Project 2025 Summary

 

Perhaps you been hearing about Project 2025, like I have, in bits and snippets, without much detail. Well, yesterday I got wondering what Project 2025 was really all about. I didn’t have time to read the whole 922-page book published by the Heritage Foundation, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, that lays out in detail what Project 2025 proposes, so I did the next-best thing; I looked for a summary on Wikipedia, and I was not disappointed. Wikipedia gives a full summation, point by point, of Project 2025, including some valuable context. Wikipedia gives page citations from the Heritage book for each point. Basically, Project 2025 envisions widespread changes to economic and social policies and the federal government and its agencies. I distilled the following list of 50 specific proposals from Wikipedia’s longer summary. As you will see, if even half of Project 2025’s proposals are implemented, we will be living in a very different country than we are now, since a good deal of the project’s intent is to dismantle much of the federal government, infuse both government and society with conservative Christian values, set corporations free from government oversight, and steer the U.S. toward autocracy. Project 2025 proposes, among other things:

 

1. taking partisan control of the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Commerce, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC);

2. dismantling the Department of Homeland Security (DHS);

3. reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuels;

4. instituting tax cuts;

5. abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be transferred or terminated; 

6. cutting funding for climate research; 

7. making the National Institutes of Health (NIH) less independent, stopping them from funding research with embryonic stem cells or using quotas to promote equal participation by women;

8. cutting Medicare and Medicaid, 

9. explicitly rejecting abortion as health care; 

10. eliminating coverage of emergency contraception; 

11. enforcing the Comstock Act to prosecute those who send and receive contraceptives and abortion pills; 

12. withdrawing approval of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol;

13. criminalizing pornography;

14. removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity; 

15. terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and affirmative action by having the DOJ prosecute “anti-white racism”; 

16. arresting, detaining, and deporting illegal immigrants; 

17. deploying the military for domestic law enforcement; 

18. enforcing capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of those sentences;

19. undoing almost everything implemented by the Biden Administration;

20. infusing Christian nationalism into every facet of government policy;

21. abolishing the Federal Reserve;

22. eventually moving from an income tax to a national sales tax;

23. changing the tax code in ways that would likely increase taxes significantly on lower- and middle-income households;

24. reducing the corporate tax from 21 percent to 18 percent (before the Trump tax cuts, it was 35 percent);

25. reducing the capital gains tax from 20 percent to 15 percent;

26. abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau;

27. abolishing the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces antitrust laws;

28. shrinking the role of the National Labor Relations Board, which protects employees’ ability to organize and fight unfair labor practices;

29. instituting work requirements for people reliant on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps);

30. allowing states to opt out of federal educational programs or standards;

31. making public funds for education available as school vouchers with no strings attached, even for parents to send their children to private or religious schools;

32. eliminating Head Start, a program that provides services to children of low-income families;

33. ensuring that “any research conducted with taxpayer dollars serves the national interest in a concrete way in line with conservative principles,” which would, for example, reduce funding for research in climatology;

34. abandoning strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, including by repealing regulations that curb emissions, downsizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA);

35. preventing states from adopting stricter regulations on vehicular emissions;

36. relaxing regulations on the fossil fuel industry;

37. reversing a 2009 EPA finding that carbon dioxide emissions are harmful to human health, preventing the government from regulating greenhouse gas emissions;

38. dismissing all Department of State employees and replacing them with Trump loyalists;

39. reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees and replacing them with Trump loyalists, who would be willing to bend or break protocol and in some cases violate laws to achieve Trump’s goals;

40. increasing the number of nuclear weapons above treaty limits and preparing to test new nuclear weapons despite the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;

41. prohibiting Medicare from negotiating drug prices;

42. denying gender-affirming care to transgender people;

43. cutting funding for Medicaid in a number of ways, and allowing states to impose stricter work requirements for beneficiaries;

44. increasing Medicaid eligibility determinations to make it harder to enroll in, apply for, and renew Medicaid;

45. withholding federal disaster relief funds to state or local governments that refuse to abide by federal immigration laws;

46. ending same-sex marriage, removing protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual or gender identity, and eliminating provisions pertaining to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI);

47. defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting;

48. allowing more media consolidation by converting local news programs into national news programs;

49. reforming the Department of Justice and placing it under White House supervision;

50. making the director of the FBI personally accountable to the president.

 

If this looks like democracy to you, well, your idea of democracy is very different from mine, but this is exactly where today’s Republican Party is headed (or where it has already arrived). Trump may be trying to distance himself from Project 2025 by claiming ignorance (we’ve seen that movie before), but it was written by some of his most loyal followers and will surely find its way into his administration, if America is crazy enough to elect him again.