According to his bio in the Mandate for Leadership, “Max Primorac is Director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. He was acting Chief Operating Officer and Assistant to the Administrator, Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, at the U.S. Agency for International Development.” That agency, commonly referred to as USAID, is what Primorac covers in the book. Primorac is not alone among the contributors to the Mandate for Leadership who have transitioned from positions in the Trump administration to positions with the organizations backing Project 2025.
Primorac’s Heritage Foundation bio mentions that his “key areas of specialization are global development, especially the adverse effects of China’s global expansion and climate policies…and international religious freedom.” This excerpt from his bio touches on three themes of Project 2025: (1) viewing China as a threat to be countered by American soft and hard power, (2) climate change denialism, and (3) religious freedom, as conservatives understand it.
First, an overview of U.S. foreign policy reveals a disturbing trend: The United States has long gone in search of enemies. Examples of this include the U.S.’s many foreign wars and actions against communist and leftist governments and insurgents as well as the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of combating terrorism, even though Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attack. Project 2025 seeks to continue this trend by casting China as an adversary or even an enemy that presents an existential challenge to the United States.
Second, the people behind Project 2025 also take a dim view of any government policy that addresses climate change. The Project 2025 team sees climate change through a political lens, in which Democrats and liberals are exploiting the issue through alarmism in order to impose their will, even if doing so is costly and has adverse effects. Regarding China’s relation to climate change, the Heritage Foundation frames the issue as “the Chinese Communist Party’s calculated strategy to control ‘green energy’ sources” and “the American left’s eagerness to collaborate with China in the fight against climate change.”
Further, Primorac complains in the Mandate for Leadership that “The [Biden] Administration has incorporated its radical climate policy into every USAID initiative. It has joined or funded international partnerships dedicated to advancing the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement and has supported the idea of giving trillions of dollars more in aid transfers for ‘climate reparations.’” As Jeva Lange, writing for Heatmap, points out, “Biden has not promised climate reparations–despite Trump and other Republicans’ frequent claims to the contrary.” Also, the Biden administration’s climate policy is hardly radical.
Third, it is necessary to understand what America’s right-wing Christians mean by “religious freedom.” Writing for the American Bar Association (hardly a bastion of radical leftism), Katherine Stewart puts it this way: “well-funded, right-wing religious legal advocacy groups have promoted a very different and quite false concept of religious freedom….It has little to do with the traditional idea that all people should be free to worship or not worship without interference or coercion from law or government. It is instead the idea that (certain) religious groups and perspectives have a right to trump those civil laws of which they disapprove on religious grounds. The idea is invariably accompanied with either implicit or explicit favoring of certain religious groups and perspectives over others, and it involves granting special privileges, and indeed public funds, to such favored groups.”
Regarding public funds, Primorac writes in his section on USAID in the Mandate for Leadership that “Under the Trump Administration, USAID focused on…increased awards to cost-effective local (including faith-based) organizations.” That the U.S. government would provide money to faith-based organizations should be a cause for concern for all Americans who value the country’s tradition of separation of church and state, which includes not providing taxpayer funds to religious institutions.
In the Mandate for Leadership Primorac criticizes “awards to a self-serving and politicized aid industrial complex [that includes] for-profit contractors.” Primorac is one to know about the awarding of USAID funds to private contractors, as a news report by ProPublica makes clear. The news story is about how, “Weeks before joining the administration, Max Primorac, a USAID appointee and adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, pushed the business interests of a client to an organization funded by USAID.”
The article tells how, “In [an] email, Primorac touted Qi Card, an Iraqi debit card, and suggested that the UNDP use it for transactions. Primorac identified his client as Markez, a U.S. firm hired at the time by Qi Card’s parent company to help build the card’s customer base.” Further, “The ethics complaint by the State Department official noted that the UNDP was a major USAID funding recipient.”
The article goes on to relate how the Trump administration threatened to stop funding “ineffective” U.N. programs in Iraq and “criticized the organization for not doing enough to help Iraqi Christians.” Moreover, “career USAID and State Department officials came under sustained White House pressure, particularly from Pence’s office, to give more money to Christians in Iraq.” Later, “Pence [with whom Primorac was allied] was displeased by new grants in Iraq, which had gone to large, established aid groups and not local Christian organizations.”
If Project 2025 becomes a guide for government policy, and if its backers are made part of the next conservative presidential administration, it would be reasonable to expect that the practice of providing government funds to favored religious organizations would be normalized.
Speaking before Congress, Primorac has criticized the Biden administration’s management of U.S. foreign aid. Primorac stated that “the sector has been taken over by a fringe group of radicals unrepresentative of America.” That the thousands of conservatives slated to take the reins of the U.S. government according to Project 2025’s plan could be considered a fringe group of radicals unrepresentative of America seems not to have crossed Primorac’s mind.
Primorac goes on to claim that the “fringe group of radicals” have worked to the “benefit of Communist China, Putin’s Russia, Iran and its proxies, and other global actors that mean to do us harm.” Primorac goes on to describe the Trump administration as providing “a robust counter-China” foreign development program that offered a clear alternative to China’s “predatory financing, corruption, substandard labor and environmental practices, repression, and subordination to Beijing’s political diktats.”
As for predatory financing, the United States hardly has clean hands, and that charge can be laid at the feet of Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Similarly, USAID’s anti-corruption efforts did not begin with the Trump administration and end when Biden took office. The same can be said regarding advocacy for better labor practices. As for subordination to political dictates, that could be said to be the point of any country’s use of soft or hard power.
