A quick analysis of what Project 2025 is, what some of its key proposals are, and what the impact of the proposals will be if implemented by a conservative Republican government.
What is Project 2025?
And why we should be concerned about it.
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Democrats believe in these guardrails of democracy that are outlined by the Constitution are necessary for our society to function:
Separation of powers among the 3 branches of government and among federal and state government functions.
Checks and balances derived from separation of powers.
Leaders at every level of government who believe in the separation of powers and encourage Americans to respect our institutions.
A well-trained, deeply knowledgeable civil service to support government functions.
Respect for the rule of law, which includes ethical rules civil servants follow.
Functioning political parties. Democracy requires viable options. Right now, the United States only has one functional political partyDemocrats.
A free press that can hold power to account without fear of oppression, prosecution, or jail time.
Good, reliable information to help Americans make voting decisions and support government functions. Misinformation and disinformation are attacks on this necessary guardrail.
Whoever controls these guardrails determines the meaning of ordered liberty. The concept of ordered liberty was the initial standard for determining what provisions of the Bill of Rights were to be upheld by the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Project 2025 has been in the works for the last two years. In July 2024, Project 2025 started getting a lot of public attention. The creators of Project 2025 bragged boldy about it, probably because they were very confident Trump would win the presidential election. The Heritage Foundation's president, Kevin Roberts, called Project 2025 a plan for "a second American Revolution" that would be "bloodless, if the Left allows it to be". Does that sound like a threat to you?
USA Today reported that at least 31 of the project's 38 creators were connected to the Trump administration. CNN.com reported that at least 140 people who worked for Trump contributed to Project 2025. Project 2025 is backed by a $22 million budget from at least 100 conservative organizations and individuals who want to use the Trump presidency to remake our country the way they want it, destroying a democracy where the majority decides what we will do and also allows for individual choice and differences. The organizer of Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation, is also creating a database of Trump loyalists to fill government positions, and a program to train those new workers.
As alarm and criticism of Project 2025 started growing, Trump denied any knowledge of Project 2025. Later, he said he disagreed with parts of it. In August, Project 2025 was shut down and its director resigned from the Heritage Foundation. Trump’s campaign has its own platform, called Agenda47, that differs in some details from Project 2025, but the two documents have a lot of similarities.
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Project 2025 states four main policy aims: restore the family as the centerpiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation's sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely. Here’s what wrong with these policies:
1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life. Project 2025 says that the department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family".
a. If HHS relies on a biblically based definition of marriage, it is violating separation between church and state.
b. The U.S. is made up of people of many religions and cultures and may have different views of marriage and family. Forcing a biblically defined marriage on them violates freedom of religion and freedom of association
c. Even Christians argue among themselves about what their bible says or means about marriage and many other things, so we end up with a small religious sect telling the majority of us how to live under this scenario.
d. The Christian nationalists who are defining what a family is describe it as a union between a man and a woman, with the man as a dominating head of the family and the woman playing a “complementary” role. (Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Bryant says she believes women are complementary.) This could result in stripping women of independence in a range of ways not yet determined. As recently as the 1970s, women could not get a credit card in their own names, husbands had legal authority over wives’ property and money, women would be fired if pregnant, a woman could not refuse to have sex with her husband, and throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, police officers believed and were taught that domestic violence was a private matter that they shouldn’t get involved in. In the United States, according to the National Intimate Partner Sexual Violence Survey of 2010, 1 in 6 women suffered some kind of sexual violence induced by their intimate partner during the
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course of their lives. Project 2025 and the MAGA movement continue to point back to the past as a better time they want to return to, but by almost any measure, that belief is incorrect.
2. Dismantle the administrative state. Project 2025 proposes firing nonpartisan career government employees and replacing them with political appointees. In practice, this would mean replacing around 50,000 experienced experts in law, the military, science, diplomacy, health and medicine, and the rest, with partisan “yes men,” put in place on the basis of a loyalty oath to do whatever the president says. In practice, the change would give the president the power of a king, to ignore all laws and rules. Historically, the American government bureaucracy has assured a stable government and a smooth transition from one presidency to another by following their oath to support the Constitution rather than a president—because Americans don’t want radical change from one administration to the next, and Americans understand that one person doesn’t know all the answers and must rely on the expertise and good advice of objective people to lead effectively.
