A news analysis | To understand the debate surrounding Project 2025 – a controversial conservative federal governing blueprint prepared by the Heritage Foundation and its ideological allies, such as South Carolina’s Palmetto Promise Institute – it helps to remember there are two great political contests in America every four years.
In the first, the Democratic and Republican parties duke it out to elect a president on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Then, in the second, various factions in the winning party – say, conservative Christians and libertarian free-marketeers in the GOP, or Bernie Sanders-style social democrats and Clintonian moderates on the Democratic side – fight a sharp-elbowed inside game to win control of the newly-elected president’s policy agenda and staffing process before he’s sworn in on January 20.
For Beltway think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, once run by former GOP U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the first contest is the playoffs. The second is the Super Bowl. And Project 2025, with its detailed, 992-page policy plan and database of pre-vetted potential staffers, is the foundation’s bid to win the big game if Trump wins a second term.
Why Project 2025 matters
So why all the hair-on-fire hullabaloo, if Project 2025 is basically just one conservative group’s long-ball effort to influence a future Trump administration? Experts say there are three good reasons to take it seriously.
First, Trump is a politician with strong instincts – immigration bad, defense good – but few concrete proposals. That kind of policy vacuum creates an ideal political environment at an untethered White House for enterprising ideologues, such as the wonks of the Heritage Foundation.
Second, Heritage has played and won this game before, most famously in 1980, when its pre-election governing plan was largely adopted by the incoming Reagan administration. By December 1982, more than 60% of the plan’s 2,000 recommendations had been implemented.
And third, the policy agenda outlined in Project 2025 is, as 2012 Republican presidential nominee and current U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney would say, severely conservative. In fact, some of its hard-right proposals have proven so divisive that even Trump very publicly distanced himself recently from the plan, calling it “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” in a July 5 social media post.
So with that history and context in mind, let’s take a look at what’s in the plan – and just as important, what isn’t.
Expanding presidential power
In keeping with the currently fashionable view among some conservatives that all executive power is vested in the person of the president – the so-called “unitary executive theory” – Project 2025 recommends several changes that would expand the president’s power across the federal government.
A return to the “spoils system:” Since the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, all but the very top jobs in the federal government have been held by professional civil servants hired under a merit-based system. Project 2025 would reclassify tens of thousands of those jobs from civil service positions to political appointments, all serving at the pleasure of the president. While this would clearly make it easier for a president to implement his policies across the federal government, critics note that it could also signal a return to the cronyism and corruption of an earlier era in American history.
Political dispersal of federal funds: If political appointees move into jobs previously held by professionals, the apportionment of billions of dollars in federal program funds would for the first time be directly controlled by political supporters of the president. This could affect spending in virtually every area of government, including transportation projects, storm recovery efforts, vendor contracts and more.
Politicizing justice: With a more political staff and a clear mandate to bring the entire executive branch under direct presidential control, the bipartisan post-Watergate tradition of Justice Department independence could effectively come to an end, according to a PBS report.
Playing the hits
The bulk of Project 2025 is a conservative wish list that will be familiar to anyone who’s been following American politics since the 1980s. Here are some of the highlights.
Tax cuts: Under the plan, the top income tax rate would be cut from 37% to 30%, and corporate taxes would fall from 21% to 18%. All individual incomes under $170,000 would be taxed at 15%, representing a tax cut for most middle earners but a tax increase for those at the bottom.
Deregulation: The plan also calls for dramatic deregulation of the economy and environment, including an end to all federal preferences for green energy over fossil fuels.
Cutting programs for the poor: Currently, federal Medicaid funds flow to states based on need – in other words, how many people qualify and what medical services they’re receiving. Under Project 2025, these funds would be converted into block grants with strict work requirements, forcing states to cut Medicaid expenditures or raise state taxes to pay for them. The plan also calls for cuts in other federal anti-poverty programs, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (what most people mean when they say “welfare”), cuts to nutritional assistance and the elimination of Head Start.
Dismantle the Department of Education: If adopted in full, Project 2025 would eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, privatize student loans and replace most federal education programs with block grants to the states. It also endorses a dramatic expansion of school choice, including the use of public funds for tuition at private religious schools.
Waging the culture war
In calling for a return to the “biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family” (page 481), an end to all forms of “woke propaganda” (page 9) and the jailing of pornographers (page 5), Project 2025 is clear in its intention to make the federal government a combatant in the culture war.
Abortion: Under the plan, the Food and Drug Administration would reverse its approval of the abortion pill, Mifepristone (page 458) , and the Comstock Act would be revived to make any mailing of the product illegal (page 459). It would also end the federal requirement that health insurance policies cover “Plan B” emergency contraception. (page 485)
Immigration: Though Project 2025 does not explicitly call for a round-up of illegal immigrants and the establishment of detention camps as some have reported, Project 2025 would create a 100,000-person strong cabinet level agency focused on border and immigration enforcement. The plan would also end student-loans at universities that allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition, and ban non-citizens from federally-subsidized housing.
DEI: Under the plan, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives would be strictly curtailed within the federal government, and federal funds and authority would be used to limit affirmative action in the public and private sectors (page 582). In addition, it would reinstate the Trump-administration ban on transgender men and women serving in the military. (page 104)
What’s not in Project 2025
Several false claims about Project 2025 have gone viral in social media since the plan became an issue in the presidential election. So to wrap things up, here’s a list of the Top 10 items that aren’t in the plan, according to an examination of the text and reliable sources on the left and right:
- An end to no-fault divorce
- A ban on all contraceptives
- A nationwide abortion ban
- Cuts to Social Security and Medicare
- Repeal of Obamacare
- Ending marriage equality
- Ending birthright citizenship and Muslim immigration
- Repeal the Civil Rights Act
- Defund the Federal Bureau of Investigation
- Teaching Christian beliefs in public schools
More info
To read Project 2025 in full, visit this website.
Here are links to various analyses of the plan:
- CBS News
- BBC
- NPR
- Vox
- The Dispatch
- Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
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