Project 2025 is on the Ballot
The first Trump administration was chaotic, disorganized and included many inexperienced and incompetent appointees. Trump’s own incompetence and erratic behavior prevented his administration from developing a coherent political agenda. He still managed to do a great deal of harm with exploding the deficit, federal judge appointments and further militarizing the southern border. But Trump’s random tweets were not a governing agenda.
This time the billionaires behind the Republican party are not relying on Trump’s non-existent leadership abilities to advance their ideological and financial interests. They have a detailed plan to totally restructure and take control of the federal government. If Trump is elected, they intend to make sure the next Trump administration has a structured, comprehensive agenda to follow. The plan is called Project 2025.
Project 2025 proposes to restructure the executive branch of the federal government. It calls for significant changes in federal bureaucracy, the civil service system and the direct political control of many currently independent agencies. This will lead to the gutting or reversal of many social, economic, environmental, equal rights and regulatory policies. It calls for the elimination of a number of federal cabinet departments and agencies.
The “about” page of the Project 2025 website summarizes the project. It says, “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”
To accomplish its goals Project 2025 has four parts. One is a 900-page policy document detailing changes to be made to the executive branch (referred to as the “administrative state”). This is called “Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise” (www.project2025.org/policy). This document also includes a “playbook” of specific tasks and goals for the first 180 days of a conservative administration. A third part is to create a database of personnel (vetted for conservative purity) to be ready for appointment on day one. This includes establishing a training “academy” for appointees. Many Trump appointees knew nothing about what they had been appointed to do and were ineffective. Project 2025 envisions a cadre of appointees ready and able to begin dismantling or neutering many federal departments and agencies.
I do not exaggerate. The “Mandate for Leadership” clearly states that one goal is to, “dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” It also says, “the surest way to put the federal government back to work for the American people is to reduce its size and scope back to something resembling the original constitutional intent.”
Reducing the “size” will be accomplished by abolishing departments and agencies. Decreasing the “scope” will be done by increasing direct political control of departments and agencies. In practice career civil service employees (the administrative and technical people who actually run the government) act as a check and balance on the actions of any administration. Trump had conflicts with these folks when trying to dictate illegal actions. So, the Project proposes to expand the number of presidential appointees from the current 4000 to some 50,000 positions. The purpose is to weaken the civil service and take more direct political control over the “administrative state.”
Going back to the “original constitutional intends” (created by wealthy white slave owners) or destroying the federal civil service system (created to replace the corrupt spoils system of the past) are just two of the many bad policy proposals in Project 2025.
All this may sound like a logical plan tor a smooth transition until you read the document. The “Mandate for Leadership” is actually an ideological document full of paranoid, irrational, inconsistent, and nonfactual statements. Its purpose is to implement the extreme anti-government, anti-tax, anti-regulation, culture war, religious nationalism and free market fundamentalism that the far right has been pushing for decades.
Project 2025 claims to be building “a better country for all Americans.” It is full of platitudes about the need to “restore power over Washington to the American people (who never had it to begin with), “secure our God-given individual rights,” and “defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” But this is a smoke screen for a corporate, fascist take over.
An example is the claim to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” The Mandate for Leadership” says, “The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics – the well-being of the American family.” But the well-being of people has never been on the agenda of conservative Republicans. They have fought every effort for families to access affordable health care, childcare, housing, clean water, clean air, better wages or any other practical component of “well-being of the American family.”
What they mean by “restoring the family” is to impose an unrealistic, moralistic, mythological model family. This isn’t about the things families really need to thrive. It is about Christian right culture war politics. The fine print is full of denunciations of unmarried mothers, absent fathers, divorce, “rejection of the church,” and all the associated social problems (poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, and high school dropouts). There is a clear racial bias to these statements. Also, these problems are universal across national, cultural, racial, religious and economic status. So, blaming these on “woke” liberal policies and program is ridiculous. But facts don’t matter to these ideologues.
“Restoring the family” is about eliminating all mention of gender, transgender, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, diversity equity and inclusion and critical race theory from schools and all government activities. This goes beyond eliminating programs and curricula. It calls for purging these terms and “any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
For these radical authoritarians, “overturning Roe vs Wade…[is] the greatest pro-family win in a generation.”
Project 2025 proposes to dismantle environmental protection and climate change initiatives as well. There is much more about this project the public needs to know.
Project 2025 is a manifesto for returning America to the “good-old-days” of the 1870s. The only Americans benefiting will be the extremely wealthy and the large businesses. If implemented, this will be a disaster for most of us. Vote accordingly for your own good.