Paul Winfree is the author of the chapter in The Mandate for Leadership concerning the Federal Reserve. According to Ballotpedia: “Winfree is the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies [and] was a member of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team, a group of advisors tasked with recommending presidential appointments for the incoming administration.” According to Ballotpedia, many other Heritage staffers made the transition from the foundation to the Trump administration. Winfree was among those who transitioned back to Heritage after serving in the Trump administration.
According to the Washington Post, “Several Heritage analysts already have joined the [Trump] administration, notes Romina Boccia, the lead author of this year’s Heritage budget blueprint. At the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, Paul Winfree, who oversaw last year’s budget blueprint at Heritage, is now deputy director and former Heritage researcher James Sherk is in charge of labor and employment policy. Justin Bogie, another Heritage analyst, was on the OMB landing team. Justin T. [“The defense budget is simply too low”] Johnson, a defense budgeting expert, was on the Pentagon landing team and may stay there, Boccia added.”
Notably, Winfree also served in an official role in the Biden administration, as chair of the Fulbright foreign scholarship board. In this regard, Winfree may be considered an outlier among the people behind Project 2025.
In other regards, however, Winfree is much in agreement with others at Heritage and the other groups behind Project 2025. For example, in a pinned tweet, he shows support for “border security, preserving and expanding the Trump-era tax cuts, reducing inflation, and policies that boost the labor market and downsize the federal bureaucracy.”
(In May 2024, House Republicans tanked a bipartisan border security bill at Trump’s request. The Trump tax cuts added, by one count, “almost $7.8 trillion [to the debt] during Trump’s time in office,” and extending the cuts would add more to the debt. The argument has been made that increasing taxes, notably on the rich, could help decrease inflation, but historically conservatives have resisted tax increases and especially tax increases on the rich. As for boosting the labor market, if that means job creation, then this from Al Jazeera is worth citing: “Under Biden, the economy has added about 15.7 million jobs. By contrast, Trump left office with some three million fewer jobs – although that figure was skewed by the pandemic.” As for downsizing the federal bureaucracy, Project 2025’s approach is to quickly fire tens of thousands of experienced professionals and replace them with people whose main qualification is their ideology.)
Winfree also seems to follow conservative thinking in that poor people can reduce their need for government assistance by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps—for example, by working in order to obtain benefits. Winfree allegedly had a hand in a Trump-era executive order titled “Executive Order Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility.” The order tells government agencies to “review any public assistance programs…that do currently require work for receipt of benefits or services, and determine whether the enforcement of such work requirements is consistent with Federal law and the principles outlined in this order.” The executive order also promulgates the policy that “To promote the proper scope and functioning of government, the Federal Government must afford State, local, and tribal governments the freedom to design and implement programs that better allocate limited resources to meet different community needs.” That may sound OK in principle, but look at what happened in Mississippi.
