Voters in recent weeks have begun to hear the name “Project 2025” invoked more and more by President Biden and Democrats, as they seek to sound the alarm about what could be in store if former President Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House.
It is led by two former Trump administration officials: Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management and serves as director of the project, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to Trump and now the project’s associate director.
Project 2025 is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, but includes an advisory board consisting of more than 100 conservative groups.
Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, is a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican nominee, presumably Donald Trump, win the 2024 presidential election. It proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees in order to replace them with loyalists more willing to enable the next Republican president’s policies. It seeks to infuse the government and society with Christian values.
Proponents have framed the plan as a means to dismantle a supposed vast, unaccountable government bureaucracy. Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to transform the U.S. into an autocracy. Many legal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law, the separation of powers, the separation of church and state,and civil liberties, including the civil rights of women, persons of color, and the LGBTQ community.
Project 2025 proposes pressuring NATO member states to increase their military spending in order to confront threats from Russia.
Project 2025 envisions widespread changes to the government, particularly economic and social policies and the role of the federal government and its agencies. The plan proposes taking partisan control of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Commerce, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), dismantling the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and sharply reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production. In addition to trying to undo most everything accomplished by the Biden administration, the blueprint seeks to institute tax cuts, though its writers disagree on the wisdom of protectionism.[17] Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be either transferred to other agencies or terminated. Funding for climate research would be cut while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be reformed according to conservative principles. The project seeks to cut funding for Medicare and Medicaid, and urges the government to explicitly reject abortion as health care.The project states that life begins at conception and seeks to eliminate coverage of emergency contraception under the Affordable Care Act and enforce the Comstock Act to prosecute those who send and receive contraceptives and abortion pills nationwide. Project 2025 seeks to infuse the government with elements of Christianity. It proposes criminalizing pornography, removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and affirmative action by having the DOJ prosecute “anti-white racism.” The project recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. by using the military to capture and place them in internment camps. The Project proposes deploying the military for domestic law enforcement. It promotes capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of those sentences.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Donald Trump
Some conservatives and Republicans have criticized the plan for its stance on climate change and foreign trade. Other critics believe Project 2025 is rhetorical “window-dressing” for what would be four years of personal vengeance at any cost. The project’s authors acknowledge that most of the proposals would require the Republican Party to control both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Some aspects of the plan have recently been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and would face court challenges, while others are norm-breaking proposals that might survive court challenges. Although the project cannot, by law, promote a specific presidential candidate, many contributors have close ties to Donald Trump and his 2024 presidential campaign.
Project 2025 attacks what it calls the “radical gender ideology” and promotes the ideal that the government should “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”] To achieve this, it proposes 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)—what it calls “state-sanctioned racism”—from federal legislation
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