern who's answering the phone just blew me off and didn't even listen to anything. I said, don't they know I actually have success in my life, in my career? I know what I'm talking about. And they won't even listen. Those people who get upset when you're making those phone calls because you have so much more experience, you're the ones we need to apply and to think about coming to Washington, we need that kind of experience.
Paul Dans (00:23:03):
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I myself kept, I'm one of the people was sitting at his kitchen counter on the bench there on the stool kind of going, how can that be? That's crazy. You're clicking. In the old days, we used to read the dredge report. I stopped doing that years ago, but refreshing the dredge report like a hundred times a day in 15 and 14 in the good years. But you realize, well, somebody's got to be doing that, somebody's handling that, and you look around, you're like, no, actually it's going to be you or nobody. So maybe it might not be the biggest thing, but you can't just rely on somebody else picking the thing up. Now we're not saying you have to be the one to do the job. You can support someone to do the job. You can know, maybe it's your neighbor, your granddaughter, your coworker, direct them and tell them, encourage them to go do the thing.
(00:24:01):
But yeah, you think that there's this professionalized service Congress is basically staffed by 20 year olds and the people making the decisions, they're at the K Street law firm and they're basically feeding it back to the members staff and then these permanent committee staff people are very powerful, but that's a story for another day, and Jenny Beth knows that in and out. I would say though, when the listener here thinks about how he or she can make a difference, putting pressure on the electeds happens also through what you write an op-ed, you do something in the community, you say stuff on social media. There's a lot of ways you can get their attention other than just making phone calls, keep making the phone calls, though I'm not saying don't make the phone calls, but write it. Write the letter to the editor to the local paper right after you hang up the phone and put what you wanted to say in that letter. So it's going to get seen.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:25:08):
That is a very good point. There's a lot more to it than just making the phone calls. It's making a voice heard very publicly so that the member of Congress actually winds up seeing what you are saying. How many departments are there within the federal government? How do these 2.2 million people, how is it structured?
Paul Dans (00:25:30):
Okay, I think somebody said there's thousands of agencies as hard as it is to believe, there's major departments though, and I should back up all this if you're interested in what I'm saying today, you can go to project 2020 five.org and you can read our policy books online, which explains a lot of the architecture of the federal government. But OPM is essentially the HR department for the federal government outside of the military. The DOD has its own kind of HR and the ic, the intelligence community if you will, has their intelligence. Intelligence. I had said, if you will, they have their own kind of hiring authority, but the OPM generally oversees those 2.2 million that are spread through major departments, the interior department, energy, hud, treasury, and there's hundreds of these, so-called independent councils and agencies and boards and commissions too, which are really fascinating things that are completely in derogation of our constitution, if you will.
(00:26:50):
I had a little experience where President Trump had appointed me at the end to be chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, and that oversees all the built environment, the office buildings, the space, the land of the federal government imprint in dc, Maryland and Virginia, and it's appointees from the president, appointees from the house, appointees from the Senate, and appointees from well appointees by the president, but on residents of Virginia, Maryland and the district. I was made the chairman by President Trump. Now the Trump administration had not filled these positions over the three or four years. They had part of what Trump had gotten wrong, and I don't think he got much wrong. I think a lot of what he was battling was in tremendous headwinds, but he did fundamentally put the wrong trust in key people with respect to personnel. And I think he admits as much.
(00:27:58):
You see that with Mattis and the top people, obviously the generals and people, he put faith in there in his cabinet, but also within lower ranks where these next tier jobs were getting filled. Many of those people just imported the old bush set. They marched right in after the election. And I can say as somebody who worked on the campaign, I've been on the ground on every presidential campaign since I guess 2000, but back in the nineties I was working on campaigns. I'd been working on the Republican National Lawyers Committee down in Western Pennsylvania in Allegheny County. And so I thought I was full-time, a big Trump backer, one of the very MAGA people. I thought, this is my ticket, right? We won. Everyone said we weren't going to win. We delivered Pennsylvania next stop Department of Justice. Right? Not going to happen. What happened was kind of the old Bush guard marched back in and part of that was the first question on the application was have you served in government before?
