What does Project 2025 really say about the US government using Signal?

The controversy surrounding a journalist for The Atlanticbeing added to a Signal group chat of senior government officials - in which they discussed plans for military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen – has now been linked to another controversial subject matter linked to US president Donald Trump: Project 2025.

As a reminder, Project 2025 was used by Democrats to attack Trump’s third bid to become president last year, described by his opponents as a “playbook” for the Republican to “achieve his dream of being a dictator” if he entered the White House for a second time, which he has.

It all surrounds a document from the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, and while Trump has said he has “no idea who is behind it”, individuals who have previously worked for him are linked to the proposals.

Yet measures contained in the manifesto – published before Trump’s inauguration – have now been enacted by the Republican administration, such as moving to shut down the Department of Education and “deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity … out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists”.

And now, comments from those associated with the Heritage Foundation around government communications have resurfaced amid the ongoing Signal scandal, with one popular post on Twitter/X claiming “Project 2025 calls for using public channels of communication … to subvert FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests”:

Another points out training videos linked to the initiative “instruct the MAGA cult to use Signal in their communications in order to avoid subpoenas”:

So, what does Project 2025 actually say about Signal?

Well, first and foremost, the actual Mandate for Leadership document makes no explicit mention of the messaging app. Instead, the material which is the most interesting to Trump critics is a training video from Project 2025 on “oversight and investigations”, obtained by ProPublica and published to YouTube in August last year.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

In the 31-minute training video, Tom Jones of the American Accountability Foundation says: “The adage we hear a lot now is like, ‘wow, this meeting could have been an email’, while in the federal government, this email probably should have been a meeting.

“Because what you probably want to do, if you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s far better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘hey, what are we going to do here’, talk through the decision, work it out.

“If you reduce it to writing, maybe you can protect it under some of these exemptions, but man, that’s a lot of a fight. You’re probably better off going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making a decision, as opposed to sending him an email, creating a thread that Accountable. US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”

Heaven forbid the government be held accountable!

After this, Mike Howell, director of the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation, asks attorney Michael Ding of America First Legal if “Signal chats count as records”, to which Ding replies “yes” and says “that’s where things get really tricky”.

“That’s another way that political appointees get into trouble sometimes, is they’re using these encrypted chat platforms or self-deleting messages.

“They are, in some sense, violating the law deleting those, because if you’re conducting official business, whatever communication was transmitted to conduct that official business, that’s a federal record, and it needs to be properly retained so that someone can request it under FOIA,” he said.

And while screenshots of the Signal group chat shared by The Atlantic show that ‘disappearing messages’ were turned on, a federal judge said on Thursday that he will order the Trump administration to preserve records of the conversation.

Non-profit watchdog American Oversight requested the temporary restraining order, calling the use of disappearing messages is “nothing less than a `systemic effort to evade the rules for record retention in the federal government”.

Trump officials, meanwhile, have insisted no classified information was shared in the Signal chat.

Why not read…

• What were the war plans shared on the Signal group chat?
• We read the 900-page Project 2025 manifesto – what does the ‘Trump blueprint’ actually say?

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