Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, outlined a disturbing vision for America’s future in his upcoming book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America. Originally scheduled for publication on September 24, RealClearPolitics reports that Roberts delayed the publication of the book, which features a foreword from J.D. Vance, until after the November elections. (6)

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Roberts, a militant Catholic, Media Matters reports, labels birth control and other forms of reproductive choice as “a snake strangling the American family,” in the upcoming tome. This perspective extends to in vitro fertilization (IVF), which he criticizes for allegedly incentivizing women to delay starting families: (6)

 

“In vitro fertilization (IVF) seems to assist fertility but has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.” (6)

 

Russell Vought

​

Russell Vought has emerged as a pivotal force in shaping the conservative vision for America’s future, most notably through his central role in Project 2025. (6)

 

Vought’s fingerprints are all over Project 2025’s most transformative proposals, including reviving a Trump-era policy that would reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, potentially enabling mass dismissals of career civil servants. This aligns with Vought’s vision of consolidating executive power and reducing the influence of what he sees as an entrenched bureaucracy. (6)

 

At the heart of Vought’s vision, and by extension Project 2025, is a radical reinterpretation of executive power. In Vought’s view, the notion of independent agencies within the executive branch is anathema to the Constitution. This philosophy, if implemented, would bring traditionally independent entities like the Justice Department more directly under presidential control. (6)

 

A proponent of Christian nationalism, Vought sees no contradiction between the separation of church and state and the influence of Christianity on government and society. This worldview underpins much of Project 2025’s agenda, reflecting a desire to reshape not just the mechanics of government, but its underlying values and priorities. (6)

 

The Heritage Foundation also created a "Mandate for Leadership" in 2015 ahead of Trump's first term. Two years into his presidency, it touted that Trump had instituted 64% of its policy recommendations, ranging from leaving the Paris Climate Accords, increasing military spending, and increasing off-shore drilling and developing federal lands. In July 2020, the Heritage Foundation gave its updated version of the book to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. (3)

 

Here are 31 of Trump’s former minions: who contributed to Project 2025, as compiled by Newsweek (7):

 

Paul Dans – Dans served as chief of staff at the US Office of Personnel Management from February 2020 until December 2020. One of Dans' tasks was liaising with the White House to help fill rolls for the approximately 4,000 presidential appointees across the federal government. Dans was the director of Project 2025, until unceremoniously sent packing. (7)

 

Steven Groves – Groves served as special assistant to Trump to defend him against Robert Mueller's investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. He served as Trump's deputy press secretary in 2019 and 2020. He previously served in 2017 as chief of staff to Nikki Haley while she was US ambassador to the United Nations. Groves was an editor of the Project 2025 policy document. (7)

 

Spencer Chretien – Chretien served as special assistant to the president in 2020 and 2021. His job involved identifying, recruiting and placing political employees at all levels of government. Chretien is associate director of Project 2025. (7)

 

Jonathan Berry – Berry served as counsel to the assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2017 and 2018. Berry was also part of Trump's presidential transition team in 2016 and 2017, advising on ethics and legal policy. (7)

 

Adam Candeub – Candeub served in the DOJ as the deputy associate attorney general in 2020. In 2019, he served as a high-ranking commerce official in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). (7)

 

Dustin J. Carmack – Carmack served as the chief of staff to the director of national intelligence in 2020 and 2021. (7)

 

Brendan Carr – A member of both the Trump and the Biden administration, Carr was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission by Trump. His post expired in 2023 and was renewed by Biden; it will expire in 2028. (7)

 

Ben Carson – One of the most prominent Black conservatives in the United States, Carson served as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 until 2021. Carson ran in the 2016 Republican primary, before eventually dropping out and endorsing Trump. (7)

 

Ken Cuccinelli – Cuccinelli served as the acting Secretary of Homeland Security from 2019 until 2021. In 2020, a congressional watchdog issued a report saying that he was unlawfully appointed to this position. (7)

 