(00:29:18):
And obviously if you check that box, you oddly enough rose to the top of the pile. And for I hear the story in my office repeated tens of times each week, people who had actually been kept out because they were too Trumpy or maga. And so for President Trump got that wrong with respect to not taking on the right people in charge of personnel. He got it right at the end. A guy named John MCee, people know he's a colleague of mine who I now work with on Project 2025, but John was an assistant to the president, worked with President Trump since 15 and the campaign and everything. And he really understood what our entire movement's about and the agenda and getting the right personnel in place. So the president put John in charge of personnel in February, 2020. And people like me, I had been at hud, John tapped me to go be chief of staff, well first White House liaison, but then ultimately chief of staff at OPM and OPM.
(00:30:29):
Like I said, that's the HR component of the white of the federal government. But what had been happening was the career HR people had been interfering with the political hiring process that is getting those 4,000 people in place was being slowed down by the career bureaucrat. So it would take seven to nine months for us to hire our own political. And the reason why that was happening was they were being given the runaround and the political appointees who had been in place were receiving it without question. So I ultimately said to them, why is it that the career employee is looking at the resume of the political appointee? Why? Oh, they're evaluating it for how much they should be paid against a schedule that's used for the competitive service. I'm like, that schedule doesn't apply to political appointees. That's for the competitive service. We are the accepted service.
(00:31:27):
So it was just these really elemental miscues that our side had been getting run around by the nose. And so we had to back out a lot of things and over time we troubleshot that hiring process. We were able to move down seven month delays to about two weeks. We onboarded about thousand people in very quick order in the spring and summer of 2020. And just the great change that happens is like a sea change. It's just opening up across the entire government where you now have aligned people in positions of getting their job done. And that was really a lot of the bottleneck had been oddly enough happening at OPM because ineffective political appointees were kind of being either intellectually lazy or worse, I say duplicitous about this, but they were slow walking our own politicals. So we learned in the process some of the enemy we met and it was us, but over time we got the hang of it. And the irony with us going into this reelection was we were really ready to take on the bureaucracy in the second term of Trump. And that may happen again, but a lot of those laws that are being misapplied can get properly applied through proper administration At OPM,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:33:06):
I want to elaborate on two or three different things you just said from my own personal experience. One is that I met with Jeff Sessions when he was Attorney General about something related to the IRS targeting of tea party groups, groups with Tea Party and Patriots and their name, ours was Tea Party Patriots. So we were targeted and I had known him for many years as senator and I meet with him and I'd never been in the building. I think it's the only time I've ever been in that building. And he was very kind to meet with me. He's a kind man. He has a terrible rep because of what happened while he was working for President Trump, but he really is a kind man and I walked out of there and he didn't understand or have been told by people in the d OJ that it was only small tea party groups that were affected, not big tea party groups.
(00:34:13):
So I was going in there for a specific purpose and there was a tight timeline because the statute of limitations and I had to spend this very limited time that I had with him going back and it's explaining, no, wait a minute, yes, my group was affected, we were the largest group affected and we were affected and it was hundreds of hours, thousands of man hours it affected us in, I can't even calculate the financial impact that it had on us. And I left that meeting and I thought, he's being lied to the people who work inside that building with the name j Edgar Hoover on it are lying to him and why should we expect anything less with the name of the building? But I just sat there thinking they're completely lying. They're lying to him and he's believing it because he was a senator and he thinks that the people who work in the government are probably good guys, but these are not good guys.
(00:35:13):
And I knew they were lying and as they watch what happened to his appointment as he was attorney general, I just was going, yeah, because you're being lied to and you believe it. Stop believing all the lies from the people who are against everything Trump is doing. There was nothing I could do about that. But that happened fairly early and I realized that there was a deep problem and we tried to get better people working in the government. But then you just explained part of the problem is there's slow walking every appointment. If you only, and you can only assume when you were president that you have four years, you might get eight, but you might not. So you have four years and that clock starts ticking and every single day matters because you only have four years. And if they can slow walk seven months of that four years, it means that that person instead of having four years has less than three and a half. And if they can do that to enough people, it hamstrings the ability for a president to actually do the job that the American people elected the president to do.
Paul Dans (00:36:25):
No, it's a great anecdote and it's sad. You're exactly right. The reality I used to say to my deputy at the end of the day, what did we get done today? What positive ground did we make up? Because a lot of the day they have you playing defense going on there to kind of cover up and they really do have us out flanked. I had the honor to meet general sessions after his service recently, and I as an outsider sitting at my kitchen table going, how could you do this? What do you mean that's not even the law? Who's telling you that? And he was actually contrite, and I think he said, I was surrounded by some pretty bad advisors to be frank with you and let alone most of the building weaponized against him and had
Jenny Beth Martin (00:37:20):
Already been weaponized before he ever got there.
