Project 2025; What is it? Why Care?

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].

Reclassifies civil servants

Project 2025 sees most civil service employees as supporters of the so-called deep state. It would reclassify them as political appointees loyal to the president. Under a Trump administration, many argue, this would lead to the establishment of an autocratic Christian nationalist state, undermining civil liberties and the separation of church and state. Traditionally, several powerful agencies in the executive branch have operated with some independence from presidential control: the departments of Justice, Commerce, and Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission.

Healthcare no longer a right

The nation’s healthcare system would be transformed by Project 2025. It would cut Medicare and Medicaid and transform the National Institutes of Health. Abortion would no longer be classified as health care, coverage of emergency contraception would end, and the sending and receiving of contraceptives and abortion pills would be criminalized.

This PBS report on Trump’s plans for health care deserves a look.

Prosecuting anti-white racism, Using the military for law enforcement

A wide range of justice issues are addressed by Project 2025. It would remove laws against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, criminalize pornography, and end affirmative action and DEl programs. The Department of Justice would instead prosecute so called anti-white racism. Illegal immigrants would be arrested and deported. It recommends using the military for law enforcement and promotes the quick use of capital punishment.

See the July 5, 2024, article in the New York Times, “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans.

Trump and Project 2025

The more Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025, the more stories surface showing his and J.D. Vance’s ties to its authors. For its own part, to keep its non- profit status, The Heritage Foundation maintains a formal distance from the Trump campaign. However, many of its employees are former members of the Trump administration. Last year, Trump campaign officials said Project 2025 aligns neatly with its own Agenda 47 manifesto. When Project 2025 began to receive more attention and criticism early this summer, Trump reversed course and pretended that he had never heard of it while at the same time attempting to distance himself from some of its particulars. The Heritage Foundation brags that the majority of its election-year Mandates for Leadership have been enacted by the Republican administrations for which they were fashioned, beginning with Reagan and continuing through the Trump term.

Despite what candidates may say now, it’s clear that the only thing that can stop the implementation of Project 2025 is the defeat of Republicans up and down the ballot on November 5.

If all of the above seems overwhelming and difficult to visualize, there is a novel that imagines a dystopia remarkably similar to the one Trump has in mind. It was written by Margaret Atwood in 1985. It’s called The Handmaid’s Tale. Read it and weep.


[This special edition of the DoorDems Newsletter was written by Special Projects Editor Scott Fosdick. We thank him for guiding it to this fruition…]

 

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