Project 2025: A Radical-Right Wet Dream
Project 2025 can also be characterized as a neofascist manifesto.
Out of curiosity, I downloaded the Project 2025 PDF file. (By the way, the Heritage Foundation is also selling a paperback version. Never pass up an opportunity to fleece the gullible.) At 866 pages, it makes a dandy door stop. (If you want to check it out for yourself, here’s the link: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf)
Project 2025 has even set up online training as well as a loyalty test to screen potential hires. The one thing they are looking for is people who are aligned with their agenda.
Though the Heritage Foundation is the lead, Project 2025 is backed by a coalition of organizations and individuals; many receive funding from the Koch network or conservative activist Leonard Leo. The project is also heavily promoted by Steve Bannon; he has called Project 2025 a blueprint for Trump's second term.
Project 2025 proposes widespread changes across the government, with particular emphasis on economic and social policies as well as the role of the federal government and its agencies.
According to the opening salvo:
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, 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 transgender ideology has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women...The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country...the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support...bringing together conservative allies with a common goal: to take back our country from the radical Left by developing a robust governing agenda and the right people to implement it.
This reads like a neofascist manifesto.
(By the way, neofascism is a far-right ideology that includes ultranationalism, racial supremacy, populism, authoritarianism, nativism, anti-immigration sentiment, as well as opposition to liberal democracy.)
There is nothing conservative about this document—if, by the term conservative, we mean one who conserves or preserves what exists and which has proven to work since March 4, 1789.
Project 2025 is reactionary. In many ways, it wants to take us back to a political scene that existed in Antebellum 1861. In other respects, it wants to convert us into an authoritarian state such as existed, say, in fascist Italy in the 1930s and ‘40s.
At the very least, the right-wing wants to reestablish the political and economic system that existed before the New Deal. But that, of course, would be a moderate position compared to what is actually proposed in the Project 2025 document.
(I get the impression that the authors of this document think they will be able to control Trump—or some future Republican president—should he be elected. They’re fools. Trump would like to be an absolute ruler.)
I didn’t attempt to read every word in that PDF file. A great deal of ink is spilled merely describing the multiple departments within the government. So consider this analysis (if I can call it that) a 30,000-foot flyover.
The manifesto is divided into five sections:
Section 1: Taking the Reins of Government
Section 2: The Common Defense
Section 3: The General Welfare
Section 4: The Economy
Section 5: Independent Regulatory Agencies
(Sounds innocuous so far, right? Motherhood and apple pie. Ah, but the devil is in the details.)
Take the intro to section one:
[T]he Left’s steady stream of insanity appears to be never-ending...it is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies, not their own. Yet the federal bureaucracy has a mind of its own...An autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Byzantine personnel rules provide the bureaucrats with their chief means of self-protection...knowledge of such rules is used to thwart the President’s appointees and agenda...In order to carry out the President’s desires...the new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees.... the White House Counsel must take seriously the duty to protect the powers and privileges of the President from encroachments by Congress, the judiciary, and the administrative components of departments and agencies...The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan experts, who pursue their own ends while engaging in groupthink.
(And there you have it. The cornerstone for a unitary president has been laid.)
Section one also covers the conversion of a portion of Civil Service positions to political appointees. This is the Schedule F that was promulgated towards the end of Trump’s first term of office via Executive Order 13957.
On a side note, the concept of the Unitary Executive Theory (or Imperial Presidency) has been kicked around for a long time. Dick Cheney pushed hard on this concept while he was vice-president. This is not to say that he bought into the concept of a dictator. But it is fair to say that the Project 2025 document carries the concept of a unitary executive farther than Cheney proposed.
Moving on to section two:
[T]he Department of Defense...has emphasized leftist politics over military readiness...the atrophy of our defense industrial base, the impact of sequestration, and effective disarmament by many U.S. allies have exacted a high toll on America’s military. Moreover, our military has adopted a risk-averse culture...this is now Barack Obama’s general officer corps...the National Security Council should rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions.
Whereas most military personnel have had leftist priorities imposed from above, the problem at State comes largely from within...Large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision...the department possesses a belief that it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President...The solution to this problem is strong political leadership...The next Administration must take swift and decisive steps to reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine that serves the President...
