Over the past few years, we have alerted readers to organizations, initiatives and stances sponsored or promoted by the right-wing element in our political discourse that might sound good at first glance but which are in fact misleading and even dangerous (Project Blitz and right-wing attempts to legislate specific types of Bible classes in public schools; Moms for Liberty; and the Liberty Justice Center and Alliance Defending Freedom.
As the critical 2024 election draws nearer, we will focus in this post on the helpful-sounding – but actually very deceptive – Presidential Administration Academy (PAA). PAA is an initiative of Project 2025, which Matt Cohen at the Democracy Docket has described as “a collection of policy transition proposals that outline how, should Trump win the November election, he can vastly remake the federal government most effectively to carry out an extremist far-right agenda.” Put more bluntly, The New Republic has described Project 2025 as “a remarkably detailed guide to turning the United States into a fascist’s paradise.”
According to its website, PAA is helping to prepare for the “next conservative President” and the “next conservative Administration.” Millions of Americans consider themselves conservative. Traditionally, over several generations, the primary values of conservatives include individualism, limited federal governmental power in relation to the states, moral absolutism, traditional marriage, American exceptionalism, prayer in public schools, and a strong military. Such self-described conservatives tend to be pro-business and pro-capitalism and generally oppose abortion, LGBTQ rights, communism, socialism, and labor unions. Some Americans on the right go even farther, however, by following ideals of extreme white Christian nationalism, neo-Nazism, antisemitism, racism against people of color and Indigenous people, misogyny, climate change denial, and voter intimidation.
We need to understand that PAA and Project 2025 go far beyond traditional conservatism – and are veering more and more into the far-right extremes that, until Trump and Trumpism, generally remained in the minority of American politics. In fact, Project 2025 actually turns traditional conservative values on their head, in an incredibly dangerous way for our democracy.
The topics PAA will address with participants are the following:
- Prepared to Serve
- Conservative Governance 101
- The Administrative State and the Regulatory Process
- Conservative Governance: Advancing Policy
PAA, a fully online program, offers both individual classes and full certificate programs. The “distinguished” faculty members come from over 100 partner organizations (many of which may be fairly unfamiliar to average Americans). The most recognizable groups might be the Heritage Foundation, Liberty University, and Moms for Liberty. The groups, by title, seem to represent a fairly wide range of Americans, including Native Americans, African Americans, and women. However, as with any movement or initiative, it is vital to understand what some of these groups truly stand for: we cannot automatically believe they share our values just by their names.
Similarly, we must look deeper for the content of the courses being offered. Under Prepared to Serve, for instance, we find the following titles with the names and affiliations of the instructors (although no additional information about the courses): 
Why Your Service Matters: How Presidential Appointees at All Levels Impact Policy; Political Appointees & the Federal Workforce; and The Federal Background Investigation & Security Clearance Process. On their face, these titles do not seem especially concerning and might in fact be helpful to Americans who are not necessarily conservative – but we have little to go by just on the basis of what is available. (Note that the syllabi of many courses in US colleges and universities are fully available to the public; these syllabi are governed under copyright law, so the PAA appears to be out of step with normal American academic practice by not providing their syllabi publicly.)
The three course titles listed under The Administrative State and the Regulatory Process are particularly enlightening, however, and may give us a better idea of where the PAA curriculum is truly heading:
- The Administrative State: What it is & How to Address the Problem (The Honorable Paul J. Ray)
- How to Promulgate a Rule (David R. Burton)
- Taking the Reins: How Conservatives Can Win the Regulations Game (Roger Severino)
The site explains, “The Administrative State and the Regulatory Process walks participants through the intricacies of the regulatory process and equips them to effectively issue and repeal regulations to advance the President’s agenda.” As we know from Trump’s first Administration and his and his followers’ subsequent efforts, a primary right-wing goal is to “repeal regulations” and undo what they consider the “deep state,” as we have addressed in the past. Also, designating the so-called “administrative state” as “the problem,” as in the course title, further betrays these organizations’ disdain for all the beneficial things that the federal government does for the American people; and the phrase “the regulations game” implies the same – regulations, many of which protect our health and safety, are for the PAA and Project 2025 part of a game to be won, not laws and principles that have been enacted over decades for our benefit.
Further clues about the radical, dangerous goals of the PAA come from the instructor names under this category and the fact that all of these instructors hail from The Heritage Foundation, the primary sponsor of Project 2025. First, the Heritage’s current president, Kevin D. Roberts, sees the foundation’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” If we do not like Trumpism, we should be very leery of the goals of The Heritage Foundation – which also include recommending and endorsing conservative judicial appointments.