Rick Dearborn – Dearborn served as a deputy chief of staff in Trump's White House in 2017 and 2018. Prior to Trump's inauguration, Dearborn worked as the staff director in the presidential transition team. (7)

 

Diana Furchtgott-Roth – Furchtgott-Roth served as acting assistant secretary for economic policy at the Department of the Treasury in 2018 and 2019. (7)

Thomas Gilman – Gilman served in two roles in the Department of Commerce simultaneously from 2019 until 2021: chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration. (7)

 

Mandy Gunasekara – Gunasekara served as the chief of staff for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2020 and 2021. She had worked as a senior policy adviser for the EPA since 2017. (7)

 

Gene Hamilton – Hamilton served as counsel for the attorney general in the DOJ from 2017 until 2021. (7)

 

Jennifer Hazelton – Hazelton served as public affairs official at the Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2020 and 2021. She also served as a public affairs official in the State Department in 2017. (7)

 

Troup Hemenway – Hemenway served as associate director for national security in the White House Presidential Personnel Office, which is tasked with vetting new appointees. He also founded the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees. (7)

 

Dennis Dean Kirk – Kirk was supposed to serve as chairman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, an agency which gives federal employees, including whistleblowers, a place to appeal if they feel they have been unfairly fired. Trump nominated him to the position in 2018. However, the Senate delayed confirming him and he never ended up serving in the role, meaning the Board did not have enough members to function during Trump's administration. This created a backlog of complaints. (7)

 

Bernard McNamee – McNamee served as commissioner for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2018 until 2020. (7)

 

Christopher Miller – Miller served in three roles in the Trump administration in a period of only seven months. In June 2020, he was appointed as the acting assistant secretary of defense, in August 2020, he was named director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and from November 2020 until January 2021, he served as the acting secretary of defense. (7)

 

Stephen Moore – Moore was not a member of Trump's administration, but advised on his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump nominated Moore to serve as governor of the Federal Reserve, but he withdrew his name after facing criticism following the resurfacing of historic articles he wrote disparaging female athletes. (7)

 

Mora Namdar – Namdar served as the acting assistant secretary of state in the State Department from December 2020 until January 2021. She previously worked as a policy adviser in the same department since 2019. (7)

 

Peter Navarro – One of the most prominent members of the Trump administration, Navarro served as the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy from 2017 until 2021. He was also the director of the National Trade Council in 2017. Navarro was a close adviser to Trump, largely on trade, but he also advised on the COVID-19 response and Trump's false election fraud claims. Navarro refused to comply with the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack. He was indicted by a grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress and eventually pled guilty. He was convicted and sentenced to four months jail and fined $9,500. He is due to be released from prison next week. (7)

 

William Perry Pendley – Pendley served as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management from 2019 until 2021. (7)

 

Max Primorac – Primorac served as the acting chief operating officer for USAID from November 2020 until January 2021. He had previously worked as an adviser in the same agency since 2018. (7)

 

Roger Severino – Severino served in the Department of Health and Human Services as director of the Civil Rights Office from 2017 until 2021. (7)

 

Kiron Skinner – Skinner served as director of policy planning in the State Department from 2018 until 2019. She previously worked from Trump's transition team. (7)

 

Brooks Tucker – Tucker served as chief of staff for the Department of Veterans Affairs from April 2020 until January 2021. He had previously served as an assistant secretary in the same department. (7)

 

Hans von Spakovsky – Von Spanovsky served on Trump's short lived Voter Fraud Commission, which operated from May 2017 until January 2018. He previously served a brief and controversial stint as commissioner of the Federal Election Commission in the Bush administration from 2006 until 2007. (7)

 

Russ Vought – Vought served as director the Office of Management and Budget, the largest office in the executive branch of government, from July 2020 until January 2021. He had served as deputy and then acting director between 2018 and 2020. (7)

 

William Walton – Although not a member of Trump's administration, Walton served on his 2016 transition team as co-head of economic issues for federal agencies. (7)

 

