Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Has there ever been a more talked-about 922-page policy document than Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise?
Oh — perhaps you know it better under the name of the group that produced it, Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation, America’s top conservative think tank, pulled together a bunch of Trump administration veterans to create a blueprint for the policy priorities of a second Trump administration.1 With 30 chapters on everything from the State Department to the Export-Import Bank, its stated goal is to get a headstart on the transition.
(The first Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981, the month Ronald Reagan took office. Heritage brags that “by the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy.”)
When some of the detailed proposals within Project 2025 — banning abortion pills, slashing climate regulations, criminalizing pornography, abolishing the Department of Education, mass deportations, to name only a few — gained public attention, Trump claimed to “know nothing about” it — despite the thicket of his own appointees who produced it.
Still, there was one element of Project 2025 I haven’t seen spelled out at length: its plans for the news media.
Thankfully, the First Amendment prevents an administration from shutting down critical news outlets.2 But the federal government can intersect with any part of the journalism process — from how stories get reported to the platforms they’re distributed on to the business models that pay the bills. What does Project 2025 have in mind for an institution it doesn’t seem to have much affection for? (Unless calling us a “center of Leftist power” is somehow a compliment.)
It is, in this reporter’s opinion, a pretty grim picture. Here are some of the high(low)lights.
Each chapter covers a different part of the government, and each was written by a different conservative. The chapter covering the intelligence community is by Dustin Carmack. For the last half-year of the Trump administration, he was chief of staff to Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe; he’s previously been a Ratcliffe staffer in the House. He was policy director for Ron DeSantis’ ill-fated 2024 presidential campaign, and as of April, he’s crossed over to Big Tech — he’s currently Meta’s director of public policy in the southern and southeastern United States.
Carmack argues that a new Trump administration should be more vigorous in investigating journalists when a government official leaks information to the press. The last Trump DOJ secretly seized the phone and email records of multiple journalists while working to discredit the Russia investigation. Soon after taking office, Attorney General Merrick Garland banned the practice in all but a few narrow circumstances. Carmack wants to reverse that.
In addition, the Department of Justice should use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks and should rescind damaging guidance by Attorney General Merrick Garland that limits investigators’ ability to identify records of unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media.
The book’s opening chapter covers the White House Office, the panoply of executive staffers who answer up to the chief of staff. It’s written by Rick Dearborn, a former Trump deputy chief of staff and executive director of Trump’s presidential transition team. He not so subtly suggests that the White House may just be too crowded to have so many reporters around:
No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus, and the next Administration should reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises.
Issues of press space would normally be something to take up with the White House Correspondents’ Association — but Dearborn also thinks Trump might be better off picking some “alternative coordinating body” in its place.
The new Administration should examine the nature of the relationship between itself and the White House Correspondents Association and consider whether an alternative coordinating body might be more suitable.
Mike Gonzalez is a former Wall Street Journal editorial page editor who has spent the last 15 years at the Heritage Foundation. In his chapter on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he’s clear about his desire to eliminate its federal funding (as he has been elsewhere).
Every Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding…In other words, all Republican Presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake. As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences — that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.”
Quelle horreur!
All of which means that the next conservative President must finally get this done and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary. To stop public funding is good policy and good politics.
The Trump administration did, in fact, try to kill funding for public broadcasting, budgeting $0 for CPB in multiple years. But Congress hasn’t been willing to go along, whether under Democratic or Republican control. Gonzalez says that next time, Trump shouldn’t take no for an answer.
The 47th President can just tell the Congress — through the budget he proposes and through personal contact — that he will not sign an appropriations spending bill that contains a penny for the CPB. The President may have to use the bully pulpit, as NPR and PBS have teams of lobbyists who have convinced enough Members of Congress to save their bacon every time their taxpayer subsidies have been at risk since the Nixon era.
One of the more memorable media-adjacent Trumpist figures in the administration’s final years was Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker who Trump appointed CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media — the agency that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Martí, and other outward-facing broadcasters. (Until 2018, it was known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors.) USAGM networks are literally state media, meant to advance American diplomatic interests, but traditionally they have maintained a large degree of editorial freedom.
Pack was nominated in 2018 but not approved by the Senate until 2020, giving him only seven and a half months in charge before the Biden administration took office. But what a seven and a half months! A few headlines: Trump Appointee Is Turning Voice of America Into Partisan Outlet, Lawsuit Says. Voice of America Journalists: New CEO Endangers Reporters, Harms U.S. Aims. Trump Appointee At VOA Parent Paid Law Firm Millions To Investigate His Own Staff. Judge Finds U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Broke Law In Seizing Control Of Fund. Government Report Finds Former USAGM CEO Abused Authority, Wasted $1.6 Million in Funds. Judge rules Voice of America head curbed First Amendment rights of its journalists. Federal inquiry details abuses of power by Trump’s CEO over Voice of America.
