Late this summer, a prominent right-wing think tank invited conservatives from around the country to learn how to work in a second Donald J. Trump administration.
In a series of training sessions in Washington, former Trump officials shared strategies with attendees for combating leftist civil servants in the federal government and dealing with the mainstream media. Participants were sent home with a thick binder of materials for further study. One section’s title: “Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump.”
The classes could easily have been the work of Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint and personnel project that was created by loyalists to Mr. Trump and that has been turned into a political cudgel by Democrats seeking to link its most radical prescriptions to the former president.
But the meetings had nothing to do with that enterprise or its principal backer, the Heritage Foundation. Instead, they were the work of the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank that has, with little fanfare or scrutiny, installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again.
Founded by three wealthy Texans in late 2020, the group, known as A.F.P.I., has quickly inserted itself into nearly every corner of Mr. Trump’s political machine, and is closer than any other outside player in his planning for a second term.
Mr. Trump chose one of its leaders, Linda McMahon, a former member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet and a longtime friend, as co-chair of his official transition team. Brooke Rollins, who also worked in the Trump administration and is currently the nonprofit’s chief executive, has been discussed as a candidate to be Mr. Trump’s chief of staff. The institute’s ranks are stocked with other former Trump administration officials who have spent the past several years planning for a return, and in recent weeks several have quietly moved over to work full time for the campaign’s transition team.
Like Project 2025, the institute developed a plan for staffing and setting the policy agenda for every federal agency, one that prioritizes loyalty to Mr. Trump and aggressive flexing of executive power from Day 1. Ms. Rollins declined an interview but has said that A.F.P.I. has already drafted nearly 300 executive orders ready for Mr. Trump’s signature should he win the election.
It’s impossible to predict which policies Mr. Trump will prioritize, and a spokesman for the nonprofit, Marc Lotter, noted that the group “does not speak on behalf of any candidate, campaign or transition.”
But unlike the creators of Heritage’s Project 2025, the key architects of A.F.P.I.’s transition plan are now advising the Trump campaign, a testament to the strategy and discretion of the organization.
“It understood what Heritage didn’t: Transition work is always best kept very quiet,” said Heath Brown, a professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies presidential transitions.
The Agenda
The institute’s policy book, titled “The America First Agenda,” is slimmer than the much-debated plans espoused in Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership.” Absent are attention-grabbing proposals such as banning pornography, prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills or ending the Justice Department’s status as an independent agency.
But its vision is no less Trumpist: It calls for halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.
It also goes significantly further than Project 2025 in one key area, calling for the elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them at-will employees — a strategy supporters believe will allow Mr. Trump and his aides to root out career staff members who they believe stood in his way in his first administration.
“Agencies should be free to remove employees for any nondiscriminatory reason, with no external appeals,” the institute’s policy book states.
That change could allow officials to try to fire civil servants for almost any reason, including for defying Mr. Trump or speaking out positions like acknowledging climate change that challenge administration policies.
Within the official transition team, Ms. McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration under Mr. Trump, has been charged with policy matters, while her co-chair, Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, is preparing to hire thousands of people to run the agencies.
In a television interview last week, Mr. Lutnick said his main priority in selecting potential appointees was fidelity to Mr. Trump. “He’s the C.E.O.,” he said.
A Landing Pad
The A.F.P.I. was born soon after Mr. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, when Ms. Rollins and Ms. McMahon approached Tim Dunn, a billionaire Texas oilman, about creating a national organization that could lay the groundwork for a second Trump administration.
Ms. Rollins, who served as Mr. Trump’s director of domestic policy, had been the president of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Mr. Dunn is a longtime board member. Together, they had helped pursue Mr. Dunn’s agenda of reshaping Texas politics, pushing the State Legislature to send public funding to private schools and to increase Christianity’s role in civic life.
Within weeks, Mr. Dunn and two other wealthy directors of the Texas nonprofit, Cody Campbell and Tim Lyles, registered A.F.P.I. Mr. Dunn and Mr. Campbell still sit on its board, along with a number of other deep-pocketed donors, including the chief executive of Goya Foods, Bob Unanue, and Trish Duggan, a Florida philanthropist and a Scientologist.
