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.

Deciphering Spiritual Feelings Is Devilishly Difficult

 

The book I described a few posts ago, Jonathan Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge, is an exploration of the quest for truth. He demonstrates how difficult it is to arrive at truth and contends that this quest is always a communal endeavor. He has given me a lot to think about. In the LDS Church, we tend to come at the question from a different angle, claiming that we can know the truth of various ideas, documents, and events through a confirmation of the Spirit. But my own experience and the experiences of others suggest that this may be an overly simplistic belief. Let me illustrate with seven stories, some personal, that illustrate how difficult it can be to interpret spiritual feelings. At the end, I’ll offer a few observations.

 

I.

In February 1976, I attended a memorable zone conference in a suburb of Hamburg Germany. One of the mission president’s assistants had received authorization to make what in hindsight seems like a totally unwarranted promise. But he stood there in front of the zone and in the name of Jesus Christ promised us missionaries that if we would commit to work fifty-five hours every week in March, then someone we were teaching would surely be baptized. Now, I know that promises like this one run against the very principle of free will and have been specifically condemned by LDS General Authorities, but when the president’s assistant spoke those words, the Holy Ghost hit me right in the solar plexus, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was speaking the truth. Apparently almost everyone else felt the same witness I did, because when the assistant asked us to raise our right hands to the square and promise to work those fifty-five-hour weeks, everyone in the zone quickly raised his or her hand. Everyone, that is, except my senior companion.

I couldn’t believe it. The wind went out of my sails as quickly as if I had floated into the Doldrums. How could he? I thought. I hadn’t seen a baptism yet on my mission, but here was a guarantee. All we had to do was work fifty-five hours. Heavens, we were already doing that. There wasn’t even any sacrifice involved. But my companion wouldn’t promise. I was so angry he could have strangled Bruder Carlson (not his real name).

Later I learned that my companion was afraid he might get sick or break his leg or that something out of his control would prevent him from keeping his promise. He didn’t want to make a promise he couldn’t keep. Eventually, after a long talk with one of the zone leaders, who had earlier been a senior companion to Bruder Carlson, he made the promise. And Bruder Carlson didn’t get sick or break his leg. And we worked our fifty-five hours each week. But none of our investigators got baptized. Of course, I realize that the promise never specified when the investigator would get baptized, but for years I kept in touch with some of the members of that ward, and my inquiries have uncovered no evidence that any of the small handful of investigators we taught have yet been baptized. When I was working at Church Magazines, I could request information from the good people down in Membership, as long as I had a good reason. This would have made a great story for the magazines, so I checked with Membership on all the investigators we had at the time. Zip. And anyway, the understanding we all had at that zone conference was that the baptism would occur soon. To this day, I still don’t understand what that strong spiritual confirmation meant, if anything. All I know is that it was a very powerful spiritual feeling.

 

II.

A few years later, as a new elders quorum president in a BYU student ward, I was searching at the beginning of the school year for a counselor among elders I had never met. After visiting all the men’s apartments in the ward, the person I had the strongest spiritual feeling about informed me privately after our visit that he had been excommunicated and was working toward rebaptism. There was a reason I had such a strong impression of him, but it wasn’t because he was to be my counselor. Before the year was over, he had been rebaptized and had his priesthood and temple ordinances restored. But if he had said nothing, I would probably have followed that spiritual feeling and called him as my counselor, a calling he would have probably been embarrassed to turn down. Only his forthright admission saved us both from what would have been an awkward situation.

 

III.

Elder Gerald N. Lund tells the story of a bishop who had a strong spiritual feeling when giving a blessing to young mother in his ward who was experiencing a serious health crisis. Following his feeling, he blessed her that she would be healed. But she died within a few hours. Elder Lund suggests that this bishop had a real spiritual experience, but he misinterpreted it. Perhaps the meaning of the spiritual feeling was just an assurance that the Lord was in charge of the situation. (From pages 8–9 in Hearing the Voice of the Lord)

 

IV.