Paul Winfree – Winfree served in three roles in Trump's White House in 2017: deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council, and director of budget policy. He left the White House at the end of 2017. Trump appointed him to the Fullbright Foreign Scholarship Board in 2019. (7)

​

EDUCATION

 

Parts of Project 2025 are far more closely aligned with a white Christian nationalist worldview than with a traditional, conservative education policy agenda. (10)

​

The Project 2025 manifesto suggests a conservative president should dismantle the Department of Education, an idea that Trump has also supported. At most, it says, the department should be a “statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states”. (8)

 

Project 2025 says that shuttering the Department of Education “would not result in fewer resources and less assistance for children with special needs or from low-income families. Rather, closing the federal behemoth would better target existing taxpayer resources already set aside for these students by shifting oversight responsibilities to federal and state agencies that have more expertise in helping these populations.” (9,12)

 

I also have some oceanfront property in Arizona for sale. Call me.

 

Title I

 

It wants to phase out Title I funding that goes to low-income schools. And it would allow states to spend federal education money without direction, giving states leeway to use money meant for a specific purpose for whatever they want as long as it relates to education. (8)

 

Head Start

 

And Project 2025 would entirely eliminate Head Start, harming children’s education and severely restricting access to child care in rural America. This despite clear evidence that the program has helped boost educational attainment and fight intergenerational poverty. (11)

 

To date, Head Start has served nearly 40 million children. In fiscal year 2023, the program was funded to serve more than 833,000 children and pregnant people living in poverty in centers and home-based settings in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and six territories. Head Start plays a critical role in supporting the healthy development of children living in poverty and in helping parents seek employment and educational opportunities that afford them a better shot at gaining a foothold in America’s middle class. (11)

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ENERGY & THE ENVIRONMENT

 

Project 2025 foreshadows what environmental experts see as an even deeper dismantling of the nation’s environmental agencies than Trump accomplished during his first term in office — which was significant. (13)

​

Within the Department of Energy, offices dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated, and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for household appliances would be scrapped. The environmental oversight capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be curbed significantly or eliminated altogether, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, and conducting climate change research. (14)

​

Eliminating programs safeguarding public health, environmental justice

​

Project 2025 advocates for getting rid of smaller and lesser-known federal programs and statutes that safeguard public health and environmental justice. It recommends eliminating the Endangerment Finding — the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from vehicles and power plants, among other industries, under the Clean Air Act. It also recommends axing government efforts to assess the social cost of carbon, or the damage each additional ton of carbon emitted causes. And it seeks to prevent agencies from assessing the “co-benefits,” or the knock-on positive health impacts, of their policies, such as better air quality.  (14)

 

“When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air, water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color,” said Rachel Cleetus, the policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. “The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.” (14)

 

Weather forecasts

 

The blueprint advocates shutting down free weather reports (see section on “Targeting Federal Agencies…”), but appears to leave the National Hurricane Center intact, saying the data it collects should be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.” But the National Hurricane Center pulls much of its data from the National Weather Service, as do most other private weather service companies, and eliminating public weather data could devastate Americans’ access to accurate weather forecasts. (14))

 

Eliminate National Flood Insurance Program

 

The blueprint recommends eliminating the National Flood Insurance Program and moving flood insurance to private insurers. That notion skates right over the fact that the federal program was initially established because private insurers found that it was economically unfeasible to insure the nation’s flood-prone homes — long before climate change began wreaking havoc on the insurance market. (14)

 

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

 

 Project 2025 advocates not just withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, but from the underlying treaty, the 32-year-old United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which would end such obligations as annual reporting on the nation’s greenhouse gas inventory. (13)

 

Selling federal lands to developers

 

Another Project 2025 co-author, William Perry Pendley, Trump’s former acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, reiterated in a recent op-ed his long-held view that federal lands should be sold off to private developers—this time, he proposed it as a solution for the housing crisis in the West.