It is worth noting that presidential adviser Ivanka Trump secured Chinese trademarks, that Donald Trump had “a Chinese bank account and spent years pursuing business projects in the country,” and that he “paid nearly $200,000 in taxes to China.”
Regarding the accusation that the Biden administration’s aid policies are “taking on the social sector obligations of the Syrian regime” and thereby “indirectly financing Russia’s and Iran’s power projection in the Middle East,” the connection between aid to Syrian refugees and enhancement of Russian and Iranian power projection is hard to see.
Primorac’s policy statements do not stop there. Indeed, they go on to what Laura Thornton, writing for Foreign Policy magazine, enter into the realm of the “bizarre.” For example, Primorac derides what he sees as “ideologically driven political agendas, such as diversity, equity and
inclusion, transgenderism, and climate alarmism.” Presumably to combat the mere idea of a transgender person’s being acknowledged by the U.S. government, for example, Thorton claims that “According to Project 2025, Trump’s new USAID will also eliminate the word “gender” full stop…This is bizarre, as I have decades of experience receiving USAID funding for numerous programs to advance women in political life and support women’s organizations.”
As for DEI, which exists to help historically marginalized people, Thorton writes that “Project 2025 calls [DEI] “discriminatory.” In other words, a policy to counter discrimination is discriminatory in the eyes of supporters of Project 2025. Regarding “climate alarmism,” that means, in non-Project 2025 terms, acknowledging the existence of climate change and its adverse effects and proposing actions to ameliorate them.
Primorac goes on to decry “progressive extremists” that “have taken over the foreign aid industry that could once boast of strong bipartisan support….Our foreign aid agencies, and the industry it finances, have lost all semblance of nonpartisanship, creating hostile work environments for those who do not subscribe to their political ideology.” Project 2025, it should be pointed out, aims precisely to advance an extremist, partisan agenda and to create a hostile work environment for those who do not subscribe to a highly conservative political ideology, and the loss of all semblance of nonpartisanship may well be blamed on Republican politics since the days of Newt Gingrich.
As for the claim that foreign aid has enjoyed bipartisan support, a counterclaim is that U.S. conservatives have generally opposed foreign aid. For example, one may cite the actions of Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Primorac makes another claim that “An example of the radicalization of our aid is USAID’s $45 million, five-year program…based on the social movement theories of an Italian Marxist professor.” An Italian Marxist professor?
The Heritage Foundation provides more information: “In a footnote, USAID reveals that the ‘democracy’ theory behind this program is the work of Donatella della Porta, an Italian intellectual and author of Social Movements: An Introduction, a foundational work among global progressives. In a 2015 roundtable discussion topic on “Marxism(s) in Social Movement, Is Marx Back in Social Theory,” della Porta spoke about “why Marxism should speak to social movement studies.”
So, since a footnote referred to a theory of democracy (no ironic quotation marks needed) provided by a professor who wrote a book about social movements and who also happened to address Marxism in a discussion in 2015, we are supposed to conclude that “the U.S. government” has “explicitly endorsed Marxism”?
Primorac goes on to decry “aggressive ideological conformity”—not the aggressive ideological conformity proposed by Project 2025, of course, and “the [Biden] administration’s obsession with abortion”—not the obsession with abortion among the conservatives backing Project 2025.
Next is the complaint that “It is a gross misallocation of our resources when USAID’s own data shows that climate-related deaths from droughts, floods, and fires saw a 97 percent drop over the past century.” The note to back up this claim links to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Bjorn Lomborg, not USAID data. The WSJ editorial mentions “The International Disaster Database” but does not tie the database to USAID. The article goes on to say that “A century ago, almost half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. Over the next 10 decades, global annual deaths from these causes declined 96%, to 18,000. In 2020, they dropped to 14,000.”
Before reviewing the numbers cited, a review of the claimant is in order. “Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is ‘False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.’” Bjorn Lomborg is a professional “lukewarmer,” or person who does not deny global warming but does deceptively minimize its adverse effects.
Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director for the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (hardly a bunch of wild-eyed tree huggers), offers more background in a piece titled “More misinformation and nonsense on climate from Lomborg and Tol.” Ward writes: “Bjorn Lomborg has demonstrated once again why he is the darling of right-wing newspapers around the world that are still desperate to promote climate change denial.” Further, “Dr Lomborg provides a masterclass in the use of inaccurate and misleading sources to construct a bogus narrative.” Regarding the claim of a dramatic decrease in disaster deaths, Ward goes on to write: “Dr Lomborg ignored the experts and cherrypicked the data to convey a misleading impression of the magnitude of the reduction in weather-related deaths over the past century. While there has been a significant drop, thanks to better disaster response, new early warning systems, stronger building codes and other measures, there is no certainty that this trend will be maintained as the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events increase in many parts of the world.”
Finally, in case there is any remaining doubt about Project 2025’s climate denialism, Media Matters observes that “Max Primorac suggests the next administration ‘rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs’ and shut down any offices or departments connected to the Paris Climate Agreement. Project 2025 also suggests eliminating or curtailing funding to dozens of federal programs or offices related to climate change.”
In sum, Primorac is aligned with Project 2025’s agenda of climate change denialism. He has partaken in partisan, deceptive, and exaggerated rhetoric regarding the Biden administration. He has also been an advocate of the Trump administration policy, notably promulgated by Mike Pence, of providing U.S. government money to religious institutions. He has also accused the Biden administration of “radical” and “extremist” policies while seemingly not recognizing Project 2025 as radical and extremist. Primorac is no outlier among the authors of the Mandate for Leadership.