Because the Senate has been extraordinarily lax in fulfilling its constitutional obligation to confirm presidential appointees...[place] appointees into acting roles until such time as the Senate confirms them...the U.S. should focus on core security, economic, and human rights rather than impose radical abortion and pro-LGBT initiatives. Divisive symbols such as the rainbow flag or the Black Lives Matter flag have no place next to the Stars and Stripes at our embassies...the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) must be reformed...The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systematic racism.
(You can see where this going.)
Onward to section three:
Health and Human Services (HHS) is home to Medicare and Medicaid, the principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt...HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsible—along with President Joe Biden—for the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic...
The Secretary must protect Americans’ civil rights by ensuring that HHS programs and activities follow the letter and spirit of religious freedom and conscience-protection laws...the federal government should not restrict providers’ ability to discharge their responsibilities or limit their ability to innovate through government pricing controls or irrational Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement schemes...family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on LGBTQ+ equity, subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support nuclear families...
The CDC should eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights...It should ensure that it is not promoting abortion as health care...HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders...
[T]he CDC exposed itself as perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government...Despite its popular image as a benign science agency, NIH was responsible for paying for research in aborted baby body parts...Anthony Fauci’s division of the NIH—the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—owns half the patent for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine...That would be the same experimental mRNA vaccine that the CDC now wants to force on children, who are at little to no risk from COVID-19 but at great risk from public health officials...
The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken ...The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism...
Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world...the FDA should reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start... Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs...the HHS Secretary should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology. The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on LGBTQ+ equity.
(The foregoing is an outright attack on reproductive rights and the LGBTQ+ community. The mention of “interstate carriage of abortion drugs” is a reference to the Comstock Act of 1873; unbelievably, this outdated law is still on the books. Also, there’s more than a whiff of Christian fundamentalism in these proposals.)
The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family...Under the Obama and Biden Administrations, labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution. The President should issue an executive order banning, and Congress should pass a law prohibiting the federal government from using taxpayer dollars to fund, all critical race theory training...prohibit racial classifications and quotas including human-resources classifications and DEI trainings...Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics...no laws requires an employer provide health insurance benefits for elective abortion...Keep anti-life benefits out of benefit plans.
The new Administration should enact policies with robust respect for religious exercise in the workplace, including under the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, Title VII, and federal conscience protection laws...The President should make clear via executive order that religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs...Congress should clarify Title VII’s religious organization exemptions to make it more explicit that those employers may make employment decisions based on religion regardless of nondiscrimination laws...Provide Robust Accommodations for Religious Employees...employers and employees should be able to set a two- or four- week period over which to calculate overtime. This would give workers greater flexibility to work more hours in one week and fewer hours in the next and would not require the employer to pay them more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period.
(Again, note the explicit injection of religion into the public arena. Also note the last sentence in the preceding section; it would give employers another tool with which to stiff their workers. There are other proposals in this section that are intended to further weaken unions.)
[A]nother department that has gone off the rails like HHS during the Obama and Biden Administrations [is the] Department of Justice (DOJ)...the department’s unprecedented politicization and weaponization under Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, resulting in politically motivated and viewpoint-based prosecutions of political enemies and indifference to the crimes of political allies, has made the department a threat to the Republic...the Federal Bureau of Investigations [is a] bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization, especially at the top...To rein in this completely out of control bureau...the FBI’s separate Office of General Counsel, separate Office of Legislative Affairs, and separate Office of Public Affairs should all be abolished...the next conservative Administration should eliminate any offices within the FBI that it has the power to eliminate without any action from Congress.
[T]he Department of Education...is a creation of the Jimmy Carter Administration. The department is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel...For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.
Under the next President, the Department of Energy should end the Biden Administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels, restore America’s energy independence, oppose eyesore windmills built at taxpayer expense, and respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own choosing, rather than trying to force them into electric vehicles and eventually out of the driver’s seat altogether in favor of self-driving robots.
The opening sentence of section three tells you a great deal about who is really behind this move to gut social services. It nicely ignores Trump’s humungous tax break that was handed to his oligarch buddies in 2017 (which, by the way, are due to expire at the end of 2025); this tax cut added immensely to the present debt load. Naturally, the 1% are crying crocodile tears and claiming that the elimination of their tax breaks will be catastrophic to our overall economy; with a sop to the 99%, they add that the well-being of many working families will likewise be adversely affected.