 

Trump’s flying cars

 

Trump can try to to distance himself from Project 2025, but Pendley was endorsing an idea that Trump himself proposed last year—the establishment of “Freedom Cities” on federal lands to “reopen the frontier.” (He was also excited by the prospect of Jetsons-style flying cars) (13)

​

Green policies cause energy crises?

 

The new energy crisis is caused not by a lack of resources, but by extreme “green” policies. Under the rubrics of “combating climate change” and “ESG” (environmental, social, and governance), the Biden Administration, Congress, and various states, as well as Wall Street investors, international corporations, and progressive special-interest groups, are changing America’s energy landscape. (15)

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Repeal Inflation Reduction Act & infrastructure law??

 

Unsurprisingly, Project 2025 supports repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act  and Inflation Reduction Act on the grounds that we are just spending too much darn money one renewal energy. (15)

 

Project 2025 — which seeks to basically privatize everything under the bloody sun — actually has the nerve to resent earning by investors and developers of sustainable energy. (13)

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HEALTH CARE

 

The recommendations of Project 2025 include policies that, if implemented, would impact our health and well-being from cradle to grave. This is a prime example of dogmatic thinking superseding pragmatism, compassion, and common sense.

 

Wait for it: “Market based” is coming!

 

Proclaims Project 2025 pretentiously: “Health care reform should be patient-centered and market-based and should empower individuals to control their health care–related dollars and decisions.” (17)

 

Make meds more costly: Repeal the IRA

 

Project 2025 proposes repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, potentially causing millions of seniors on Medicare to experience higher prescription drug costs. Over the past two years, the IRA has helped lower drug costs, with policies such as a $35 monthly cap on insulin for seniors, free vaccines covered under Medicare Part D, and the spreading out of total annual Medicare Part D out-of-pocket costs over the year. However, if the IRA is repealed, an estimated 18.5 million Medicare enrollees could pay more for their medications and Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies would be ended. (18)

 

Repeal the Affordable Care Act

 

By repealing the ACA, Trump’s agenda would allow health insurance companies to once again deny coverage based on preexisting conditions. Such a move would leave tens of millions of people without health coverage.

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Restrict women’s access to contraception

 

Project 2025 would also restrict women’s access to contraception, inserting itself in their reproductive lives. Among other things, Trump’s plan would make it harder for women to access no-cost emergency contraception, affecting nearly 48 million women of reproductive age. Emergency contraception is widely used, completely safe and effective at preventing a pregnancy before it occurs. (19)

​

Privatizing Medicare and converting to a defined-contribution system

​

Project 2025 will destroy Medicare through privatization, while lining the bottomless pockets of insurers.

 

“Medicare’s open-ended payment system should be converted to a defined-contribution, premium support system,” the Heritage Foundation wrote. (20)

 

“Rather than controlling costs by tightening price controls or imposing payment caps, policymakers should transform Medicare into a competitive, market-based system, financed by a defined contribution (premium support) to a beneficiary’s choice of health plan, including traditional Medicare,” Heritage writes. (20)

 

Heritage looks to save $1 trillion through their Grinch-hearted policies over the next several years (2025-2032). (20)

 

Further, for-profit, privately run Medicare Advantage plans would become the DEFAULT for doctors and services under Medicare, rather than traditional Medicare, thereby risking the health of our seniors (21)

 

Lifetime cap on Medicaid & more cruelty

 

Project 2025 also proposes to implement a lifetime cap for Medicaid that would threaten health care coverage for 18.5 million Americans. This would mean that once a person has been on Medicaid for a set amount of time—potentially over the full course of their life—they could lose eligibility for Medicaid coverage, regardless of their financial situation. Similar policies have previously been introduced, including a proposal to impose a 36-month lifetime maximum for Medicaid coverage. (22)

 

But wait! There’s more. Project 2025 is pulling out all the stops to destroy the safety net:

• Gut Medicaid by converting federal funding to block grants or per capita caps and eliminates existing federal Medicaid protections and requirements (21)

• Reject abortion as health care, reverse the FDA’s approval of abortion pills, and require states to report abortions to the federal government (21)

