A No Bullshit Guide to Project 2025

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”

Kevin Roberts, President of Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 Architect

Anyone who's ever worked in an office knows, it’s the staff who get shit done. And Trump, with his mob-boss style of executive functioning, never gives explicit directions. He just wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it and never face consequences. His staff know this better than anyone and they have plans to radically reshape the American government in his image: purging staff who are disloyal and instituting radical policies that will fundamentally transform the contours of American life.

So what playbook is the staff using? A little thing called Project 2025.

I know you’ve heard of Project 2025. It’s been all over the news for the last few months, most recently that its director Paul Dans would be stepping down and Project 2025 would be ending its policy operations and moving on to the next stage, building a personnel selection apparatus.

Project 2025 is short hand for a nearly 1,000 page set of policy proposals for a future Trump administration. Dan’s job was to put the package together. While some are touting his ouster as a win, to most in policy circles this is just the normal cadence of life. Because Project 2025 isn’t just about research, it’s about implementation and it’s so much bigger than the man at the top. Project 2025 is actually a four part project, the book is merely part 1.

Part I is a conservative consensus plan for governance. (the book)

Part II is a personnel database.

Part III is an online academy for loyalists.

Part IV is a playbook for execution of the plan.

Presidential transition projects are par for the course in politics. After Trump’s first year in office, 64% of the 2016 version of the Heritage Foundation’s plan had already been implemented. What makes Project 2025 different is the scale and ambition of the project. Heritage brought together $20 million in dark money, a powerful coalition of 110 advisory board members, and even contracted with Oracle to build a personnel database. Their goal isn’t to implement mere policy, it is a total restructuring of the government.

Paul Dans is stepping down, Trump is distancing himself from the project, but doesn’t mean that Project 2025 is any less potent than it was before. 

So what will Project 2025 do? Here’s a summary. (more info can be found here and here)

It would strip away rights and freedoms

● Ban medication abortion nationwide by using a zombie law, the Comstock Act of 1873, to criminalize mailing abortion pills, plus revoke FDA approval of vital medications

● Permit dangerous child labor, allow anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and assail racial diversity protections

● Declare a “mass migration” crisis to round-up millions of undocumented immigrant workers, including DREAMERs 

 Withhold money from states and key agencies 

● Withhold Medicaid reimbursement to force states to comply with abortion tracking and also block funding to force cities/states to target immigrants, including conditioning FEMA funding on state/city support for the administration’s immigration policies

● Impound or unilaterally redirect infrastructure, climate, & CFPB funding that Congress has already budgeted

Cut vital programs and services that Americans need

● Block funding to Planned Parenthood for health screenings and contraception services

● Disband the Environmental Protection Agency, undermining clean air & water protection

● Demand that Congress kill the Department of Education–and significant federal public school funding–and “eliminate the Head Start program” for poor children

● Privatize the National Weather Service, making Americans pay for weather data

Concentrate presidential power, disrupt our economy, and undermine expertise

● Purge tens of thousands of experts and civil servants across consumer protection, national security, and other agencies, to “fill [the] ranks with political appointees” who will prioritize a Project 2025 agenda over all else 

● Compromise the Federal Reserve and other independent agencies’ autonomy, firing leaders and gutting their capacity to promote the stability of our economy and more

● Challenge long-standing laws that limit executive power and urge the Supreme Court to overturn long-standing precedents in order to concentrate executive branch power

Project 2025 has proved to be a powerful messaging tool for Dems. Despite all of us living through the first Trump administration, there continues to be a shared illusion that another Trump administration will not be that bad. 

In part, I think the sucess of this message is because Project 2025 builds on the conspiracy frameworks already existing in the minds of Americans. A shady group of dark money backed people are plotting a government takeover. (I’d love to read it as a novel! Unsubscribe to the reality) You can’t claim hysteria when we can all see it in black and white - that’s why the best response they can muster is, in the words of the great Mariah Carey, “I don’t know her.”

If you have Project 2025 questions, put them in the comments, below.

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