Our Goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on day one to deconstruct the Administrative State (-xiv-)

The Conservative Promise (p. 2)

Just as important as the scope of The Conservative Promise’s recommendations is the breadth of its authorship. This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and veterans from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country from the brink of disaster.

The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work. But as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement. As such, the authors express consensus recommendations already forged, especially along four broad fronts that will decide America’s future:

• • 1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
  • 2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
  • 3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
  • 4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.

Department of Homeland Security (p. 136)

• Expansion of Dedicated Political Personnel. The Secretary of Homeland Security is a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed political appointee, but for budgetary reasons, he or she has historically been unable to fund a dedicated team of political appointees. A key first step for the Secretary to improve front-office functions is to have his or her own dedicated team of political appointees selected and vetted by the Office of Presidential Personnel, which is not reliant on details from other parts of the department, to help ensure the completion of the next President’s agenda.
• An Aggressive Approach to Senate-Confirmed Leadership Positions. While Senate confirmation is a constitutionally necessary requirement for appointing agency leadership, the next Administration may need to take a novel approach to the confirmations process to ensure an adequate and rapid transition.
• For example, the next Administration arguably should place its nominees for key positions into similar positions as “actings” (for example, putting in a person to serve as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner of CBP while that person is going through the confirmation process to direct ICE or become the Secretary). This approach would both guarantee implementation of the Day One agenda and equip the department for potential emergency situations while still honoring the confirmation requirement. The department should also look to remove lower-level but nevertheless important positions that currently require Senate confirmation from the confirmation requirement, although this effort would require legislation (and might also be mooted in the event of legislation that closes portions of the department that currently have Senate-confirmed leadership).

• CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency)

• CISA’s funding and resources should align narrowly with the foregoing two mission requirements. The component’s emergency communications and Chem- ical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) roles should be moved to FEMA; its school security functions should be transferred to state homeland security offices; and CISA should refrain from duplicating cybersecurity functions done elsewhere at the Department of Defense, FBI, National Security Agency, and U.S. Secret Service.
• Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts. The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth. CISA began this work because of alleged Russian misinformation in the 2016 election, which in fact turned out to be a Clinton campaign “dirty trick.” The Intelligence Community, including the NSA or DOD, should counter foreign actors. At the time of this writing, release of the Twitter Files has demonstrated that CISA has devolved into an unconstitutional censoring and election engineering apparatus of the political Left. In any event, the entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One.
• For election security, CISA should help states and localities assess whether they have good cyber hygiene in their hardware and software in preparation for an election—but nothing more. This is of value to smaller localities, particularly by flagging who is attacking their websites. CISA should not be significantly involved closer to an election. Nor should it participate in messaging or propaganda.
• Restoration of both domestic security and the integrity of the U.S. immigration system should start with rapid reactivation of several key initiatives in effect at the conclusion of the Trump Administration. Reimplementation of the Remain in Mexico policy, safe third-country agreements, and other measures to address the influx of non-Mexican asylum applicants at the United States–Mexico border must be Day One priorities. (p. 210)
• The next conservative Administration will have a unique opportunity to realign U.S. foreign assistance with American national interests and the principles of good governance and more accurately reflect the U.S. taxpayer’s unmatched charitable desire to help those in need. It can build on a strong baseline of conservative reforms undertaken by the Trump Administration to counter Communist China’s strategy of world domination. However, this will require that bold steps are taken on Day One to undo the gross misuse of foreign aid by the current Administration to promote a radical ideology that is politically divisive at home and harms our global standing. (p. 279)

Department of Education 

“Donald Trump (02:52:24):

On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school, pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children. And I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.”

Donald Trump (02:52:49):

And I will keep men out of women's sports if that's okay. 

Donald Trump (02:53:42):

I will get all males off your daughter's soccer teams and volleyball teams and get them out of your locker rooms once and for all. That's going to be cleaned up. And we will fight to make sure that the LA Olympics protects women and protects girls.

Environmental Protection Agency: (p. 422-423)

• • To initiate the review and reorganization, a Day One executive order should be drafted for the incoming President with explicit language requiring reconsideration of the agency’s structure with reference to fulfilling its mission to create a better environment tomorrow with clean air, safe water, healthy soil, and thriving communities. The order should set up “pause and review” teams to assess the following:
    • Major Rules and Guidance Materials. Identify existing rules to be stayed and reproposed and initiate rule development in appropriate media offices.
    • Pending Petitions. Grant new petitions for rule reconsideration and stays of rules.
    • Grants. Stop all grants to advocacy groups and review which potentia federal investments will lead to tangible environmental improvements.
    • Legal Settlements. Reassess any “sue and settle” cases and develop  new policy to establish standard review and oversight, including public notification and participation.

• Employee Review. Determine the opportunity to downsize by terminating the newest hires in low-value programs and identify relocation opportunities for Senior Executive Service (SES) positions.