• Redirects Title X family planning funding towards education about the importance of marriage (21)

• Commits to finding ways to outlaw IVF by revising the mission statement of HHS to declare that life begins at conception (21)

• Pregnant women receiving benefits from Medicaid — the federal health insurance plan that also provides coverage for children, parents, older Americans and individuals with disabilities — could expect fewer of those benefits. (23a)

• Pregnant women with serious complications — such as the death of the fetus inside their bodies — could find it harder to get medical treatment, risking death because of the poisoning of their bodies by the decaying fetus. (Actually, this is already happening in states where abortion is banned.) (23a)

 

If you wanted to place your baby for adoption, your options could be limited to placing your child with a man and a woman who are married. As Project 2025 asserts plainly, “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” Expect the courts to embrace this as a guiding principle. (23a)

 

“Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, 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 the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.” (17)

 

The right cannot get over Anthony Fauci! Unbelievably, Project 2025 says: “Unaccountable bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci should never again have such broad, unchecked power to issue health ‘guidelines’ that will certainly be the basis for federal and state mandates.” (17)

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ABORTION

 

Project 2025 does not explicitly call for a national abortion ban, but the policy ideas it advocates would aggressively limit access to abortions across the country.

 

The manifesto suggests the Department of Health and Human Services should rename itself the Department of Life, explicitly rejecting abortion as health care.

“The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.” (24)

 

Tracking abortion stats

 

Project 2025 is obsessed with collecting data on abortions, and is very miffed that pro-choice states like California and Maryland don’t submit any data: “The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate.” (17)

 

“Abortion tourism”?? Gimme a break

 

The right wing cannot get enough on abortion: “CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.’ (25)

 

“Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, 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, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” (25)

 

So will pro-choice states be forced to submit data? Where’s your right-wing state’s rights now?

 

Abortion pills

 

Project 2025 proposes mobilizing an array of government agencies to curb access to abortion – up to and including a national ban on abortion pills that would affect even states that protect abortion rights. (26)

 

“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world. The rate of chemical abortion in the U.S. has increased by more than 150 percent in the past decade; more than half of annual abortions in the U.S. are chemical rather than surgical.” (17)

 

“The Dobbs decision [overturning Roe v Wade] is just the beginning,” Project 2025 reads. “Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America.” (26)

 

Project 2025 also indicates that fetuses should have legal rights, and seeks to expand “surveillance” of abortion while eliminating government support for the procedure. In its architects’ view, abortion is not healthcare and should never be treated as such. (26)

 

“Project 2025’s whole-of-government approach to dismantling reproductive rights by weaponizing federal agencies and consolidating executive branch power is unprecedented – and goes against most Americans’ wishes,” said Caroline Ciccone, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US. (26)

 

Project 2025 also calls for enforcing the 151-year-old anti-obscenity law known as the  Comstock Act to ban people from shipping abortion pills. Because abortion clinics rely on the mail to send and receive the pills, as do the advocates who help people induce their own abortions, enforcing the Comstock Act could result in a de facto national ban on medication abortion. (26)

 

After Roe fell, Biden’s Department of Justice issued guidance saying that the Comstock Act only applies to people who intentionally break the law. But a Trump administration could roll back that guidance and thus sidestep a gridlocked Congress to ban the most popular type of abortion. (26)

 

Project 2025 would end privacy for abortion patients, and this will likely creep to include women seeking non-abortion reproductive health care. After Roe was tossed out, the pro-choice Biden administration issued guidance asserting that, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), healthcare providers can talk to law enforcement about abortion patients only in “narrowly tailored” circumstances. For example, hospital workers are not allowed to tell cops that they suspect someone may have taken pills to induce an abortion. Cops also cannot demand records from an abortion clinic without a court order. (17,25)

 

Project 2025 demands that this guidance be abandoned. “HIPAA covers patients in the womb, but this guidance treats them as nonpersons contrary to law,” the playbook reads. “The guidance is unnecessary and contributes to ideologically motivated fear-mongering about abortion after Dobbs.” (25)

 

Increase CDC ‘surveillance’ over abortion

 

The nefarious blueprint would also increase CDC “surveillance” over ab ortion. The CDC already collects information about abortion from most of the country. But its reports are incomplete, since states such as California do not supply the data. Project 2025 suggests that the CDC should go so far as to cut funds from a state if it does not tell the CDC “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method”. (25)

 

VETERANS

 

American right wing takes joy in sending our youth to war, and self-righteously proclaim their support for the troops. And after they come home? Not so much.