Paul Dans (00:37:23):
Yeah, exactly. It was like you want to believe the best we all wanted trust our doctors. I grew up the son of a doctor and I see the Albert Schweitzer types who are out there, maybe not Albert Schweitzer more the real caring people, and that's across all the professions in walks of life. I see the best in people and I don't want to paint a full brush against the federal workforce. There's a lot of people there who are to be faithful public servants, but every major institution in our lifetime, the left has marched through it and taken a captive. And the reality is some of the agencies are worse than others, but when you get in there and you aren't a manager right away and you can kind of clean house, they know that they have the upper hand on you and then it's all betts are off.
(00:38:21):
They're just the rest of your time there is going to be trying to stay alive. And that's where if a person can't get in and fire people right away, then what good is the political management, the whole thing is kind of at the end of the day is charade. So we have to fix that with the DOJ look like you say was happening beforehand. It's totally weaponized. I think that that's probably one of the most acute agencies. They talk about the Deep State Department where they actually think the entire foreign policy is their own province and we can all lay off in the book I was talking about the Reagan book that was as much the ethos in 1980 as it is today. They actually derided the political appointees back then as the quote Christmas help that they were basically coming in for a short stay.
(00:39:17):
And the reality is when you have effective political appointees come in, they have 101 ways to react and the ones who are there to upset there to be sure there are a lot of people you have to understand who have been living under kind of persecution themselves, who are happy to get a new boss in town who want to help you. Those are the people you really have to listen to and they'll come and help you out, but the others are either going to wait, the more effective people you'll get promoted and moved on. So the good news is you'll be gone in six months, otherwise they'll set a trap for you to try to get you gone, but in the interim, they'll start so many little fires everywhere else that you're going to get derailed from your actual forward momentum. When you were saying about asking a question, someone told me this, you have to ask the direct question Exactly, and then you have to ask all the questions around that exact question to get a full answer.
(00:40:25):
They can't lie to you, but they don't have to give you a fulsome response, which is annoying. It's a lot of cat and mouse kind of thing when you're kind of in this environment. But the reality with us as conservatives is that the demographics here in DC vote 95% Democrat. The campaign contributions in the federal agencies, 90 to 95% Democrat. So when a Democrat walks in, they're with like-minded people, right? These are fellow travelers and they're, how can we help you get your job done faster when we walk in? Maybe you get that guild that's the old school is like, tell us what direction to row we're going to do it. And you get some people are like, thank God the cavalry's here, I got to tell you about this. But the others are like, okay, we'll see. And they may be GERD for battle and most of the people like us coming through had never even thought about an agency or realize this.
(00:41:36):
You're literally learning on the job. You're dropped in, you're a player out there, things are coming at you every direction. You got to think quickly. And that in Project 2025, what we're doing now is trying to systematically prepare people to be dropped in to these agencies, know what they're going to do. Like I say, this is all project 2020 five.org. We are literally building figuratively rather, not literally we're figuratively building for the next White House. And we've done that by for work streams we call pillars. So if you guys imagine what the White House looks like, the North Portico supported by four pillars, think of that. That's what we're working on right now. Our first pillar is the policy book, which is available online. We brought it out in April. It's 920 pages, a lot of bedtime reading there, but it sets a chapter by chapter agency description of what a successful conservative presidency would look like.
(00:42:37):
So if you never thought about the Department of the Treasury, you've never thought about HUD or a state department. Now is the way you can pick up this chapter and get a good primer on what's going wrong and what we have to do. So we call that our big plan. That's our big architectural plan. We think that we're at a hundred year threshold here. Like I said, the progressive experiment in government with this kind of this on accountable civil services run its course and the equation has to start running backwards. This chemical reaction has to start flowing the other way to reach an equilibrium. It's unsupportable what we have here, this permanent government. So we think we win big. We have to have the big plan in mind. That's what the book is. The saying here is make no small plans. They have no power to inspire.
