Connect the Dots 101

“If you’re going to take the time to draw up a playbook, you’re damn sure going to use it,” said Mr. Walz in August about the Trump campaign’s attempts to downplay Project 2025…

The document, totaling about 900 pages, details extreme executive-branch overhauls, such as plans for disbanding several federal departments including the Education Department, rejecting the concept of abortion as health care, undoing environmental regulations and criminalizing pornography. It also proposes ending protections for many civil-service roles so they may be filled with appointees loyal to the president — a notion backed by both Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance…

• Vance wrote the foreword for a book by Kevin Roberts, who oversaw Project 2025.
• He has connections to some of the Project 2025 contributors. A former budget director in the Trump White House and the Republican National Convention’s policy director, Russell T. Vought, wrote a section of Project 2025 about executive orders. Mr. Vought told Politico in January that he was in “regular contact” with Mr. Vance’s Capitol Hill office and that he had “one of the closest relationships” with his office compared to other lawmakers’ offices on the hill.
• He wrote a preface for a separate Heritage Foundation report in 2017.
  • Mr. Vance has collaborated with the Heritage Foundation before. He wrote a preface for its report about families in 2017, calling the report’s policy discussions “admirable.” The package included 29 essays by conservative commentators, policy experts and Christian clergy members who largely opposed abortion and in vitro fertilization — describing I.V.F. as harmful to women — and offered guidance on raising children.
  • The essays said that abortion should become “unthinkable” in the U.S. and praised state laws restricting abortion access. They also included instructions on how to raise families, arguing that a two-parent heterosexual household was the “ideal” environment for children. The recommendations bear similarities to Project 2025’s proposals.