3. Defend the nation's sovereignty and borders I’m having trouble summarizing this one.
4. Secure God-given individual rights to live freely. The Declaration of Independence already guarantees us that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” It would seem you couldn’t improve on that, but Project 2025 redefines our Founders’ intent. When Christian Nationalists say we have the right to live the good life, they mean to force all Americans to live their narrow definition of the good Christian life, no longer allowing for the consent of the governed. Christian Nationalists believe the founders intended for the United States to be a Christian nation with the Bible as the foundation of law. Therefore, their definition of order will always mean “this behavior offends me because the Bible says it offends God. We must honor God by limiting individual freedoms to control this behavior.”
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Here's a summary of some of the key proposals of Project 2025. We hope this gives you the flavor of what Project 2025 is trying to accomplish. Project 2025 is 900 pages long and goes into great detail on many issues, but the issues summarized below cover many of the overarching ideas of Project 2025.
Use this QR code to see the entire Project 2025 Document.
Use this QR code to see Agenda47, the official Republican Party platform.
TWO EXCELLENT VIDEOS ABOUT PROJECT 2025 AND AGENDA 47
PROJECT 2025 https://youtu.be/A7OlQG9C4zM?si=ORCDvCAXvI4Slwrf
AGENDA 47 https://youtu.be/1kIWW2JFU0w?si=1waqPPYCOmjtte7c
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Government
Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal government be placed under direct presidential control. The proposals call for firing nonpartisan career government employees and replacing them with political appointees. In practice, this would mean replacing around 50,000 experienced experts in law, the military, science, diplomacy, health and medicine, and the rest, with partisan “yes men,” put in place on the basis of a loyalty oath to do whatever the president says. This would replace the president with a king.
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Immigration
Project 2025 proposes increasing funding for a wall on the US-Mexico border —which already has been proven not to work. It wants to combine the Department of Homeland Security with other immigration enforcement units to create a much larger and more powerful border policing operation to implement “the largest deportation program in American history.” Asylum for many migrants needing protection would be eliminated, and fees would be increased for ordinary migrants, but migrants who can afford to pay premium fees could fast-track visa applications.
Other proposals include eliminating visa categories for crime and human trafficking victims, increasing fees on immigrants, and allowing fast-tracked applications for migrants who pay a premium.
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Climate and economy
Project 2025 would slash federal money for research and investment in renewable energy and eliminate carbon-reduction goals. It would repeal tax breaks for green energy companies and withdraw from climate change agreements seen as a disadvantage to corporations. It would increase oil and gas production. This comes at a time when the overwhelming majority of scientists say we are at a tipping point for the earth’s survival—if we don’t make major changes by 2030, we will not be able to survive. https://www.iea.org/news/the-energy-world-is-set-to-change-significantly-by2030-based-on-today-s-policy-settings-alone
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Taxes and the Economy
Project 2025 proposes slashing corporate and income taxes. The first Trump administration slashed income taxes on corporations and the wealthy, with no relief for middle- and lower-income taxpayers. Trump’s tax cuts, especially the sharp reduction in the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%, took away money that the country uses to operate. All across America, roads, bridges, water systems, schools, and other vital public infrastructure have been underfunded and neglected because of these tax cuts. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2018 that the tax cut would increase deficits by about $1.9 trillion over 11 years. Trump created the third largest deficit in American history, with George W. Bush creating the second largest and Abraham Lincoln the largest (but he had to raise money to fight the Civil War.).
In order to pay for the second most massive tax cut for the morbidly rich in history (Reagan cut the top tax bracket from 74% down to 25%), the Reagan administration cut spending on education, housing, roads, and bridges, and pretty much every other aspect of America’s infrastructure. George W. Bush did the same thing, and Donald Trump tripled down on the scheme. All across America, roads, bridges, water systems, schools, and other vital public infrastructure have been underfunded and neglected ever since Reagan popularized the idea of “austerity” among Republicans.
The result was a $51 trillion transfer of wealth — over a mere forty-three years — from the homes, retirement accounts, and savings of average working families into the money bins of the extremely wealthy. Thirty-four
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trillion of that transfer show up as our national debt, which was a mere $800 billion ($0.8 trillion) when Reagan first came into office and started this scam.
President Joe Biden and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, ran the first administration of either party to significantly repudiate Reagan’s neoliberalism by injecting trillions into rebuilding our nation (over 35,000 projects) while raising taxes on rich people and corporations to pay for it.
