PROJECT 2025

Road Map for an Extremist Presidency

 

Interest peaked this week around “Project 2025”, a 922-page policy document from conservative think-tanks outlining a roadmap for a presidential transition.

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Former President Donald Trump last week denied knowledge of its specifics or backers, although leaders of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and over 200 former high-level White House staff are central to the project. Project 2025 outlines a set of unpopular, controversial and extreme right-wing policy goals, alongside strategies to bypass democratic safeguards and implement those policies.

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Proposals

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1- Advocates for an Imperial Presidency that disregards Congressional and judicial constraints based on their interpretation of the Unitary Principle in the US Constitution.
2- Mass firings of federal civil servants, referred to as the “DEEP STATE” such as NASA, NOA, EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), Consumer Protection Agency, FEMA, Electoral College and others where “expert” knowledge resides; replacing them with vetted right-wing loyalists. As part of efforts related to Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation is actively vetting potential right-wing hires for ideological purity and already conducting an ideological training program, with the goal of delivering tens of thousands of resumes from right-wing activists to a potential Trump transition team in 2025.
3- Aims to curb regulatory agencies, (the DEEP STATE) and enforce conservative cultural norms through a politicized federal workforce.

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While not explicit in the document, conservative leaders advocating for Project 2025 have made it clear they expect they’ll have to use VIOLENCE against their fellow Americans to implement their policy goals. Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, recently likened the project in a right-wing podcast to a “revolution”, saying it would “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.

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Here are the areas of policy that Project 2025 is seeking to influence in a potential Trump administration

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Anti-immigrant policies: MASS DEPORTATIONS also on the Platform adopted at the Republican National Convention. It revives efforts to include a U.S. citizenship question in the census, which experts agree would lead to significant undercount of the population in states with a high percentage of immigrants; disqualifying immigrant-heavy companies from federal contracts; advocating for stricter immigration policies, including mass deportations; increasing focus on the border wall.

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Christian nationalism: Integrating Christian nationalist principles into government, potentially compromising the separation of church and state.

Climate change: Abandoning emissions regulations; downsizing the EPA; abolishing NOAA; promoting fossil fuels over renewable energy.

The economy: Abolishing the Federal Reserve; returning the U.S. dollar to the gold standard; abandoning the government policy of striving for low unemployment; extending the tax cuts for high earners passed in 2017.

Education: Eliminating the Department of Education; reducing federal education funding; curtailing federal protections of civil rights in educational institutions; opposing student loan forgiveness; eliminating federal funding for low-income students; eliminating free school meals and Head Start; defunding university research not aligned with conservative principles.

Foreign affairs: Moving away from nuclear arms control treaties; aggressively pushing conservative policies on countries receiving U.S. aid; pressuring NATO allies to increase spending.

 

Healthcare and public health: Restricting healthcare coverage for trans people; opposing certain contraceptives; cutting Medicaid funding; prohibiting Medicare from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for the price of prescription drugs.

Social Media: Declaring that the impact of social media on young Americans is a public health crisis and using emergency, extreme measures to intervene against social media companies.

Equality and gender identity: Rolling back LGBTQ+ rights; ending same-sex marriage protections; removing anti-discrimination protections based on sexual or gender identity; eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) provisions from federal legislation; opposing all diversity initiatives.

Reproductive health: Restricting abortion access; enforcing strict reporting requirements on abortions; defunding Planned Parenthood.

Pornography: Criminally prosecuting the people and companies who produce pornography, which Project 2025 equates to addictive drugs; banning all pornography eventually.

Transportation: Cutting transit funding; reevaluating transportation projects; curtailing projects aimed at carbon mitigation in traffic infrastructure.

 

 

TALKING POINTS

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• “With details coming out as to what the actual proposals are inside Project 2025, it’s understandable that anyone running for any office would disavow and distance themselves from these highly unpopular policies. But the fact remains that the people leading the project are mostly former, high-level Trump administration officials.”

• “From court rulings blocking – and professional staff refusing to carry out – the cruel and unconstitutional Muslim ban during his first few days as President, to top Justice Department officials threatening to resign en masse if the attorney-general was replaced in order to overturn the election during his last few days, the Trump administration was blocked at various turns by people refusing to break the law on its behalf. The point of Project 2025 is to make sure no president faces such guardrails in the future.”

• "Project 2025 is not just an abstract concept. It’s a playbook for white, supposedly “Christian” fundamentalists to impose their vision of a suffocating, angry, fear-driven America, where all abortions are illegal, watching porn is a crime, gay people are written out of existence, the transition to a clean energy economy is reversed out of pure spite, we return to a nuclear Cold War with Russia and China, and the government lets Big Business do as it pleases. It’s a sadistic revenge plan written by the same people who complain of ‘reverse discrimination’ against conservative white men, which turns the federal executive into a tool to legally discriminate against atheists, immigrants, single mothers, trans people, and anyone else deemed an inconvenient minority.”

• “Project 2025 literally advocates to cut education and health care funding, drive up unemployment, and let corporations abuse their employees and customers as they see fit. It’s a plan funded by big right-wing campaign donors to make Americans less educated, keep them less healthy, and make them financially desperate, driving the average American to willingly accept being exploited by the giant corporations those big right-wing campaign donors own.”
   

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