By Pack’s side throughout all this was Morvared Namdarkhan, who goes by Mora Namdar professionally. She was Pack’s acting VP of legal, compliance, and risk — “compliance” not being one of the Pack regime’s strengths! — and she is the author of the Project 2025 chapter on USAGM. (Namdar is mentioned more than 50 times in the 145-page federal investigation into Pack’s tenure, the one that found he had “abused his authority” and “engaged in gross mismanagement and gross waste.”)
Namdar considers the USAGM “firewall” — meant to separate the journalism it produces from the influence of top political appointees — a tool to sneak in “anti-American propaganda” and bias:
Although a firewall should ensure journalistic independence, it has been used without formal regulation for decades in order to shirk legitimate oversight of everything from promoting adversaries’ propaganda to ignoring journalistic safety. Often, the “firewall” is touted when journalists are either promoting anti-American propaganda that parrots adversarial regime talking points or promoting politically biased viewpoints in opposition to the VOA charter.
She spends a lot of time refighting Pack-era battles, including a not-very-subtle dig at David Folkenflik’s regular coverage of the chaos at USAGM for NPR.
Current and former USAGM/VOA leadership who wanted to maintain virtually zero accountability and oversight waged a campaign of interference, resistance, and disinformation to stifle change at the agency. Perhaps not coincidentally, various media outlets with relationships to former and future USAGM leadership published near-daily criticisms of Trump Administration appointees and also of grantee organization leaders who were appointed by CEO Pack to implement long-overdue reforms.
Namdar complains about “the agency’s media organizations joining the mainstream media’s anti-U.S. chorus and denigrating the American story — all in the name of so-called journalistic independence. Indeed, content during the Trump Administration was rife with typical mainstream media talking points assailing the President and his staff.”
Her solutions? Personnel decisions that currently rest within USAGM must be moved to “the Department of Defense and the Office of Personnel Management.” Its budget should be cut to $700 million from 2023’s $885 million. USAGM “should report to the President and coordinate activities with the National Security Council,” to which there should be “clear lines of command” — or else putting the entire agency under the State Department.
Otherwise, shut the whole place down:
If the defacto aim of the agency simply remains to compete in foreign markets using anti-U.S. talking points that parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda, then this represents an unacceptable burden to the U.S. taxpayer and a negative return on investment. In that case, the USAGM should be defunded and disestablished. If, however, the agency can be reformed to become an effective tool, it would be one of the greatest tools in America’s arsenal to tell America’s story and promote freedom and democracy around the world.
The argument, in the Health and Human Services chapter, comes from Roger Severino, who spent Trump’s term in office as director of the Office for Civil Rights within HHS. (He did not make many friends in the LGBTQ community in the process.)
Severino argues that the FDA’s decision to allow widespread drug advertising on TV has skewed “independent reporting on public health issues” and “buys considerable influence in the newsroom.” (He describes the pharmaceutical industry as “the largest advertiser for all major media organizations.” Pharma is a very big spender, but it is most certainly not the largest for all major media.)
In 1997, the FDA relaxed regulations to permit broadcast drug advertisements, after which Big Pharma began routine direct-to-consumer advertising, making the United States and New Zealand the only countries where such practices are legal. Following the 1997 changes, pharma became the largest advertiser for all major media organizations. This buys considerable influence in the newsroom — whether media companies acknowledge this or not — and distorts independent reporting on public health issues. The FDA or Congress should regulate where and how paid advertising is used by pharmaceutical companies more stringently, especially on media outlets.
Since Trump first took office, a number of former intelligence officials have spoken out against his administration’s policies. Carmack would like to disincentivize that practice by revoking their security clearances.
The President should immediately revoke the security clearances of any former Directors, Deputy Directors, or other senior intelligence officials who discuss their work in the press or on social media without prior clearance from the current Director.
They should just keep quiet:
IC leaders should practice extreme restraint in engaging with the public and the media. They should seek to work in the shadows rather than in the limelight.
