This story was reported and written by VPM News.
Three people with strong Virginia ties authored sections in a conservative policy publication as part of Project 2025, while at least 18 other organizations on its board have been connected to Virginia policy debates and Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration.
Democrats on the campaign trail, including in Virginia , have raised the specter of the publication — officially known as The Mandate for Leadership — as the GOP’s blueprint for a Republican administration should they come into power this fall. Chapters call for eliminating entire federal departments or long-standing regulations.
On Tuesday, the head of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down amid reports that the campaign of former President Donald Trump had pressured the Heritage Foundation over the project. NPR reported that the organization said work would continue despite Dans’ departure.
Two experts told VPM News that Virginia’s relationships with the personalities involved likely has to do with DC’s shared border and talent pool with the commonwealth, the Heritage Foundation’s large role in conservative policy making, and the Mandate for Leadership’s espousal of long-standing conservative policy solutions.
“These are not new conservative principles at all,” said Steve Haner , a senior fellow for the conservative Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, of privatization and the reduction of federal power. “Anytime a Republican gets elected, there's a push-pull”
Youngkin named former Heritage President Kay Coles James the co-chair of his transition team, and later as secretary of the commonwealth, which oversees functions related to boards, commissions and state workforce records. Coles James left the administration for Youngkin’s political action committee in 2023.
“I got the impression [Youngkin] was relying heavily on Heritage,” said Haner of the early days of the first-time governor’s administration. “He probably was relying on advisers, and one of those advisers was the Heritage Foundation. But again, this gets kind of how it works, and not pernicious at all.”
Don Abelson, a political science professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario — and an expert on think tanks — also said it was not surprising that conservative Virginia politicians would utilize Heritage for job recruitment and policy recommendations.
“What the Heritage Foundation tries to do is to almost create kind of a job dating service,” he said.
“The kind of blueprints that Heritage provides and builds on can have an impact across the United States.” Abelson added. “There is a lot of cross-fertilization between the think tank and the kinds of organizations with which it has established close affiliations with.
Alumni of the Youngkin administration have moved on to work for organizations that make up Project 2025’s advisory board. Youngkin himself has appointed many of those organizations’ members to state boards and commissions, including public university boards of visitors , the Board of Physical Therapy and The Virginia Council on Women .
“The members appointed by Governor Youngkin to state Boards are all exceptionally qualified. Claims to the contrary only serve to propagate unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and divert attention from the real issues Virginia families care about,” said Youngkin’s Press Secretary Christian Martinez. Martinez did not answer questions if Youngkin had read the Mandate for Leadership or his stances on its policy proposals.
The governor spoke at a gala sponsored by the Alliance for Defending Freedom , which sued the Harrisonburg City School Board over transgender rights — and at a reception of the Susan B Anthony List (now known as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America), which opposes abortion. During his gubernatorial campaign, he received donations from FreedomWorks , a now-dissolved organization that trained political volunteers, and the PAC of the American Principles Project think tank.
Education – Lindsey Burke
Lindsey Burke, a Youngkin-appointed member of George Mason University’s Board of Visitors, wrote the mandate’s chapter on education. Burke is the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, was on Youngkin’s transition steering committee and has three degrees from Virginia universities: Hollins University, University of Virginia and GMU.
“Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” Burke wrote. In her chapter, she outlines the shift of the department’s programs to other federal agencies.
Burke’s chapter also calls for:
- Expanding school choice, including using publicly funded education savings accounts, and providing school choice to “federal” children, or “those connected to military families, who live in the District of Columbia, or who are members of sovereign tribes,” through agencies serving those families.
- Rescinding regulations and lessening federal restrictions on charter schools.
- Moving the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice and limiting enforcement to litigation only.
- Replacing income-driven repayment plans for student debt with a program exempting income equal to the poverty line and requiring borrowers to pay 10% of their income above that — though federal guidelines on determining the poverty line vary.
The US Department of Education employs 419 people in Virginia and estimated its budget will be $5.2 billion in federal fiscal 2025, which runs from Oct. 1, 2024, through Sept. 30, 2025. About $3 billion of that is new federal student loans.
Homeland Security – Ken Cuccinelli
Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, also a former acting deputy secretary for the US Department of Homeland Security in President Donald Trump’s administration, advocates the dismantling of DHS. He wrote the 22-year-old agency has failed to function as one entity, which was the driving factor behind its creation after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
A sweeping change Cuccinelli suggested is creating a different Cabinet-level “border and immigration agency” with over 100,000 employees. That agency would become the federal government’s third-largest, according to Cuccinelli, and consolidate the Office of Refugee Resettlement (Department of Health and Human Services), US Citizenship and Immigration Services (Homeland Security), US Customs and Border Protection (Homeland Security) — and others.
Cuccinelli also advocates for:
- More political personnel and congressional legislation to remove lower-level positions that currently require Senate confirmation.
- The proposed agency’s secretary not using their discretionary authority to increase the number of H-2B seasonal, non-agricultural worker visas.
- Eliminating T and U visas, issued to survivors of human trafficking or people who have been subject to abuse and can assist in criminal investigations.
- Identifying deportation officers with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as primarily responsible for immigration regulation and deporting individuals “without warrant where appropriate.”
- Repealing Temporary Protective Status, which allows some individuals to stay in the US due to armed conflict or environmental disaster in their countries of origin.
In one section, “An Aggressive Approach to Senate-Confirmed Leadership Positions,” Cuccinelli says the next administration could “place its nominees for key positions into similar positions as ‘actings.’” Cuccinelli faced his own confirmation controversy with questions over whether he was legally in the position.
Energy – Bernard McNamee
Bernard L. McNamee, a commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Trump, authored the Mandate’s chapter on energy policy. Today, McNamee is a partner at Richmond law firm McGuireWoods and is retained as one of Dominion Energy Virginia’s three lobbyists from MGW. He also worked for a Virginia attorney general and governor, according to his bio.
McNamee called for an “all of the above” energy policy, echoing Youngkin (and former President Barack Obama before him). He says federal nuclear regulators should streamline approval processes for light water reactors, while refocusing regulatory efforts to expedite approvals of new technologies like small modular reactors.
In his chapter, McNamee calls for:
- FERC to refocus on avoiding power shortages or electric grid failures, and disregard climate issues in its decision-making.
- FERC to scrap a proposed policy to evaluate greenhouse gas emissions when considering natural gas pipelines.
- The Department of Energy to repeal energy efficiency standards for appliances, required since 1987, which would expand natural gas production.
- Slashing federal programs that dedicate taxpayer dollars to renewable energy projects.
Dominion Energy, which retains multiple bipartisan lobbyists beyond McNamee, said in a statement to VPM News that it had no involvement in Project 2025.
“We are a client of McGuireWoods; suggesting we, or any of their thousands of other clients, have any connection to Project 2025 is absurd,” it said.
McGuireWoods and McNamee did not respond to a request for comment. McGuireWoods had over 100 lobbying clients in the past year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, including VPM Media Corporation.
Copyright 2024 VPM