 

Remember the PACT Act?

 

The PACT Act is a new law that expands access to VA health care and benefits for Veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances, notably vets who served in Iraq. (27,28,29)

Sounds good, but war-loving Republicans initially blocked it. This sudden Republican opposition to the PACT Act, left many veterans and their supporters shocked. Why were they opposed? Cost, of course. (27,28,29)

 

Project 2025: Turning our backs on vets

 

Now let’s talk Project 2025. Project 2025 envisions significant reductions to veterans' health care services and disability benefits. It plans to slash funding for the VA, leading to: (30)

• Longer wait times

• Reduced access to care

• Lower quality of services

 

Proposed changes could dis-enroll millions of veterans without a service-connected designation from VA-paid health care. Other veterans could lose access to VA health care for issues that "don't align" with their service-related conditions. Take a look at the desired policies laid out in the Heritage Foundation's related blueprint: It's there in black and white. (23b)

 

Project 2025's plan would also require VA hospitals to "increase the number of patients seen each day to equal the number seen by DoD medical facilities." That apples and oranges demand ignores the enormous differences in needs between generally healthy younger service members and older veterans, and risks compromising the quality of care for veterans.

 

Privatize: Make the VA outsource to private facilities

 

Project 2025 also calls for VA hospitals to outsource more care into costly private facilities, a fiscally reckless move that continues a Trump-backed trend promoted by the Mission Act that has ballooned costs for the VA. Project 2025 also endorses the revival of a scuttled Trump-era commission largely aimed at downsizing and even closing VA hospitals. (23b)

 

The ultimate endgame of these plans is to dismantle the VA's clinical care mission. (23b)

 

Project 2025 aims to privatize significant portions of VA healthcare, pushing veterans to seek care from private providers who may not understand our unique needs. This could lead to fragmented care, increased costs, and confusion, particularly for those in rural areas far from VA facilities. (30)

Veteran disability benefits on chopping block

 

Project 2025 is hell-bent on cutting veterans' hard-earned disability benefits. The agenda calls for cutting costs by revising disability rating awards for future claims and partially revising some existing claims. Let's call this what this is: a proposal to slash care and benefits for disabled veterans, in part or in whole. When asked about these slashed disability payments, a spokesperson for Project 2025 dug in on the possibility of rolling back the ratings scale for those who fight tomorrow's wars. In a Project 2025 world, future generations of disabled veterans could see their benefits cut or wiped out entirely. (23b)

 

Project 2025 seeks to limit the health conditions that qualify for disability benefits: (30)

• Conditions tenuously linked or unrelated to military service might no longer be covered

• Veterans currently receiving benefits could see reductions

• Future veterans might find it harder to get the support they need

For example, illnesses like multiple sclerosis and Crohn's disease might be excluded from disability compensation, severely impacting the quality of life for affected veterans​. (30)

 

AGRICULTURE & CLIMATE CHANGE

 

Consistently, Project 2025’s proposal for the Department of Agriculture aims at eliminating pretty much all US Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations on farms, allowing them to produce as much as possible, for as cheap as possible, regardless of the consequences.

