Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

This is an excerpt from Project 2025.

Although I don't agree with everything I have read so far which is not reprinted here I am interested on people's thoughts regarding this introduction to Chapter II...


In its opening words, Article II of the U.S. Constitution makes it abundantly
clear that “[t]he executive power shall be vested in a President of the United
States of America.”1 That enormous power is not vested in departments or
agencies, in staff or administrative bodies, in nongovernmental organizations or
other equities and interests close to the government. The President must set and
enforce a plan for the executive branch. Sadly, however, a President today assumes
office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its
own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences
of a radical, supposedly “woke” faction of the country.

The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the
executive branch on behalf of the American people. This challenge is created
and exacerbated by factors like Congress’s decades-long tendency to delegate its
lawmaking power to agency bureaucracies, the pervasive notion of expert “independence”
that protects so-called expert authorities from scrutiny, the presumed
inability to hold career civil servants accountable for their performance, and the
increasing reality that many agencies are not only too big and powerful, but also
increasingly weaponized against the public and a President who is elected by the
people and empowered by the Constitution to govern.

In Federalist No. 47, James Madison warned that “[t]he accumulation of all powers,
legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many,
and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the
very definition of tyranny.”2 Regrettably, that wise and cautionary note describes
to a significant degree the modern executive branch, which—whether controlled



EXECUTIVE OFFICE
OF THE PRESIDENT
OF THE UNITED STATES
Russ Vought


The Executive Office of the President by the bureaucracy or by the President—writes federal policy, enforces that policy,
and often adjudicates whether that policy was properly drafted and enforced. The
overall situation is constitutionally dire, unsustainably expensive, and in urgent need
of repair. Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.
The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need
for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—
including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people.
Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and
self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and
self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington
and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.
Fortunately, a President who is willing to lead will find in the Executive Office
of the President (EOP) the levers necessary to reverse this trend and impose a
sound direction for the nation on the federal bureaucracy. The effectiveness of
those EOP levers depends on the fundamental premise that it is the President’s
agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his
constitutional authority and that, as a general matter, it is the President’s chosen
advisers who have the best sense of the President’s aims and intentions, both with
respect to the policies he intends to enact and with respect to the interests that
must be secured to govern successfully on behalf of the American people. This
chapter focuses on key features of and recommendations for several of the EOP’s
important components.