By: Scott Fosdick, Special projects editor
What is Project 2025 and Why Should I Care About it?
Most of us have seen scores of headlines about Project 2025. If you’re like me, your first reaction is to avoid wasting time on the fever dreams of the lunatic right. This one, however, warrants our close attention, as it provides an extremely detailed vision of what the Republican Party has in store if it manages to take control of the White House and Congress.
Project 2025 is a 900-page playbook, “Mandate for Leadership”, for the transformation of government and American life created by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank founded in 1973 that has been instrumental in forming policy goals for Republican administrations.
Project 2025, sometimes called the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, is a blueprint for consolidating power in the executive branch to enable a laundry list of initiatives favored by religious extremists, white supremacists, and climate change-denying oil industrialists. It would achieve these ends in part by removing civil service employees and replacing them with partisans loyal to the president.
Guts the EPA
It’s difficult to say which of these ideas is most dangerous, but my leading candidate is the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency (established, ironically, by the Nixon administration in 1970).
Some problems – gun violence, for example – cause immediate suffering, but may eventually be reduced by better policies; any solution that works will still be available in the future. With most issues, we could ride out several years of Republican mismanagement and eventually make things better when they lose power.
Climate change is different. Without action soon, we will reach a point of no return, with consequences that cannot be avoided regardless of what we do. Project 2025 takes a big step backward when it comes to reducing carbon emissions.
For more on how Project 2025 would roll back progress on climate change, read this article from the Yale Climate Connections website.
Short-term, lower taxes on corporations and the very rich would be the greatest impact of the plan, resulting in either higher taxes for middle and lower-income people or increased deficits- or both. This, of course, has been a feature of all Republican administrations since (but not including) Eisenhower’s. Income inequality is the Republican calling card. It would not be exacerbated by another Trump administration, even without the detailed game plan offered by Project 2025. In 2017, Trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Project 2025 recommends deeper cuts. It also proposes paring the number of tax brackets for personal income, effectively raising taxes on those in the lower brackets.
Eliminates the Dept. of Education
Public education would take a major hit if Project 2025 has its way. It calls for the total elimination of the Department of Education, blunting decades-long efforts to make college affordable to more people. It would also rewrite the history books in ways similar to what has been going on in states like Florida and Texas.
An article in The Wisconsin Independent details the many impacts of Project 2025 on education
[Continues in column 2].
