Project 2025 per Professor Brooks

University of Kansas Professor Karl Brooks discusses what he has been telling his students about Project 2025. He discusses this with Radio Active Magazine regulars Spencer Graves and Craig Lubow.

Brooks is an attorney with a PhD in history. He served three terms in the Idaho state senate and taught environmental history at the University of Kansas for a decade during which time he wrote two books on (2006) Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books), (2009) Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law, 1945-1970 (University Press of Kansas), and edited a third, (2009) The Environmental Legacy of Harry S. Truman (Truman Legacy Series 5). In 2010 he was appointed the Administrator for Region 7 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas including native American jurisdictions in those states. In 2015, he became the national operations manager for the EPA. He later became deputy director of the Administrative Office of the Courts in New Mexico. Then he served two years as senior staff executive for the multi-county judicial district based in Taos before rejoining the faculty at KU.

Project 2025 is a political initiative published online in 2022 by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation as Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.

Kevin Roberts, President of The Heritage Foundation, introduced that book by noting that the Heritage Foundation had published an earlier Mandate for Leadership in January 1981, the same month that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President, and “By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy—and Reagan was on his way to ending stagflation, reviving American confidence and prosperity, and winning the Cold War.”

The Heritage Foundation has published new editions during 8 of the 11 presidential elections since 1981, with the current version being the ninth. They skipped 1992, 2008 and 2012. In 2018, The Heritage Foundation claimed that the Trump administration had embraced 64%, almost 2/3rds, of the 334 proposed policies in the seventh edition of their Mandate for Leadership.

Other experts on US history and politics do not agree that Reagan ended stagflation, revived American confidence and prosperity, and won the Cold War. For example, Matthews claimed that Paul Volker, appointed to chair the Federal Reserve in 1979 by President Carter, had pushed the US into recession¹ by 1980 and contributed to Reagan’s victory that November. And Ohio State professor John Mueller insists that the Cold War was NOT won by President Reagan but rather by the non-interventionist policies of President Carter, which encouraged the Soviet Union to try to support economic basket cases like Nicaragua and Mozambique and to invade Afghanistan, where they essentially bled to death.²

Copyright 2024 Karl Brooks, Spencer Graves, Craig Lubow, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license

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1. Dylan Matthews, “How the Fed ended the last great American inflation — and how much it hurt”, Vox.com, 2022-07-13 (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/13/23188455/inflation-paul-volcker-shock-recession-1970s, accessed 2024-10-22).

2. John Mueller (2021) The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency (Cambridge U. Pr.)

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