We get further insights from the bios of the three faculty members.
- The Honorable Paul J. Ray, current Director of Heritage’s Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, has an impressive bio: “regulations czar” under Trump as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (which is within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget); counselor to the U.S. Secretary of Labor; law clerk for Judge Debra Ann Livingston and Justice Samuel A. Alito; and graduate of Harvard Law School. Ray’s worrisome values, however (and some insight into why Trump appointed him) are encapsulated by the statement of Roberts about Ray’s appointment at the Roe Institute in 2022: “The American left relies on the administrative state to advance its radical agenda through regulatory power. This power grows by the day, reaching further and further into the daily lives of Americans across this country. It’s no longer enough to have the right policy ideas in Congress. We must know how to fight the left in the executive branch and take back the ground they have won… [Ray] will be a warrior against the administrative state, helping Heritage and our allies in the movement come up with the right policy and overcome the bureaucratic elites to implement it.”
- David R. Burton is the Senior Fellow in Economic Policy at the Roe Institute. His right-wing values are betrayed by the topics of some of his recent opinion pieces in the past few years: “Dismantling DEI = Restoring Equal Protection of the Law;” Why Small Businesses Cheer as Judge Strikes Down ‘Transparency’ Law;” “Legal Challenges Follow SEC Adoption of Costly, Burdensome Climate Rule;” and “‘Inflation Reduction Act’ Is Euphemism for Big Government Socialism, Higher Prices.”
- Roger Severino, Vice President of Domestic Policy and The Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow at Heritage, is very active in the anti-abortion and “religious freedom” movements of right-wing Christians. As longtime director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services, Severino “founded the federal government’s first division dedicated exclusively to conscience and religious freedom compliance and enforcement.” In the words of Heritage, “he enforced the Weldon Amendment for the first time against a state (California) after it coerced families and religious organizations into paying for abortion insurance coverage, leading to a $200 million federal funding disallowance. He also enforced laws protecting pro-life pregnancy resource centers from discrimination by states hostile to their message and enforced laws prohibiting forced participation in abortions by medical professionals.”
The titles of Severino’s commentaries (some co-written with others) are similar in tone and bias as Burton’s, using such provocative and misleading terms as the “pronoun police,” federal departments promoting abortion;” and “Biden’s solar power scam.”
These gentlemen are obviously intelligent and have a great deal of expertise. Many of their opinions and observations may actually have some merit. However, many of their assertions are replete with innuendo, exaggerations, and misinformation. While political discourse “takes sides” to make points and convert people to a particular perspective, such discourse should be based on facts as much as possible – otherwise those perspectives cannot be trusted. We are all human, and we make mistakes, but the deliberate promotion of lies in the primary service of staying in power – rather than serving the common good – is destructive and needs to be called out.
There is another curious aspect to PAA’s stated goals: irony. Organizations like The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 are offering courses and certificates on governance while one of their primary goals is to dismantle government. We might postulate that, taken to its logical conclusion, their mission is to ultimately engineer their own demise! We know that they plan to eliminate a number of federal departments – thus putting potentially thousands of dedicated civil servants out of work and jeopardizing our health and safety in significant ways. We can instead conclude that these right-wing activists only want to dismantle those departments with which they do not agree while passing laws that ensure the survival of pet projects such as banning abortion nationwide and making the Justice Department an instrument of Trump the dictator.
Finally, we might ask how federal employees normally obtain training for their jobs. A number of resources are already provided by many federal entities, in addition to qualified employees learning portions of their positions on the job: Training opportunities for federal employees by the General Services Administration; Understanding the Federal Hiring Process by the Department of Labor; Training and Development by the Office of Personnel Management; and Working for the Federal Government, What Every Employee Should Know, by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. It is a fair bet that the federal employees who are producing these materials not only want to help employees succeed in their positions but also support the overall missions of their departments, commissions and agencies – missions that are mandated by the Constitution and that uphold the rule of law.
The PAA, in contrast, is specifically – and admittedly – geared toward supporting a convicted felon who has vowed to “terminate” the Constitution, who has been impeached twice, who is under indictment for multiple federal and state charges, and who has been found liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. Perhaps if the PAA were not so closely associated with Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation or Donald Trump, we could take it more seriously. But it must instead be listed among the right-wing initiatives about which we must know and of which we must be very wary.