With a hopeful tone and serious goal, the Heritage Foundation today said it is already working up a blueprint for who it expects will be the next conservative president, to be elected in 2024.
Its “2025 Presidential Transition Project” is the latest version of the conservative think tank’s evolving “Mandate for Leadership” white paper that the Gipper, both Bush presidencies, and the Trump administration used as a policy guide, especially in their respective first 100 days.
The project, the first for newly installed Heritage President Kevin Roberts, will greatly expand on past road maps with investments of millions of dollars in a program to line up and train a conservative workforce that will be ready to go should President Joe Biden lose.
“Even though we’re optimists, we believe that the very next term in the history of the American presidency, 2025 to 2029, is going to be the term that we turn the tide against centralized power, against the radical Left. Otherwise, we might be playing defense for the rest of our careers,” Roberts told Secrets.
An element in Heritage’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project is a new focus on personnel, an area administrations sometimes trip up or lag on. Former President Donald Trump, for example, was criticized for going slow in replacing Obama-era aides, and that led to a swamp-sized blockage of some key policies.
The new Heritage project will feature recommendations on personnel and a recruiting and training mission to find conservatives around the country to fill out the thousands of jobs in every new administration.
Key to that is the project’s new director, Paul Dans, the former chief of staff of the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration.
His plan is to bring in a new generation of federal workers, train them to do battle with the established bureaucracy, and help a new president score early wins.
“It’s really trying to, first, cast a wide net across this whole great United States and find these people, bring them to Washington — the ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ ‘Miss Smith Comes to Washington,’” said Dans.
“We’ve probably fallen down as a conservative movement in terms of having effective mentoring of next-generation folks. So the good news is we have a great generation coming up and a willingness to learn, and they’re inventive. We need to put them in the right direction in government,” he added.
Roberts, previously chief of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said it has been difficult to get conservatives to move to Washington and take on the swamp, and he hopes the new project will give them confidence and team members to fight with.
“It’s hard to convince people who are conservatively minded to take that kind of job in government because they know that they’re going to be so outnumbered. So part of this is to encourage them that we’re not just going to send you in as, like, this lone kamikaze and your career is going to be destroyed. We want to make sure that there are people around you of like mind who want to get the job done,” he told us.
In addition to the new personnel push, Roberts told Secrets that Heritage is eager for all other conservative organizations to help write the new blueprint that the think tank has been both famous for and relied upon.
“That policy handbook, while sort of having overarching Heritage themes, overarching Heritage policy priorities, will include significant input from across the movement. We think that that means, whomever the next president is, that he or she, regardless of which part of the conservative coalition they come out of, which part of the coalition is their base, that they’re going to be able to rely on this whole effort,” he said.
“We don’t want all of this work to happen, the entire conservative movement to be involved, and the next president of the United States to say, ‘Oh, man, this just represents one little slice of conservatism. We think that would be a mistake,” added Roberts.