The chapter on the Federal Communications Commission — the nation’s chief regulator of, among other things, broadcast media — was written by Brendan Carr, a current FCC commissioner appointed by Trump in 2017. Carr has earned a pugilistic reputation in his regulatory seat. (Politico: “He rails against the ‘far left’s’ hoaxes. He says the World Health Organization has been ‘beclowned’ over its response to the coronavirus. And he describes a ‘secret and partisan surveillance machine’ run by House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff. Those aren’t President Donald Trump’s words. They came from Brendan Carr…who is embracing a flavor of distinctly Trumpian rhetoric…”)
Carr offers a long list of policy prescriptions, including requiring tech giants to contribute to the FCC’s Universal Service Fund as telephone companies do. Three stood out to me. First, he believes the next administration should ban TikTok:
As law enforcement officials have made clear, TikTok poses a serious and unacceptable risk to America’s national security. It also provides Beijing with an opportunity to run a foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans. As of this writing, the Biden Administration’s Treasury Department has not announced a final decision concerning its long-pending review of TikTok. If that inaction persists, or if the Administration allows TikTok to continue to operate in the U.S., a new Administration should ban the application on national security grounds.
For decades, the FCC enforced limitations on how many media properties a given company could own. For example, a 1975 rule prevented a city’s daily newspaper from buying a local TV station, and vice versa. Over time, those rules have grown more lax and less enforced, and local broadcasting companies have grown larger and larger. Carr doesn’t specify which remaining restrictions he’d like to eliminate, but he’d target “eliminating many of the heavy-handed” ones.
These rapidly evolving market conditions counsel in favor of eliminating many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo. These include many of the FCC’s media ownership rules, which can have the effect of restricting investment and competition because those regulations assume a far more limited set of competitors for advertising dollars than exist today…The FCC should engage in a serious top-to-bottom review of its regulations and take steps to rescind any that are overly cumbersome or outdated. The Commission should focus its efforts on creating a market-friendly regulatory environment that fosters innovation and competition from a wide range of actors, including cable-based, broadband-based, and satellite-based Internet providers.
Section 230 is a controversial bit of U.S. law that protects devious tech companies who want to censor your takes. Or it’s “the twenty-six words that created the Internet” and allowed a flowering of public discourse. Depends on your point of view!
What Section 230 does (in general) is hold that an online publisher is not liable for content created by its users. If a reader of a news site falsely accuses someone of being a pedophile in a comments section, the commenter is subject to a defamation suit, but the news site isn’t. The same protection applies to everything from giant platforms (Facebook, Google) to self-hosted blogs. And it also protects them from lawsuits over their moderation activities — say, removing vaccine misinformation or Nazi content.
Carr wants legislation “that scraps Section 230’s current approach”:
The FCC should work with Congress on more fundamental Section 230 reforms that go beyond interpreting its current terms. Congress should do so by ensuring that Internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech while maintaining their Section 230 protections. As part of those reforms, the FCC should work with Congress to ensure that antidiscrimination provisions are applied to Big Tech — including “back-end” companies that provide hosting services and DDoS protection. Reforms that prohibit discrimination against core political viewpoints are one way to do this and would track the approach taken in a social media law passed in Texas, which was upheld on appeal in late 2022 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
(The Supreme Court later threw out that ruling, though final dispensation of the Texas law is still TBD. That law would ban big tech platforms from removing any content because of its “viewpoint.”)
In arguing to scrap Section 230, Carr says he is focused on the “dominant, general-use platforms rather than specialized ones” and said a new law could exclude “comment sections in online publications, specialized message boards, or communities within larger platforms that self-moderate.”
It’s quite a rundown.
The thing is: None of these should be surprising. These aren’t ideas dreamed up by people Donald Trump has never met. They all reflect policies that Trump has either advocated or that he tried to enact in his first term.
He revoked former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearances when he felt Brennan had made “unfounded and outrageous allegations.” He tried to ban TikTok with an executive order — even though he now says “I’m for TikTok” and even joined the site in June.
He threatened to kick the press out of the White House before even taking office — though he settled for not giving them a press briefing for a full calendar year instead. He tried gutting public broadcasting four times, only to have Congress step in.
We know what his appointee Michael Pack tried to do at USAGM. His FCC did its best to strip away media ownership regulations.
The Biden-era policy not to seize journalists’ emails and phone records was in response to Trump’s politicized DOJ doing exactly that.
And you’ll already find a “REPEAL SECTION 230!!!” tweet in his collected works.3 The only one of these ideas Trump hasn’t pushed, as far as I can tell, is “regulat[ing] where and how paid advertising is used by pharmaceutical companies…especially on media outlets.”4 (He did try, unsuccessfully, to mandate pricing disclosure in drug TV ads.)
That’s the strangeness of Donald Trump’s third run for the White House. The first time around, there was at least a modicum of uncertainty about what a Trump administration would actually do. The second time, voters knew better, and they rejected it. The third time? Well, no one can say it’ll come as a surprise.