The group fast became a landing pad where former Trump aides could collect six-figure salaries while awaiting the next election. Dozens of Trump administration officials joined, including Hogan Gidley, who served as his deputy press secretary; Chad Wolf, who served as the interim secretary of homeland security; and Douglas Hoelscher, who led the office of intergovernmental affairs and recently left the think tank to join the Trump transition team.
The Trump transition, formally known as Trump Vance Transition 2024 Inc., did not respond to a request to interview Ms. McMahon or Mr. Hoelscher.
From the outset, A.F.P.I. received the blessings of Mr. Trump, whose leadership PAC donated $1 million to it in 2021. The former president also spoke at the institute’s first policy summit, in July 2022, his first major speech in Washington since leaving the White House.
The nonprofit has found ways to stay on Mr. Trump’s radar, branching out into seemingly every corner of his political movement.
Current board members have collectively donated more than $31 million to Mr. Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., during the current election cycle, including $20 million from Ms. McMahon alone.
Its sister organization, America First Works, is one of three groups working directly with the Trump campaign on get-out-the-vote activities in battleground states.
And its legal arm, led by Pam Bondi, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump, has been filing voting lawsuits in battleground states. In May, for example, it sued the board of elections in Fulton County, Ga., on behalf of a board member who sought the right not to certify an election based on suspicion of fraud.
A county judge rejected that argument last week, stating that “our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.”
The group has made sure to keep itself in Mr. Trump’s good graces. While the former president has privately complained that A.F.P.I. was raising money off his “America First” slogan, the institute has made sure to send some of its money back his way.
All three of its annual fund-raiser galas have been held at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla. In tax filings, the group said it spent a total of $1.7 million on these galas in 2021 and 2022, including fees paid to Mr. Trump’s business for using the facility. Mr. Lotter, the nonprofit’s spokesman, said that the payments also covered other events at nearby properties, and that the money did not all go to Mar-a-Lago.
“Brooke, what a job you’re doing,” Mr. Trump said while delivering the keynote speech at the group’s 2021 fund-raiser, which netted the nonprofit roughly $385,000 after expenses.
A Contest With Heritage
But the core of the institute’s mission has been preparing for a new Republican administration. And on that front, it has had competition.
For over two years, since A.F.P.I. formally began its transition project, it has vied with the Heritage Foundation to become the gatekeeper to a second Trump administration. Heritage, a much larger fixture of the conservative movement that for decades has helped Republican presidential candidates make plans to assume power, did not take kindly to the competition.
Tensions burst into view just over a year ago, when a Heritage employee accused A.F.P.I. of “ripping off” its transition project “down to the name, language and logo” in an email that ended up in news reports. Ms. Rollins responded by saying that the groups were “fully aligned.”
Last November, Mr. Trump’s top campaign advisers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, publicly complained that they were “seeing more and more stories about various groups’ intentions for leading a Trump transition,” adding that “these stories are neither appropriate nor constructive.”
A.F.P.I. appeared to take the hint. Its leadership clammed up, making scant public comment about its transition planning. Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president and himself a former head of the Texas Public Policy Institute, went in the opposite direction, using Project 2025 to increase fund-raising and promote his still-unreleased book.
The competition came to an abrupt conclusion this summer, when the Trump campaign, in the face of growing public outcry over Project 2025’s well-publicized policy goals, thoroughly disavowed the Heritage enterprise.
“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed,” said Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles, in a statement at the end of July.
Yet despite its best efforts, the Trump campaign has been unable to separate itself from Project 2025, which has become a favorite punching bag for the political left.
At the Democratic National Convention, Project 2025 was a running theme, and since then, Vice President Kamala Harris has missed few opportunities to mention it, airing several ominous campaign spots referring to “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda.”
The campaign maintains a website dedicated to Project 2025, and during last month’s presidential debate, Ms. Harris spoke repeatedly of “a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025 that the former president intends on implementing.”
She did not mention the America First Policy Institute.
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