Schmidt is a syndicated columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 chapter on the intelligence community has almost nothing to do with its advertised subject matter and focuses almost exclusively on the past and possible future conservative president. It looks backwards at the so called wrongs done to Donald Trump while not looking forward to protecting America from future threats.
The 32-page chapter, part of a larger blueprint for a second Trump administration, reads like a retribution manifesto for Trump and his perceived grievances with the U.S. intelligence community. As with related chapters focused on national security, Project 2025’s recommendations for the intelligence community would protect one man and make the rest of America and the world much less safe.
The national security apparatus’s mission should be focused on keeping Americans protected. The details of how to best do that can and should be debated, but changing the centerpiece from security to presidential power should give all Americans pause.
Starting at the top, Project 2025 recommends that Trump’s director of national intelligence fall directly under the president. “A conservative President must decide how to empower an individual to oversee and manage the Intelligence Community effectively,” the report states. “To be successful, the DNI and ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) must be able to lead the IC and implement the President’s intelligence priorities.”
The language in that paragraph is centered around the chief executive, which is not where loyalty should lie. The IC needs to act independently and maintain the wall of separation between the agencies and the presidency.
Project 2025 recommends the next conservative president appoint whomever he chooses as DNI with “agreement between the incoming DNI and President with advice and counsel from the Presidential Personnel Office on selecting positions overseen by the DNI.”
It also recommends the enhancement of the DNI’s role in overseeing execution of the National Intelligence Program budget under the President’s authority, with “under the President’s authority” being the operative words.
Under this plan, Trump would choose a deputy director who, “without needing Senate confirmation, can immediately begin to implement the President’s agenda.” This would include halting all current hiring to prevent the “burrowing in” of outgoing political personnel.
The Heritage Foundation, though Project 2025, has already been accepting resumes for inclusion in the Presidential Personnel Database. Candidates would be cleared under a Trump loyalty test before even being considered for positions in a presidential administration.
The report calls out three individuals by name; former CIA Director John Brennan, former DNI James Clapper, and Attorney General Merrick Garland, in the section titled “Preventing the Abuse of Intelligence for Partisan Purposes.”
“The IC must restore confidence in its political neutrality to rectify the damage done by the actions of former IC leaders and personnel regarding the claims of Trump-Russia collusion following the 2016 election and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation and media revelations of its existence during the 2020 election,” according to the report.
It accuses Brennan, who served under President Barack Obama, of having “gravely damaged the CIA by minimizing the Directorate of Operations and exploiting intelligence analysis as a political weapon after he left office.” Project 2025 cites Brennan's role in the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials before the 2020 election “dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop as ‘Russian disinformation,’” claiming it discredited the CIA and revealing “the shocking extent of politicization among some former IC officials.”
Clapper also comes under scrutiny for his answering questions about government surveillance programs before Congress.
Project 2025 recommends that the Department of Justice “should use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks and should rescind damaging guidance by Attorney General Merrick Garland that limits investigators’ ability to identify records of unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media.”
There are several paragraphs giving the DNI the authority to drive necessary changes throughout the IC “to deal with the nation’s most compelling threats, including those emanating from China” but there is no mention of Russia, Iran or domestic terrorism.
There are sections with recommendations on changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act due to concerns about “the politicization of intelligence collection authority in recent years” as well as complaints on “overclassification,” with attempts to restrict classifying material.
This reads like an unveiled nod against the 40 felony counts brought against Trump, his personal aide and valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago maintenance chief Carlos De Oliveira, for alleged mishandling of classified documents after Trump’s presidency.
Project 2025’s chapter on the IC is all about giving the next conservative president more control over our intelligence communities as well as seeking revenge on those who aggrieved the former president. Instead of offering reassurances of safety and security, I for one came away feeling much more afraid.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.