Hello everyone I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where none of us is as smart as all of us.

I'm Kai Rosal. Thanks for joining us on this Tuesday. It is the 10th of September.

We are talking today about Project 2025, which is a 922-page document, that's the thing that's gotten all the press

Project 2025 is all project but we'll get there anyway not a hundred page document

written by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation which is a blueprint for a second Trump term.

Right, and it's a set of conservative policy proposals that, as Kaye just mentioned, has gotten

a lot of attention lately. Likely is going to come up in tonight's debate.

So we wanted to know more about what's in it and how it could influence of potential future Trump administration.

So here to make a smart about this is E.J. Fagan.

He teaches political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is the author of

The Thinkers, The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American

Politics.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on.

I want to ask first about the Heritage Foundation since you have written about think tanks.

It feels like this was an organization that while conservative, up until the Trump administration was still taken kind of seriously in

Washington as like a legitimate place to go for meaningful policy research but

that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Yeah, you know, they used to have a motto that they would influence Washington through the power of ideas.

The idea that if they put some information out there they made a good argument that they could

get conservative policy through.

And they were quite successful for some time, especially during the Reagan administration

...