(00:43:33):
So that's what we've done with the book. The second pillar is a database where we want the listener here, anyone who knows somebody who could serve as an effective conservative in the federal government create the profile and the database. We liken it to a conservative LinkedIn, it's going to radically change the way we can get these jobs filled, do away with a lot of the paper chase. But essentially we are 75 major groups conjoining our efforts and our personnel picks. So Tea Party Patriots will recommend a group of people to serve. The conservative partnership entity will recommend a group of people to serve American Moment, heritage Foundation name. You can figure out the groups, but we are going to fill out those 4,000 jobs and more very quickly. And what we're now asking people to do is create your profile, indicate where you'd want to serve, and then on the backend we're going to vet you and kind of map you to where you might serve in an agency, all with the idea of trying to recruit people and interview 'em in early spring.
(00:44:43):
So you're ready to go three, while you're doing that, you need to learn, you need to get your training up. So we have an online university called the Presidential Appointee Academy, but we have a series of about 40 lectures online, which you can listen to top crowdsourced really from our 75 member groups. People have served experts outside of government as well. Telling you everything from the seemingly mundane, how do you get a security clearance? How do you fill out your SSF 86, that's your security clearance form to how do you manage career obstinate career employees or what are the IES you might face in an agency and to how does the federal budgeting process work? How's federal contracting work? What is an oversight committee? So all those lessons are online. Part of being a better candidate is going to be taking those lessons and we'll be able to see that you're participating in the academy.
(00:45:52):
Ultimately, we're going to bring conclaves of folks together in person, department of Justice meetup or a group of general counsels or budget director types and start getting people together once certain Department of Agriculture or Commerce and the like. And then finally what we're writing is our attack plan, our 180 day playbook. And that's what you do when you get into the agency day one. So that's rethinking a lot of these personnel laws that are in place, how we're going to make changes, what programs are going to be shut down, what's going to be emphasized, what executive order is going to be issued and when. And the regulations authored are pulled down. So that work's getting done. Right now we have about a thousand people dividing about 30 teams at work, and that continues a pace, but that's directed by Russ Vote. I think people may know Russ through CRA, center for Renewing America, one of our key coalition partners.
(00:47:04):
So what we've done here with Project 2025 is a new paradigm. It's a new way for our movement to not leave transition up to the candidate or the President-elect, but to serve it up to him or her in really a turnkey fashion that will make it so easily digestible and ready to plug in that they'll hit the ground running. And it's done through our unified efforts, which is really a positive. We're candidate agnostic. This could be going to any candidate bearer, but we're unapologetically American first about what we're doing. So I really encourage people listening to give this a serious thought. I wouldn't have served in Washington and like I said, a little smarter than the average bear, but really just more hardheaded. I don't really take no for an answer. So I just kind of kept coming at it. I had a devil of time getting in. It took like two years and I basically was pretty much given up until somebody said, why don't you take the Trump stuff off your resume? It's not bragging about working. Oh, maybe I should do that, but I I wish I were being facetious. I'm not. That's how bad things were a little bit because
Jenny Beth Martin (00:48:27):
And you were very supportive of President Trump when I met you in 2020. Oh, absolutely. So you taking it off wasn't to harm him, it was because you wanted to
Paul Dans (00:48:40):
Help. Oh, I wanted to help. But it's like what the reality is, your resume is going to fall into some never Trumper and they're going to sandbag you. And we learned this after the fact that there were so many people getting sandbagged because somebody thought there were two America Firstie or two Trumpist or whatnot and says just kind of sail sailing under the radar, just your milk toast Republican appointee. So that's where we are. I think the good news is that we're actually, we have a plan and we have people we're going to be ready. We have to win. I'm not, people ask me, that's great. Happy to hear that you're doing all this. What are you doing about election integrity? They're absolutely right. I mean, I wish I had more than 24 hours in the day. I do believe that that is really the critical, the beginning of the end of this whole thing.