And then note the attacks on the HHS–specifically, the NIH and CDC. Also the DOJ comes into the crosshairs (as if Bill Barr didn’t do a lot to subvert the independence of the DOJ).
Has fatigue set in yet? Hang in there. Only two more sections to go.
Section 4 takes on a grab bag of Federal agencies.
[T]he Department of Commerce [is] dominated by career staff who are uninterested in implementing the President’s priorities. The department clearly needs far more political leadership, including at the Census Bureau.
Under the leadership of Secretary Janet Yellen, Treasury has placed equity and climate change among its top five priorities. The next Administration must act decisively to curtail activities that fall outside of Treasury’s mandate and primary mission. Treasury should make balancing the federal budget a mission-critical objective...The Treasury Department should develop and promote tax reform legislation...reducing marginal tax rates, reducing the cost of capital and broadening the tax base to eliminate tax-induced economic distortions by eliminating special-interest tax credits, deductions, and exclusions...
The Treasury Department should also promote tax competition rather than supporting an international tax cartel...The Treasury Department plays an important role in international institutions and should force reforms and new policies...The U.S., however, should withdraw from both the World Bank and the IMF and terminate its financial contribution to both institutions.
The corporate income tax rate should be reduced to 18 percent...Capital gains and qualified dividends should be taxed at 15 percent...tax reform should repeal all tax increases that were passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, including...the stock buyback excise tax, the coal excise tax, the reinstated Superfund tax, and excise taxes on drug manufacturers to compel them to comply with Medicare price controls...The individual state and local tax deduction, which was temporarily capped at $10,000, should be fully repealed...Treasury should support legislation instituting a three-fifths vote threshold in the U.S. House and the Senate to raise income or corporate tax rates to create a wall of protection for the new rate structure.
One guess as to who would really benefit from these proposed changes to Treasury.
(By the way, the reference to the “international tax cartel” is the agreement by 130 countries to a global minimum tax rate of 15 percent on corporate profits; the agreement is intended to make it harder for companies to shift their tax liabilities from higher- to lower-taxing countries.)
[T]he Federal Reserve actually causes inflationary and recessionary cycles...the next Administration should think about proposing legislation that would effectively abolish the Federal Reserve and replace it with free banking, whereby neither interest rates nor the supply of money would be controlled by government... Alternatively the next Administration should consider the feasibility of a return to the gold standard.
(The gold standard. Wow!!)
And now we finally come to the last section which, thankfully, is quite short.
In addition to the executive departments and agencies discussed previously, a number of independent commissions exist that are loosely affiliated with the executive branch. In general, the President can appoint people to these commissions but cannot remove them, which makes them constitutionally problematic in light of the Constitution’s having vested federal executive power in the President...
Few appointments to these commissions will be as important as the President’s selection of the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission...In addition to taking unilateral action, the FCC should work with Congress on legislative changes to ensure that Internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech...
[T]he Securities and Exchange Commission should be reducing impediments to capital formation, not radically increasing them by pushing a costly climate change agenda, as it is doing under the Biden Administration...Under the Biden FTC, firms try to get out of anti- trust liability by offering climate, diversity, or other forms of environmental, social, and corporate governance, (ESG) offerings.
One thing that characterizes all of the chapters in each section is high flown rhetoric—words that sound good but are intended to obscure the real objective of the project. That being said, there occasionally are some proposals that merit serious consideration. Unfortunately, they are few and far between and generally are buried by the surrounding ideology. Which is too bad.
That being said, make no mistake. The people who propose to implement this manifesto (the likes of Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Stephen Miller, et al.) are deadly serious about their intentions. In this context, it’s useful to revisit FDR’s acceptance speech on June 27, 1936 at the Democratic convention.
In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy...modern economic royalists [have since] carved new dynasties...the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction... opportunity was limited by monopoly...For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives...The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business...These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power...Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes...Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference...It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.
Exactly. When Biden describes the 2024 election as saving democracy, this is not hyperbole. Current economic circumstances may be markedly different from where they were in 1936. But the oligarchic and neofascist impulses are remarkably similar in many ways, as witness the income and wealth inequality that now exists and the prescriptions laid out in the Project 2025 manifesto.
So if you hear or read that Trump 2.0 will simply be a repeat of trump 1.0 (i.e., don’t worry, be happy)—Don’t. Believe. It. The MAGA takeover of the GOP is complete. They’re organized this time. And the adults in the room are long gone.