What is Project 2025? And why we should avoid it at all costs
If you’ve been following the political news lately, even slightly, you’ve heard about “Project 2025.” As we get closer and closer to the 2024 presidential election date, Tuesday, November 5, 2024, it’s time we all took a closer look at exactly what Project 2025 is and what it means. Simply put, Project 2025 is a blueprint for Donald Trump’s second presidential term and what he plans to do if elected to that high office once again. The document was prepared by The Heritage Foundation, the plan’s authors including several key members from Trump’s inner political circle.
One civilian Republican I know actually read all 900+ pages of the project and described it simply as “Trump’s plan to become King of America. It won’t matter what the courts say, what the House says, what the Senate says, what law enforcement agencies say, Trump will be able to do whatever he wants.” Several sources describe Project 2025 as the Fascist Blueprint for America.
Project 2025 is designed to dismantle a major chunk of the U.S. Government and transform it so that all power and decision-making lies under the purview of the U.S. President, with the entirety of the Executive Branch falling beneath the President’s control – in an autocratic vision of the transformed presidential office.
Additionally, the blueprint for Trump’s second term includes some of the following proposals. There are more not included for the purpose of brevity.
- Reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees in order to replace them with people loyal to the president – basically, having them all sign a mandatory partisan loyalty oath to the president.
- Project 2025 would allow the president to rule many government agencies that have historically been non-partisan and independent of the president’s office. The plan proposes the president taking control and being able to autocratically direct the:
- Department of Justice (DOJ)
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
- Department of Commerce
- Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
- Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
- Project 2025 would dismantle the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
- Project 2025 would reduce environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuels.
- Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be transferred or terminated.
- Funding for climate research would be cut.
- The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be made less independent, stopped from funding research with embryonic stem cells, and stopped from using quotas to promote equal participation by women.
- Project 2025 would cut Medicare and Medicaid,
- Project 2025 urges the government to explicitly reject abortion as health care and would eliminate coverage of emergency contraception and enforce the Comstock Act to prosecute those who send and receive contraceptives and abortion pills.
- Project 2025 would remove legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The projects would also terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and affirmative action by having the DOJ prosecute “anti-white racism”.
- The Project recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants.
- It proposes deploying the military for domestic law enforcement. It promotes capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of those sentences.
- The project also hopes to undo “[al]most everything implemented” by the Biden Administration.”
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The Republican View: The official Republican description of the plan can be found below as shared by the Project 2025 website.
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Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project
Project 2025 is a historic movement, brought together by over 100 respected organizations from across the conservative movement, to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people. Its Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, published in April 2023, is a product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from around the country. The book offers a menu of policy suggestions to meet our country’s deepest challenges and put America back on track, including:
- Secure the border, finish building the wall, and deport illegal aliens
- De-weaponize the Federal Government by increasing accountability and oversight of the FBI and DOJ
- Unleash American energy production to reduce energy prices
- Cut the growth of government spending to reduce inflation
- Make federal bureaucrats more accountable to the democratically elected President and Congress
- Improve education by moving control and funding of education from DC bureaucrats directly to parents and state and local governments
- Ban biological males from competing in women’s sports
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The Democrats’ View: The official Democratic response to Project 2025 can be found on Kamala Harris’ Project 2025 website which begins with the header statement:
ROLL BACK FREEDOMS.
NATIONAL ABORTION BAN.
ABOLISH CHECKS AND BALANCES.
Harris’ site then goes on to describe many of the plan’s proposals in more detail, as indicated below.
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Donald Trump’s plans for a full government takeover have been exposed. Scroll down to see what’s in it for yourself — and tell your friends.
His Project 2025 agenda would strip away our freedoms.
It includes a plan hatched by people who used to work for Donald Trump that focuses on the first 180 days.
(Project 2025 Website)
The plan begins with a sweeping takeover of the federal government to consolidate power under Donald Trump. Inside pages of dense policy proposals, their intentions become clear.
“Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.”
(New York Times, July 17, 2023)
Project 2025 is a plan to seize power within the federal government.
First: They’d make it easier to fire non-partisan government employees, like they attempted to do at the end of Trump’s administration.
Reissue Trump’s schedule F executive order to permit discharge of nonperforming employees. (Project 2025, a Mandate for Leadership, p. 535)
Then, they’d replace them with politically appointed Trump Loyalists.
“The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch….The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch.… Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will”. (p. 43-44)
They’d end the independence of the Department of Justice and FBI…
“Conservatives have long believed in either ending law enforcement activities of independent agencies or ending their independent status. (p. 873)
…and turn them into enforcement arms of the White House.
The next conservative Administration must make every effort to obtain the resources to support a vast expansion of the number of appointees in every office and component across the department—especially in the Civil Rights Division, the FBI, and the EOIR.” (p. 569)
“[This] would also place the FBI under a politically accountable leader.” (p. 549)
Some of Donald Trump’s allies are assembling proposals to curtail the Justice Department’s independence and turn the nation’s top law enforcement body into an attack dog for conservative causes, nine people involved in the effort told Reuters.
(Reuters, May 17, 2024)
All while Trump has immunity from crimes committed in office thanks to a ruling from his Supreme Court picks.
Project 2025 is a plan to give MAGA extremists control over your life.
Trump and his Project 2025 allies overturned Roe v. Wade and unleashed extreme abortion bans across the country. Now, they’ll go even further.
