As the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” became the punching bag of the political left, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) has filled the void in creating a transition team for a possible Trump White House. The AFPI has nearly 300 executive orders ready for Trump’s signature on Day 1 of a possible new administration. It would seem that Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership”—900 pages long—has been replaced by the slicker and trimmer AFPI’s “America First Agenda,” according to the New York Times. The AFPI has quietly made itself the primary partner to the Trump campaign in policy and the flexing of executive muscle.
The AFPI is less than four years old, but has several dozen former Trump administration officials, all planning for a return to power, who are committed to overcoming the resistance from the federal bureaucracy that they experienced in the last Trump administration. Over the summer these former officials gave a series of training sessions on how to control civil servants who might resist Trump directives. In these areas, the AFPI goes further than Project 2025, calling to remove nearly all protections for civil servants, allowing a new Trump administration to remove career staffers at will, and with no external appeal process. Like Project 2025, AFPI wants to be the gatekeeper to a possible Trump White House, and the most important trait is personal loyalty to Trump.