(00:49:37):
But again, I say the people I want to serve are the people who are fighting on the front lines. And if you want this job, don't just think you can lay back and just ship your resume in on November, whatever fourth or whatever they have to election is. It's like, no, you got to show us that you are working, whether you are organizing locally or providing some cover for somebody or doing a harder task. So I think people should just keep that in mind that their service is going to be a very positive reflection on serving. There's a new sheriff in town when it comes to political appointees, and it's not going to be knighting the people who've already been in Washington. It's empowering the people who support this place in the rest of America.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:50:37):
That's very, very important and it would be a good place to end, but I'm not going to end just yet because I want to say two more things. First, when it comes to election integrity, you can't do all things and we can't do all things, but we are working on election integrity. We train 20,000 people before the 2022 election so they can become poll watchers or poll workers or plug in Cleta Mitchell's election integrity network and start a local election integrity task force. And her network is leading the way on it. We are definitely at t pretty Patriot's action, huge supporter of that and very active and will continue to do that in 2024. And I
Paul Dans (00:51:20):
Phenomenal. I like to take that and obviously multiply it to, I never feel more comfortable obviously with Clea at the helm, I'm very comfortable. But I mean the more the merrier. If people aren't engaged in this now after what Jenny Beth just told you, get engaged, you have to just keep building this.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:51:41):
So we are not backing down on that. We haven't done as much in 2023 on that, but we plan to start it back up even more in 2024 from our organization standpoint. Election Integrity Network definitely hasn't slowed down at all. The other thing we're working on is winning because you've got to secure elections and then you've got to win elections. And we were working on plans for getting out the vote, which we'll elaborate later in 2024. But that election day, if we win and we do what we want to see happen on election day, that's just day zero. It's not even day one. So what you're doing is preparing for day one and there is so much work to be done with that I spoke to in 2012. It's hard to believe it seems like so long ago, but in 2012 I wound up being called to a meeting in Washington DC to talk about Romney's transition, and this is in October.
(00:52:49):
And I was thinking, why are we doing this? He hasn't won. It was really weird. I didn't even understand what a presidential transition was. So it was my first entree into learning about what a presidential transition is. And Becky Norton Dunlap, who was with the Heritage Foundation for years and years, and Morton Blackwell from Leadership Institute were in that meeting and they told me about what happened to them when they worked for President Reagan and when President Reagan became president, and they worked on his transition team as well. And then they were involved with George HW Bush's transition eight years later. And I think this is important because it's indicative of why the problems you mentioned from staring the elephant in 1987 still exist today. So what happened when President Reagan was becoming president, they were looking at letters of reference and conservative credentials, and the thicker your file folder was with all of your credentials, more likely, likely you were
Narrator (00:53:52):
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The Reagan administration
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Produced by Kevin Moon,
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Paying lot of attention to that working to get the right
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Show, a production of Tea Party Patriots
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Jenny Beth Martin (00:54:08):
HW Bush's transition. And the question was one of the questions not did you work on the campaign or whatever, or have you been in federal government before you were experiencing it? Was did you endorse George HW Bush when he ran for president either in 1980 or even four years before that? Well, the thing is in 1980, or maybe it was four years before, but I think it was 1980, who was he running against in the primary in 1980? Oh, that would be Ronald Reagan. So if you had not endorsed George EHW Bush and you endorsed the conservative Ronald Reagan, that was an automatic disqualifier for the appointments for his administration. So he was actively working to get rid of the conservative appointees, maybe not he, but the people working that transition and get in more just bushes in there and the people who would be loyal to him, not loyal to principals and a cause beyond just the personality. And I am certain that then you have eight years of Clinton and then you have George W. Bush who becomes president, and I'm sure he was pulling from people who were part of his father's administration because he was the last Republican president and you didn't have eight years of George H of Bush, just four. But I'm sure that then George W. Bush was pulling from that. And so you wind up with these people who are not conservative at core, they're more dedicated to the government and the bureaucracy.
Paul Dans (00:55:48):
Oh, what you're saying also is alarming to hear that story, but not completely out of field. Like I'm not being thrown for a loop. One bad appointee can make such mischief and bad ramifications that follow not only for the present, but like you say for terms in the future. An example would be someone who has the ability to point in certain cases, like 20 deputies beneath him or her, but instead relies on the career staff to fill all those deputy positions. And why does that person do that? Because they love to be enamored, the building being enamored with them, right? All those careers view those jobs as theirs anyways. And you're the Christmas health coming in, well, this person wants to be loved by the building and then parachute out and go on to a very high end career. What's the effect of that? Well, none of our farm team got the deputy positions so they could have been doing those jobs.
(00:56:59):
Don't tell me that there aren't people in private life who are conservatives who can't do those jobs. There absolutely are. But you pick the career staff to do it. And as a result, the companies, the JP Morgans, they don't have those deputies now building their way up and becoming more powerful in the bank. And then when the new crop comes in and we win the election, we don't have those deputies to turn to consider them for the assistant secretary level. So you have an entire generation that's been wiped out of political appointee and that's just complete political mis, I guess malpractice if you will. So it's really critical that we get the aligned people in there and Becky Norton Dunlop's the treasurer and we worked with her at Heritage, but those reaganites, they got it. And I'm happy to say that our coalition we're hiring 18 to 80.