Years ago, my wife was called to be Primary president, a calling the bishopric undoubtedly had prayed about. She accepted, but afterward she felt great turmoil about the calling, not because she wasn’t capable and not because she wasn’t willing. Something else was wrong. After talking it over with me, she called the bishop. He prayed about it again and then called her back and said, “Sister Terry, this calling is not for you right now.” A couple of months later, we experienced a problem pregnancy that resulted in our third child being born three months premature. For the next year or more, we were in over our heads with his medical needs. Sheri would have had no time or mental and emotional bandwidth to be Primary president. A few years later, however, the same calling was extended, and she accepted the call without any inner turmoil. The bishop obviously missed something in his initial prayers, but he was humble and willing to be questioned by my wife and corrected in subsequent prayers.

 

V.

In recent years, I have observed friends and fellow ward members who have been stricken with cancer. One in particular was cured in a miraculous way. But a few have prayed and felt very strongly that God was telling them they would be healed. These were very righteous people, one even serving in a stake presidency. I don’t doubt that they exercised great faith and believed God was telling them they would conquer the dreaded disease. After intense suffering, though, they died. I think this illustrates that it is very difficult, especially when we are in our extremity, to tell the difference between the spiritual message we desperately want God to give us and our own impassioned feelings.

This difficulty apparently also extends even to Apostles. Many years ago now, my boss told me about his sister-in-law. She was serving in a foreign land with her husband, who was the mission president there. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she returned to the United States for surgery and treatment. She also received a special priesthood blessing from an Apostle. In this blessing, he promised her that she would be healed. After a short battle with the disease, however, she passed away. I have often wondered what the Apostle was basing his promise on. Was it just a warm feeling about this woman and her future? Or was it more specific than that? Regardless, it is both distressing and comforting to know that deciphering spiritual feelings is something all of us struggle with, even Apostles.

 

VI.

Several years ago, I published in Dialogue an essay titled “Frau Rüster and the Cure for Cognitive Dissonance.” It details an overwhelming spiritual manifestation that I shared with two other people—my missionary companion and Frau Rüster, one of our investigators. At the time of the experience and in that essay, I interpreted the manifestation to be a confirmation of “everything” about the Church. But in the ensuing years, I learned a great deal more about what “everything” entails and how complicated the Church and its history are. A decade later, I included an updated version of this essay as a chapter in a mission memoir published by BCC Press. In the memoir, I had to scale back my interpretation of what the manifestation meant. Significantly, I added a question mark to the title. Part of my reason for reconsidering my interpretation is that Frau Rüster, who shared that spiritual outpouring, understood it far differently than I did. All the Spirit told her was that she needed to repent. And despite this wonderful spiritual outpouring, she never did join the Church.

 

VII.

The final story may provide a good summary of my point in this post. Frau Tiedemann (not her real name) had a dream one night in which she was surrounded by fire. Her children were screaming, but she couldn’t get to them. She woke up and sat up in bed. A power came over her that prevented her from moving. A voice then spoke to her. It gave a cryptic message, “Chadwick [my companion] is right. Watch over your family.” The voice repeated these words four or five times. She was frantic. She was sure her family was in grave physical danger. She called us the next morning, hysterical, so we rushed over to her house. Elder Chadwick assured her that it was probably a message about spiritual danger and her children’s eternal welfare. This was “obvious” to us, but certainly not to her.

This experience illustrates that it’s not just spiritual feelings that are difficult to decipher. Sometimes the Spirit speaks in actual words and sentences, but even these can be vague, and we are left on our own to interpret them.

 

Our Craving for Certainty

In the Church, we crave certainty. But often the Spirit is both subtle and ambiguous. Perhaps we place too much emphasis on testimony and not enough on faith. After all, our first article of faith says nothing about sure knowledge. The first principle of the gospel is not certainty; it is faith.

If God wanted to give us certainty, he wouldn’t have had Moroni take back the gold plates. He would appear not just to Joseph Smith but to each of us and tell us in no uncertain terms what is true and what is not. And he definitely wouldn’t have given us scriptures that are both incomplete and internally inconsistent in many ways. But that is apparently not what God wants. Maybe he just wants to see how we will behave in the face of uncertainty. Maybe that’s what faith is all about.

I don’t pretend to know how the interface between the Spirit and our minds and emotions works. All I know is that the interface is a bit spotty at times, perhaps all the time. And for us to declare our certainty may be more than we can really justify.

On the other hand, there have been times when I’ve had strong spiritual impressions, and I’ve followed them, and I have apparently understood them correctly. At least things turned out the way I felt I had been told they would. But in my life, it has been about a 50-50 proposition. At least half the time, I’ve been wrong.

