Project 2025
by Rob Lyons
Thursday July 18 brought the curtain down, mercifully, on the 2024 Republican National Convention. Donald Trump accepted the Republican Presidential nomination with a gracious and conciliatory speech about national unification. For fifteen minutes he did quite well, sounding presidential after all: this is what a brush with mortality can do to you. Then he couldn’t help himself: he scrapped the teleprompter and veered back to his canned stump speech, a lost galaxy spiraling into a black hole, droning on for 90 minutes, the longest convention acceptance speech in U.S. history. Gone was the conciliatory tone, gone were calls for unity. In their place a meandering grievance-filled rant, the familiar sour grapes about the stolen 2020 election, condemnation of immigrants and Democrats, vows of vengeance, the obligatory shout-out to the late great Hannibal Lecter. How can anyone ignore the fact that this man is unbalanced, unfit, unhinged, and unwell?
Friday morning (the day after the convention ended) I met up with Susan Winecki and we walked over to the Knickerbocker Hotel on Lake Michigan to join 60 others for a meeting of the League of Progressive Seniors. We heard a briefing on Project 2025, the 920-page blueprint paid for by the Koch Family and Leonard Leo, put together by the Heritage Foundation. Here’s a link to a video of the hour-long presentation we witnessed:
Key provisions of Project 2025 document are shown below (this is taken nearly verbatim from a summary analysis of the Project 2025 document, prepared by Al Nichols and handed out at the League of Progressive Seniors meeting.).
- End no fault divorce
- Complete ban on abortions without exceptions
- Ban contraceptives
- Additional tax breaks for corporations and the 1%
- Higher taxes for the working class
- Elimination of unions and worker protections
- Raise the retirement age
- Cut Social Security
- Cut Medicare
- End the Affordable Care Act
- Raise prescription drug prices
- Eliminate the Department of Education
- Use public, taxpayer money for private religious schools
- Teach Christian religious beliefs in public schools
- End free and discounted school lunch programs
- End civil rights and DEI protections in government
- Ban African American and gender studies in all levels of education
- Ban books and curriculum about slavery
- End climate protections
- Increase Arctic drilling
- Deregulate big business and the oil industry
- Promote and expedite capital punishment
- End marriage equality
- Condemn single mothers while promoting only “traditional families”
- Defund the FBI and Homeland Security
- Use the military to break up domestic protests
- Mass deportation of immigrants and incarceration in “camps”
- End birthright citizenship
- Ban Muslims from entering the country
- Eliminate federal agencies like the FDA, EPA, NOAA and more
- Continue to pack the Supreme Court and lower courts with right wing judges
Beyond these draconian policy provisions, the most jaw-dropping part of Project 2025 comes where they lay out their clever plan for implementing these changes:
- End civil service protections and fill the federal government with political hires dedicated to serving the President’s agenda;
- Dismantle any part of the government that limits business’ ability to prey on society or protects people from the excesses of capitalism;
- Weaponize any part of government that deals with force or repression, in service of the MAGA agenda and its proponents;
- Create a personnel database to identify conservatives from all walks of life to serve in the next conservative administration;
- Create a Presidential Administration Academy, to recruit and train right wing activists.
Talk about the Deep State! If this weren’t so shocking and audacious, it would seem like some fever dream of The Minions to take over the world, or Dr. Evil setting the ransom price at “ONE MILLION DOLLARS!” Firing some 50,000 civil service employees and replacing them with MAGA loyalists definitely qualifies as a right-wing takeover of the Federal bureaucracy.
The Civil Service, established in 1883 when Chester A. Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, established merit as the key qualification for a government job, and required testing as the method for evaluating merit. This Act also established a tenure system, which protected civil service employees from being fired to make way for patronage appointments. The system was revised in 1978, with the creation of the Office of Personnel Management, and clarification and modernization of the system for evaluating merit, abilities, and qualifications. Throughout, for the past 140 years, the system has been focussed on staffing Federal positions with qualified able people – and avoiding the obvious pitfalls of a “spoils system” of political patronage.
Project 2025 would scrap all this. This proposed takeover of the Federal bureaucracy echoes the strategy that the right followed in 2010, when they captured local and state governments: wealthy Republican donors poured shoveled amounts of money into state races, with the result that the Democrats suffered what Obama called a “shellacking” in the House of Representatives and also in statehouses around the country. From 2011 to the present Republicans have consistently achieved a “trifecta” in more than 20 states (governorship and both houses of state legislature) – peaking in 2017 when Republicans held trifectas in 26 states to the Democrats 5. This has rebalanced somewhat, but there are lasting effects from Republican dominance in the late teens: in many of these states there was a program of introducing and passing model legislation developed by the American Legislative Exchange Conference (ALEC); the State Policy Network (SPN); and Americans for Prosperity (AFP). In fact some of the policy provisions in the list above have been already introduced and signed into law in states like Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, etc.
All of this, the laundry list of rollbacks to established government programs, the savaging of the civil service system, seems designed to take us back 50 or even 100 years, to a time when the Federal government, rather than protecting its citizens, instead removes established social and economic supports, removes restraints on corporate greed, and abandons its traditional role as an oversight body and steward. Children take a big hit in this plan, with school lunch programs eliminated; families take a big hit; labor is undercut; the Department of Education is eliminated and educational policy reverts to the states – with predictable results. This is a prescription for widespread misery.
I don’t know that I could conjure up a better portrait of Greed, Hate and Delusion, on such an grand scale. Greed for money and power. Greed in the defunding of social investment, so that wealthy corporations and individuals can enjoy lower taxes and freedom from burdensome regulation. Hatred in the many provisions that target the “Other” whether they be Black or Latinx or Asian, or LGBTQ – and the “Othering” of family units that don’t meet the definition of the classic nuclear family. Hatred in the mass deportation of immigrants and banning Muslims from entering the country. And delusion in the deranged belief that something so stingy and hard-hearted and mean-spirited could somehow result in an improvement in our world.
Who are these people? What sort of reality do they inhabit, and what planet do they live on, where it’s OK to take food away from children – quite literally – so the filthy rich can get filthier and richer? Where it’s OK to take away the social safety net, so people can get sick and die in poverty, so communities can be polluted with foul air and foul groundwater, all so that corporations can avoid red tape?
Have they no sense of decency? Have they no shame? And for that matter, where is their common sense? Even an old fascist like Henry Ford was smart enough to know that you had to pay workers enough that they could afford to buy his cars.
According to a recent PBS News posting: “Project 2025 recently underwent a shakeup as its director Paul Dans abruptly exited amid the Trump campaign’s efforts to distance itself from the group and its proposals.” But nobody’s buying it. JD Vance wrote the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light, a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, Dans’ successor as leader of the Project 2025 project – and tellingly, with the public uproar about Project 2025, the release of the Roberts’ book has been pushed back till after the election. Trump himself has been backpedaling furiously away from Project 2025, but in the words of the Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz: “Don’t believe him when he plays dumb. He knows exactly what Project 2025 will do to restrict our freedoms.”
We should have no illusions about this: if Trump and Vance prevail, this is what they intend to do. “Dictator on Day One.” “You won’t have to vote again in four years.” We’ll see the Justice Department weaponized, and the military will be used to put down social unrest. Recall what Charlie Sykes said when I eavesdropped on the Principles First meeting: that we collectively suffer from a “crisis of imagination,” that we can’t imagine that they’ll actually do what they say they’ll do. But they will. That’s their plan. Have they no sense of decency? Have they no shame?
