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.