• • • Budget Review. Develop a tiered-down approach to cut costs, reduce the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) positions, and eliminate duplicative programs. EPA should not conduct any ongoing or planned activity for which there is not clear and current congressional authorization, and it should communicate this shift in the President’s first budget request.
    • Risk Management Policy. Revise guidance documents that control regulations such as the social cost of carbon; discount rates; timing of regulatory review (before options are selected); causality of health effects; low-dose risk estimation (linear no-threshold analysis); and employment loss analysis.
  • The majority of the political appointee team must be assembled, vetted, and ready to deploy before Day One. To the extent provided by the Federal Vacancies Reform Act,15 appointees in consideration for Senate-confirmed positions (excluding the Administrator) should be prepared to serve as a Deputy or Principal Deputy to get into the agency on Day One while their nomination and affiliated confirmation processes proceeds. In addition to a deputy slated for the Assistant Administrator role, each office will need a political chief of staff, senior advisers designated to run suboffices, and energized assistants. Teams should be balanced with technical knowledge, legal expertise, and political exposure. Ideally, they should also be geographically diverse. Appointee positions should also extend to all the regional offices and specialty labs.

• Day One Priorities (p. 434)

• • • Notify Congress that EPA will not conduct any ongoing or planned science activity for which there is not clear and current congressional authorization. This priority should be underscored in the President’s first budget request.
    • The new President’s Inauguration Day regulatory review/freeze directives should avoid exceptions for EPA actions. This freeze should explicitly include quasi-regulatory actions, including assessments, determinations, standards, and guidance, that have failed to go through the notice-and-comment process and may date back years.
    • Pause for review of all contracts above $100,000 with a heavy focus on major external peer reviews and regulatory models.

• Call for the public to identify areas where EPA has inconsistently assessed risk, failed to use the best science, or participated in research misconduct.

Eliminate the use of unauthorized regulatory inputs like the social cost of carbon, black box and proprietary models, and unrealistic climate scenarios, including those based on Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5.

Department of Labor (p. 615)

Appoint new EEOC and NLRB general counsels on Day One. The Biden Administration broke significant precedent by firing the EEOC and NLRB general counsels despite their term appointments. The next Administration should do the same and expand on the Biden Administration’s new precedent by refusing to acknowledge terms in other offices, where applicable, and installing acting or full new officers immediately.

Department of Commerce (p. 665-680)

• Office of the Secretary 

• • • …it is vitally important that an incoming Administration fully staff OS with political appointees, send all existing detailees back to their home bureaus on Day One, and replace those detailees with trusted and knowledgeable career staff on an as-needed basis.
    • Department of Commerce leadership should also fight to restore direct funding and additional political appointee positions to OS and its constituent parts involved in implementing and communicating the Commerce Secretary’s and President’s policy priorities. (p. 665)

• International Trade

• • • It is important to note that a deeply entrenched set of career Senior Executive Service officials have managed the ITA (International Trade Administration) for over a decade. While most are truly non-partisan civil servants, some are not. Political leadership must manage accordingly. Strong political leadership is needed in ITA’s policymaking positions from Day One to ensure the bureau is fully implementing Administration policy. An incoming Administration should ensure that Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary positions are staffed by appointees as quickly as possible. (p. 666-667)

• Census

• • Fully vet existing planning and budgeting from Day One. Planning and budgets for the 2030 decennial census will be finalized in fall 2025, including many decisions on how to use, develop, and administer the count.
  • An incoming Administration should immediately audit the lifecycle cost estimate (LCCE) for the 2030 census and conduct a new LCCE if necessary.

This will ensure that budget requests are accurate and up-to-date and allow the new Administration to understand the decennial process in greater detail (p. 679-680)

Onward! (p. 886)

• Something that is essential to ensuring that a new President in 2025 can successfully implement a conservative agenda is having the right personnel to run the executive branch departments and their agencies.
• This is why it is so often said that “people are policy.” The Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, administrators, agency heads, and on and on that a new President chooses to place throughout the executive branch must be principled individuals already aligned with the President’s conservative vision. And they must be willing to execute it on the President’s behalf.
• These personnel choices will ultimately determine the success or failure of the policy agenda and, hence, of the whole Administration.
• Presidential appointees not only are critical to implementing the policy agenda, but also must serve to “watch the watchers” in the departments and agencies they oversee. They must ensure accountability as well as provide a check on the inherent nature of the administrative state to overreach its authority.
  • For example, they must rein in the Environmental Protection Agency, which declared backyard streams navigable waterways that then fall under its authority. They must rein in the Internal Revenue Service, including its 87,000 new employees hired to pick through every detail of what Americans make and how they spend their money. They must rein in agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which the Biden Administration weaponized to attempt to force COVID-19 vaccine mandates on 84 million Americans through their workplaces.
• When these new presidential appointees come into office, it is often the career bureaucrats who end up orienting them to their new positions. Many of these bureaucrats are all too comfortable with the status quo. Appointees have only four years (eight at the most) to effect change and make a difference. They need a road map to do that starting on Day One.

That road map is exactly what Mandate provides. It is not a mandate to maintain the status quo but just do it a little more efficiently. Rather, it is a mandate to significantly advance conservative principles in practice and demonstrate to the American people that where liberal policies generally fail, conservative solutions succeed in making life better for all of us