(00:57:57):
I had the honor working alongside Dr. Donald Devine. He co-wrote my chapter, chapter three of the book. You can read it on federal personnel agencies. Some may know him as the man who famously fired the air traffic controllers under Reagan. He was Reagan's first director of the Office of Personal Management and later wrote a book about being known as Reagan's terrible swift sword. But he basically not only performed the government pension system and saved us billions of dollars, but made government a lot more efficient. And his thinking is key to our entire program. He has a lot of great books. If people really want to read about this, go read our book first, but then read the footnotes and you'll trace the Even Better Works by Donald. But we are learning from the past to be sure there's a lot of missteps. I think President Trump should be lauded for someone who came in and made so much progress despite all the headwinds, even on his own side, people undercutting him. So that said, we are busy at work here, but this whole thing is really academic unless we win, but unless the listener comes forward and helps. So create a profile today. If you're listening to this, go project 2020 five.org, sign up, tell 'em you heard it on Jenny Best podcast, and we're going to get this done right, the next go round.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:59:41):
That's right. And we heard, I think even the most loyal of Trump fans would say he wasn't able to clean the swamp out, but what you're doing is laying the groundwork so that can actually happen the next time.
Paul Dans (00:59:58):
Absolutely. I got to o pm and I thought, whoa, I'm finally going to meet all the swamp trainers. And you get there and you're like, okay, where is everybody? And it's like, don't they understand? This is where the entire deep state's hardwired. This is the CPO, this is the HR department, which gives everyone their feeling of invincibility because of these ironclad career protections. If you're Peter Stork, the FBI Lovebirds, and you face no accountability, the guy's literally suing his boss, the leader of the free world. Now think of how absurd that is. Somebody who's like the counterintelligence, I mean, God help us, but how would somebody like that become ahead of our counterintelligence in the United States, but walk into a Walmart and der everyone saying that he could smell? It smells like Trump voters. I mean, seriously, the contempt that these folks have for us, but that they are still in the government and they're to this day, not accountable. Notwithstanding all the hot air here in Washington, the thing goes on and very few of them get dismissed. But that's because the system's jammed up. Like you said, some of it was some bad things that actually happened in the Bush years, but a lot of the tools are in place. They have to be dusted off and basically run properly with the right engineers.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:01:37):
Well, I think that what you are doing is tremendous. And when I heard about Project 2025, I was glad to hear about it, but then when I heard you were running it, I was like, oh, this is great. I knew that we had talked about why wasn't the swamp trained, how can we fix this the next time? And you're taking the lessons learned and working with the best C3 and the conservative movement and pulling together all of this knowledge and working with so many partner organizations to create the book, to get people who are willing to sign up, train them, and be ready to hit the ground running when we elect another conservative president.
Paul Dans (01:02:21):
Well, thank you. It's an honor to be able to do this job. But like I say, it's not, it's me. There's thousands of us at work, and it's been really inspiring to see everyone basically just come into the fold of and put away any kind of petty differences among themselves and say, we got to get this job done. We do need people who are thinking differently that we just cannot have the regular go along to get along people here because the systems at the breaking point and the metaphors overused about the boiling frogs. But we're living in an area where a federal judge tried to enjoin the leading candidate from president for speaking political speech. That's the entirety of why this country was founded. Or maybe the entirety maybe we should shift to religion, religious liberty. Oh wait, that same DOJ is surveilling little ladies praying the rosary and naming people as domestic threats who number half the population. So we are living in the real absurd time right now and we have to step out of it and just kind of go to work.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:03:39):
Well, I hope that people who are listening step up, read the book, sign up on the website, project 2020 five.org and are willing to step up and come to DC and do the work that needs to be done in dc.
Paul Dans (01:03:53):
Great. I appreciate it.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:03:54):
Well, thank you so much, Paul. I really appreciate you being here and all the work that you are doing.
Paul Dans (01:03:59):
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:04:01):
That was Paul Dans with Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. You can learn more about that by going to project 2020 five.org. I'm Jenny Beth Martin, and this is the Jenny Beth Show.
Narrator (01:04:12):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:04:32):
If you like this episode, let me know by hitting the light button or leaving a comment or a five star review. And if you want to be the first to know every time we drop a new episode, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for whichever platform you're listening on. If you do, these simple things will help the podcast grow and I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much.