Kent Lassman has made a career of promoting free-trade, anti-regulatory policy advocacy at various think tanks. According to Wikipedia, as of this writing, he “is the president and CEO of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an American free market think tank.”
According to SourceWatch, “The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C….CEI’s mission is to ‘reform America’s unaccountable regulatory state,’ and to advance ‘policies to eliminate harmful bureaucratic controls so people can live in a freer, healthier, and more prosperous nation.’ The organization is primarily associated with tobacco disinformation and climate change denial, having received substantial funding from companies and political advocacy groups in the tobacco, energy, technology, and automotive industries. Inside Climate News has referred to CEI as ‘one of the fossil fuel industry’s most steadfast allies,’ while CEI itself claims it ‘has been instrumental in fighting decades of climate alarmism.’”
CEI is reportedly a member of the advisory board of Project 2025.
According to Exposed by CMD on a page titled “The Dirty Dozen: The Biggest Nonprofit Funders of Climate Denial,” CEI’s “former executive director, Gregory Conko, is senior director of programs at DonorsTrust.” In turn, AccountableUS describes DonorsTrust as a “’dark money ATM for hate groups, right-wing extremist orgs.”
As far as climate denialism and right-wing extremism go, the president and CEO of CEI is well within the ideological tent of the other authors of The Mandate for Leadership. Belief that there is an unaccountable regulatory state imposing its oppressive whims on a defenseless American public, and that drastic action is needed to stop such abuse, is also very much within Project 2025’s weird worldview. So is the belief that eliminating regulations that ensure the quality of–for example–baby food, drugs, and household products will make Americans healthier.
(To digress a little: It can be illustrative to compare The Mandate for Leadership’s account of the baby formula shortage of 2022—which can be found via word search–and the account of a liberal news source such as the Center for American Progress.)
The Case for Free Trade
The Mandate for Leadership presents a unified front on many issues, including fear and hatred of transgender people; an absolutist anti-abortion stance; climate denialism; fossil fuel advocacy; hostility toward China; hostility toward LGBT rights; opposition to DEI, ESG, and CRT (and assigning them a much more baleful and pervasive influence than they actually have); and a desire to break up federal agencies with an eye toward privatization or toward jurisdiction by the states; among other things.
On the other hand, The Mandate for Leadership does allow for a debate on whether the next conservative administration should pursue either 1) a “fair trade” or 2) “free trade” policy. Lassman takes the free-trade side; Peter Navarro takes the fair-trade side.
The Mandate for Leadership summarizes the debate in this way: “In Chapter 26, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute Kent Lassman and former White House director of trade and manufacturing policy Peter Navarro debate what an effective conservative trade policy would look like. Lass man argues that the best trade policy is a humble, limited-government approach that would encourage free trade with all nations.”
Further, “Lassman believes that we should lower or repeal tariffs—including eliminating ‘the destructive Trump–Biden tariffs’—in order to make goods more affordable for Americans. He thinks free trade will improve our economy [and] enhance our national security.”
On the other hand, “in contrast to Lassman, Navarro thinks that “offshoring not only suppresses the real wages of American blue-collar workers…” but also “raises the specter of a manufacturing and defense industrial base that, unlike our experience in World Wars I and II, will not be able to provide the weapons and matériel that would be needed should America enter another major world war.”
One key issue in the debate, as shown above, is whether a free trade policy would adversely affect national security. For a conservative who is a strong adherent of laissez faire, free market economics as axiomatic, this can present a problem. For example, should the United States outsource the manufacturing of its weapons? Ships? Planes? Ammo? Well, what about the components of those weapons? If a military submarine has an off-the-shelf laptop computer on board, should that computer have a microchip that was manufactured, say, in China? If a U.S. military submarine does not have off-the-shelf computers, the question still applies–should the submarine’s bespoke computers have Chinese chips?
The Mandate for Leadership quotes Navarro as writing: “Trade policy can and must play an essential role in an American manufacturing and defense industrial base renaissance.”
As an aside, the dividing line between civilian- and defense-related manufacturing can be blurry. What about, say, first aid kits? Or widgets that have both civilian and defense uses? Or, for that matter, can a sewing machine factory be retooled to make guns, as happened in World War II? (and at the behest of the government no less) Therefore, one may argue that a government policy that supports domestic manufacturing generally can have a benefit for national security.
This line of questioning can lead a conservative who is dedicated to partisanship to a difficult position. Should a partisan conservative support, for example, the CHIPS and Science Act, which was favored by a Democratic president? The act, after all, was intended to “strengthen supply chains and counter China” by promoting domestic production of computer chips. One may imagine that for Lassman the choice would be simple enough—oppose the act because it goes against the free-market principle that the government should not interfere with business.
For those who are less dedicated to partisanship or absolutist approaches to trade policy, there is a way to a solution. It could involve, for example, a policy of compromise that favors domestic manufacturing (especially for military matériel) for reasons such as national security and promoting jobs within a nation’s borders but that also allows for imports to compete to one degree or another with domestic products.
Project 2025, however, is very explicitly not about compromise. It is about firing thousands of civil servants (despite whatever expertise or experience they may have) and replacing them with zealots (despite what they may lack in experience, expertise, integrity, or ability to compromise) who will follow the directives of the few hundred oligarchs who fund the entities behind Project 2025. The express purpose of those zealots is to run roughshod over the desires of the nation’s moderates and liberals. The harm that would result to the United States is clear.
