Originally by Daily Hampshire Gazette at www.gazettenet.com
To know what’s coming if Donald Trump wins the fall election, check out Project 2025, the extreme right’s policy agenda and plan of action for the next Republican president. The Heritage Foundation produced Project 2025 with support from a coalition of over 100 right-wing organizations.
Project 2025’s policy agenda includes banning abortion pills and limiting access to contraception nationwide, gutting programs to help poor and low-income mothers feed and care for their children, pressuring single mothers to marry, rolling back Title IX protections against sexual harassment and assault at educational institutions, and eliminating LGBTQ rights. Project 2025 would also remove environmental and labor protections, shut U.S. borders and round up and deport immigrants, make draconian cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and social security, and so much more.
“Project 2025 is a far-right manifesto and blueprint for Trump and Republicans to enact widespread, wholesale policy violence on everyone who calls America home,” says U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). “We must call that out and use every Congressional tool to push back and prevent this harmful agenda from becoming reality.”
Project 2025 includes “four pillars”: a 920-page policy agenda, a presidential personnel database of vetted conservatives, a Presidential Administration Academy to train these people to achieve the Project 2025 policy goals, and a 180-day playbook, which is what they hope to achieve in the first 180 days if Trump takes office in January 2025.
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” says the Project 2025 website. “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.”
Their plan is to fundamentally reshape the executive branch of the federal government by replacing nonpartisan civil servants with trained ideologues in order to carry out their radical agenda. Despite a longstanding American tradition that career employees of the federal government are not political appointees, Project 2025 calls for removing any federal government employee who disagrees with their agenda. The authors of 2025 boast about “how to fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of Government” (p. 9).
Project 2025 explicitly seeks to “dismantle the administrative state” in order to eliminate enforcement of civil rights, labor and environmental laws. They explain: “The solution … is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees — root and branch” (p. 12).
Just as the Federalist Society helped Trump transform the federal judiciary in his first term, the Heritage Foundation hopes to help Trump transform the executive branch in a second term.
Shaped by a Christian nationalist vision of America, the authors of Project 2025 twist our founding values of equality and freedom. They claim to support equality while advocating for dismantling the government agencies that enforce laws ensuring equality, such as Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. They claim to support freedom while advocating policies that force women to carry unwanted and unsafe pregnancies to term. They are particularly regressive around gender issues, condemning single mothers, same-sex marriage and transgender people. They define freedom in religious terms: “An individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained — to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family — marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like” (p. 14).
On economic issues, Project 2025 claims to support the working class but calls for tax cuts for the rich, elimination of labor and environmental protections, and deregulation of big business and the oil industry. They say, “America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth” (p. 13).
The nonpartisan watchdog group Accountable.US has created an Expose Project 2025 campaign to educate the public and reveal the key funders and conservative figures behind Project 2025. Leonard Leo’s dark money network has contributed $21.5 million in funding to over half of the organizations behind Project 2025. Meanwhile in Congress, U.S. Rep. Jaren Huffman (D-CA) recently announced the Stop Project 2025 Task Force.
“Project 2025 is more than an idea, it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will,” said Rep. Huffman. “This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers. We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late.”
Carrie N. Baker is a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College and a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine.
Read the Original Story