They’ll implement a 50-state “backdoor ban” on abortion — without Congress — and jail health care providers.
“Announcing a Campaign to Enforce the Criminal Prohibitions in 18 U.S. Code §§ 1461 and 1462.” (p. 562)
Project 2025 would resurrect a law from the 1800s called the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide and jail health care providers. (p. 459)
Don’t take our word for it. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation: A literal interpretation of the [Comstock] Act could potentially also apply to materials used to produce all abortions, not just medication abortions; would not have exceptions; and could affect other medical care, such as miscarriage management.
(Kaiser Family Foundation, 4/15/24)
And they’ll ban abortion medication, which is also used in a range of ways to protect women’s health.
“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world…. The FDA should reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs.” (p. 457)
They’ll force states to report women’s miscarriages and abortions to Trump’s Federal Government.
Project 2025 would “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds” to force states to report miscarriages and “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders,” including the “reason” for every abortion. (p. 455)
They’ll put limits on contraception access.
The President should “[e]liminate the week-after-pill from the contraceptive mandate as a potential abortifacient.” (p. 485)
Allows employers to deny workers access to birth control coverage. (p. 483-85)
It also calls for defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides access to contraception for over 2 million women each year. (p. 471)
And then rip away President Biden’s protections for a woman’s right to life-saving medical care.
The President should “reverse distorted pro-abortion ‘interpretations’ added to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. (p. 473)
They’ll enable discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans.
Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics. The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc. (p. 584)
Project 2025 is a plan to make Trump and his rich friends even richer.
It will cut taxes for Trump and his rich friends and pad their profits.
“The corporate income tax should be reduced to 18 percent.” (p. 696)
And cut taxes for wealthy families — offset by tax hikes on middle class families.
Project 2025 would restructure the tax code to benefit wealthy families. (p. 696)
Millions of low- and middle-class households would likely face significantly higher taxes under the Project 2025’s proposals. [Center for American Progress senior director for economic policy Brendan Duke] estimated that a middle-class family with two children and an annual income of $100,000 would pay $2,600 in additional federal income tax if they faced a 15% flat tax on their income due to the loss of the 10% and 12% tax brackets. If the Child Tax Credit were also eliminated, they would pay an additional $6,600 compared with today’s tax system, Duke said. By comparison, a married couple with two children and earnings of $5 million a year would enjoy a $325,000 tax cut, he estimated.
(CBS News, 7/12/24)
They’d line Big Pharma’s pockets by ending prescription drug price caps for seniors, and banning Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices.
“Repeal harmful health policies enacted under the Obama and Biden Administrations such as… the Inflation Reduction Act.” (p. 465)
“This ‘negotiation’ program should be repealed.” (p. 465)
All while Trump’s administration guts Medicare and Social Security.
When asked about cuts to entitlements like Medicare and Social Security, Trump said: “Oh we’ll be cutting,” and later doubled down, saying, “There’s a lot you can do…in terms of cutting.”
Trump has also called Social Security a “Ponzi Scheme,” supported raising the age for eligibility, and has been open to privatizing it.
They’d let employers drastically cut overtime — or eliminate it outright.
- Return to Trump’s overtime rule, meaning 4 million middle class workers will lose overtime protections because of the salary they make.
- Make remote employees work 10, instead of 8, hours in a day before they can earn overtime.
- Prevent benefits from counting as part of workers’ overtime calculations
- Allow employers to calculate overtime over four weeks instead of one. (pp. 587, 589, 592)
And they’d reinstate crippling student debt payments.
“The new Administration must end abuses in the loan forgiveness programs. Borrowers should be expected to repay their loans” (p. 322).
“The Secretary should phase out all existing [income-driven repayment] plans by making new loans (including consolidation loans) ineligible…. If new legislation is possible, there should be no loan forgiveness, but if not, existing law would require forgiving any remaining balance after 25 years.” (pp. 337-38).
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Link: You can view, download, print, read, and digest the complete Project 2025 plan here.
More Links:
- Project 2025 web site: https://www.project2025.org/
- Kamala Harris website: https://kamalaharris.com/project2025/
- The Heritage Foundation: https://www.heritage.org/
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Opinion: This writer’s take on Project 2025 is that if it’s ever allowed to be implemented, it would result in the end of the United States’ democracy as we know it. This plan would forego the necessary checks and balances built in to our democratic system by our forefathers – and reduce our country to being ruled by a dictator, like those of Trump’s idols – Vladamir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
This country cannot afford another tax cut for the wealthiest 1% to be paid for by raising taxes on low and middle-income households – while doing away with essential health services like Medicaid, Medicare, the NIH, ending prescription drug price caps for seniors, Planned Parenthood, and returning to an ignorance regarding climate change and protecting our environment. Our country cannot afford another four years of Donald Trump. His failed policies as president are a matter of public record.
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His four years were highlighted with mocks from our allies and foreign leaders who quickly saw him for the self-serving, uninformed, uneducated, Reality-TV personality who lied his way into the presidency – with that term beginning with a hush money payment to a porn star and ending with a violent insurrection of his supporters rioting inside the U.S. Capitol Building because he refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election – which he lost “bigly.”
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As of this writing, the video below from The Wall Street Journal regarding Project 2025 has garnered 1.2 million views and almost 9.400 comments. Check it out.
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(Cover photo: Joe Biden .com)
Posted by Richard Webster, Ace News Today
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