I guess all I’m saying here is that we probably ought to be a lot more cautious in our declarations and interpretations and admit that we may very well be wrong about a lot of things. My 25 years as a full-time editor in the field of Mormon studies has taught me that we know a lot less than we sometimes think we do.

A Tale of Two (or Maybe Three or Four or Five) LDS Politicians

 

In a July 10, 2024, interview with CNN, Utah Governor Spencer Cox stated that he would not vote for Donald Trump, although he also claimed he wanted Trump to win. “I do want Donald Trump to succeed,” said Cox. “I want my party to win. We desperately need the right people in the right positions. I’m very anxious for who he picks as vice president, that’s going to make a big difference.”

I guess Cox is much more excited about “Cat Lady” JD Vance than a large majority of Americans, because Cox changed his stance on Trump the next week, pledging his support for the former president.

Now, contrast Cox’s wishy-washy but eventually willing support of Trump with this clear-eyed statement made in a speech at an Arizona rally of the Harris-Walz campaign. The speaker? John Giles, lifelong Republican, mayor of Mesa, and graduate of BYU. “I do not recognize my party. The Republican Party has been taken over by extremists that are committed to forcing people in the center of the political spectrum out of the party. I have something to say to those of us who are in the political middle: You don’t owe a damn thing to that political party. . . . You don’t owe anything to a party that is out of touch and is hell-bent on taking our country backward. And by all means, you owe no displaced loyalty to a candidate that is morally and ethically bankrupt. . . . In the spirit of the great Senator John McCain, please join me in putting country over party and stopping Donald Trump, and protecting the rule of law, protecting our Constitution, and protecting the democracy of this great country. That is why I’m standing with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz.”

Both of these men are Latter-day Saints. One is willing to put country above party. One is definitely more concerned with reelection and places party above country. Giles’s stand may end his political career. Likely, Arizona Republicans will give him the same treatment they gave Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who refused to overturn a free and fair election in 2020. Bowers, of course, was also LDS and ran for an Arizona senate seat in 2022 but lost badly in the primary, largely due to his refusal to cave in to pressure from Trump and Rudy Giuliani to throw the election. Bowers, despite his ethical stand on election shenanigans, was a Trump supporter.

Then there is Phil Lyman, another BYU graduate, who lost to Spencer Cox in the 2024 primary for Utah governor. Lyman, a rabid Trump supporter (he was pardoned by Trump for organizing and leading an illegal protest on federal lands), has taken many pages out of the Trump playbook. He is currently suing to have Cox disqualified on shaky legal grounds and has announced that he will run for governor as a write-in candidate.

I can’t help but wonder about the reasoning of these four Latter-day Saint politicians and how they interpret the First Presidency statement issued on June 1, 2023, which included the following counsel: “Members should also study candidates carefully and vote for those who have demonstrated integrity, compassion, and service to others, regardless of party affiliation. Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy and inconsistent with revealed standards (see Doctrine and Covenants 98:10).” D&C 98:10 says, “Wherefore, honest men [and women] and wise men [and women] should be sought for diligently, and good men [and women] and wise men [and women] ye should observe to uphold; otherwise whatsoever is less than these cometh of evil.”

The First Presidency, of course, cannot support or oppose a particular party or candidate, but this statement does everything short of naming Trump in telling members they should not vote for him. He is the exact opposite of what this statement and the cited scriptural verse encourage. It cannot be a coincidence that this statement was issued as Trump’s campaign started heating up. It also followed on the heels of his first felony indictments, with many more on the horizon.

It goes without saying that the First Presidency didn’t issue this statement because they were worried about too many Latter-day Saints voting straight-ticket Democrat. This letter was aimed directly at the majority of Saints, who happen to be Republican, many of whom do vote straight ticket because they are woefully uninformed or merely uninterested in politics. Many others have convinced themselves that they can vote for a corrupt and amoral man simply because they “like his policies.”

Now, what about that fifth LDS politician? Well, I’m hopeful that Phil Lyman’s write-in campaign is successful enough to split the Republican vote and allow Brian King, the Democratic candidate, to win the governorship in Utah. Wouldn’t that be a pleasant surprise?