Abortion and family
Project 2025 says that that the department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family". The report calls on the Department of Health and Human Services to declare that “men and women are biological realities and married men and women are the ideal, natural family.” If Christians claim the Bible specifically condemns or approves of abortion, they are skewing the textual evidence to fit their position: There is no specific reference to abortion. But more concerning is the idea that marriage and family should be defined for the entire nation by a small sect of Christians, which is made up of non-Christians as well as a very diverse population of Christians who hold many views different from other Christians. Project 2025 does not call outright for a nationwide abortion ban. However, it proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market and stopping it from being sent through the post office. Some Christian nationalists have stated they oppose birth control and in-vitro fertilization (IVF), which could be their next target if the environment is receptive to them.
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Education
Project 2025 wants to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and calls for school choice and parental control over schools ending the Head Start program for preschool children, and rejecting efforts to provide universal free school meals. Education is primarily funded and overseen by state and local authorities in the US, but the federal government funds some elements of education and sets certain policies, which are then implemented locally to assure fairness for all students. It’s the policies promoting fairness that Project 2025 objects to. As it stands now, schools receive federal grants targeted toward specific purposes, like aiding low-income students or students with disabilities. States implement these programs and comply with federal requirements. Project 2025 generally says states should be given money with no strings attached to spend on “any lawful education purpose under state law,” which could, for example, be redirected to the school football program. Project 2025 is opposed to "woke propaganda," and what it calls “inappropriate political indoctrination of our children” by public schools. Examples of the woke propaganda and inappropriate political indoctrination that conservatives have already acted on are: removing The Diary of Anne Frank and Huckleberry Finn from bookshelves; playing down the impact and cruelty of slavery in history books, or even denying it existed in the United States; and erasing Cesar
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Chavez from Texas history textbooks. Conservative members of the State School Board of Texas have complained that there is an "over representation of minorities" in current social studies standards. Project 2025 aims to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in schools and government departments as part of what it describes as a wider crackdown on "woke" ideology. The effect would be eliminating many programs that have been created to increase equality in education and our country.
Health Care
Project 2025 wants to limit health care to all recipients of Medicare and Medicaid. It calls for repealing the $35 per month cap on insulin costs for seniors on Medicare, as well as ending Medicare’s $2,000 per year cap on out-of-pocket drug costs that begins in 2025, as well as the federal government’s ability to negotiate drug prices. Such policies benefit Big Pharma and don’t care about the health of citizens. Americans pay far more for than drugs in other countries, where their governments negotiate prices with drug companies. Project 2025 wants to roll back the recent law banning surprise medical billing. Project 2025 wants to place a lifetime cap on Medicaid coverage. Some proponents have suggested imposing a limit of 36 months. This policy translates to the opinion that poor people who receive Medicaid are entitled to be sick (or to be treated) out of only 36 months in their lifetimes. This policy disregards that Medicaid recipients, due to the fact that they perform manual labor jobs, are the people most likely to be exposed to workplace injury and disease, and once reaching old age, are more likely to have a compilation of illness and injury that makes them less healthy than people in other socioeconomic groups. This policy would
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impact health care facilities and providers serving Medicaid patients too. Nurses, home care providers, emergency medical personnel and physicians would not be paid for their services and eventually have to quit providing care. Right now, many rural communities do not have health care facilities because the State of Texas refuses to expand Medicaid to poor people. Denying Medicaid to eligible people also impacts taxpayers who pay, through their community hospital emergency rooms and hospitals, for the care of uninsured people. Project 2025 says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) should adopt work incentives for able-bodied individuals receiving Medicaid, ignoring that fact that the vast majority of Medicaid recipients are already working one or more jobs and disregarding that some Medicaid recipients are too ill to work.
Social Security
Although Heritage Foundation has long supported reforming the country's public pension plan, Project 2025 barely touches on it. However, Republicans have long proposed reducing Social Security benefits, raising the age to qualify for it, or turning it over to an investment plan where every beneficiary has to manage his own investment in the stock market. We think there is not much emphasis on Social Security because changing it would be politically unpopular, even among Republican voters. However, their intent to reduce or eliminate Social Security has been made very clear.
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Making People and Things They Don’t Like Disappear
Project 2025 proposes to eliminate a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including "sexual orientation", "gender equality", "abortion" and "reproductive rights". When words are banned, people and ideas disappear because we aren’t allowed to talk about them anymore, and once they disappear from our vocabulary it is easier to ignore them or take away people’s rights and literally push them into the shadows where they are not seen.
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