The right-wing tome is also extremely hostile to climate change mitigation, and looks to eliminate cilmate-protection regulations,  any of which are within the USDA. (32)

 

More factory farms, fewer small ones

 

Increasing yield by any means possible is in part what led to the spread of factory farms that control American agriculture today. Many small and medium-sized farms couldn’t afford to invest in the necessary technology needed to produce commodity crops like corn and soy at the rate that needed to compete. Others that did fell into debt, opening the door for large agri-corporations to take over. (32)

 

In 1990, small and medium-sized farms accounted for nearly half of agricultural production in the U.S. Thirty years later, it was less than a quarter. (32)

 

Left up to Project 2025, it would be up to each farm's own discretion when it comes to raising animals and growing food. (32)

 

“Farmers, and the food system should be free from any unnecessary government intervention,” the document reads. The USDA should instead prioritize “personal freedom, private property and the rule of law.” (33)

 

Food security

 

Numerous proposals in Project 2025 intend to reduce numbers and eligibility for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, known commonly as the food stamp program) and for school meals [Note: Food insecurity is rising faster in rural areas. (34)

 

Eliminating nutritional labeling and dietary guidelines

 

Project 2025 also proposed changing the USDA dietary guidelines to “focus on nutritional issues and do not veer off-mission by focusing on unrelated issues, such as the environment, that have nothing to do with nutritional advice. The guidelines are published every five years in collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services. (32)

 

Project 2025 claims that there have been “constant controversy due to questionable recommendation and claims regarding the politicization of the process.” The USDA and the HHS have for more than 40 years jointly published the Dietary Guidelines. They are refreshed every five years. (33)

 

Instead? The private sector has the answers of course — for a price

 

“There is no shortage of private sector dietary advice for the public, and nutrition and dietary choices are best left to individuals to address their personal needs. This includes working with their own health professionals,” Project 2025 pontificates. (33)

 

Project 2025 concludes there is no need, therefore, for USDA or HHS  to define healthy eating practices and foods.

 

Never mind that rural residents are less likely to have “their own health professionals” or reliable access to any health professional, or other specific dietary advice. (35)

 

Atop that, this suggestion comes as nearly 42% of adults in the U.S. are defined as obese, and 20% of children. (34)

 

Project 2025 blames climate change and sustainability efforts. “Issues such as climate change and sustainability infiltrated the process.” (33)

 

SNAP

 

The project’s agriculture section proposes moving SNAP from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to Health and Human Services. Bakst also argues that a future administration should make recipients work or apply for jobs for more than 20 hours a week. (36)

 

Additionally, it proposes reversing the Biden administration’s 2021 reforms that sought to increase SNAP disbursements to reflect the real-world costs of healthy food — and rejiggering the federal math that determines whether all students in a district have access to free meals. (36)

 

Climate change

 

To Project 2025, focusing on climate change and renewable energy is a waste of time, despite agriculture accounting for one third of the nation’s methane emissions. The proposal is disturbingly anti-climate, recommending the elimination of any program that addresses a climate issue that is “speculative in nature.” In other words, preventative.  (32)

 

Project 2025 would nix the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) which pays farmers “to remove environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production and plant species that will improve environmental health and quality.” The goal of the program is to improve water quality, prevent soil erosion and reduce the loss of wildlife habitat. (32)

 

Increase logging to prevent wildfires??

Many of the proposed measures cut against the grain of mainstream scientific thought. For example, to address destructive wildfire, the plan seeks to ban the use of prescribed burns to reduce the amount of fire-prone vegetation in forests — something Republican lawmakers have also pushed for. (36)

 

Instead, Project 2025 would fight wildfires with increased logging — a strategy that many ecologists argue makes fires worse. (Logging is distinct from expensive and noncommercial tree thinning — rather like weeding with a chainsaw — which does reduce fire risk.) (36)

 

Let state-inspected food be sold interstate

Project 2025 argues that a future Republican USDA should allow facilities inspected by the states to sell food across state lines. (36)

 

This proposal hinges on the 1978 language requiring state-inspected facilities to be “at least equal to” USDA inspected ones. (36)

 

But after Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) proposed the same change in a 2021 bill that failed to escape committee, the Safe Food Coalition (SFC) noted in an April letter to congressional leaders urging them to vote against the measure that this standard doesn’t mean state inspections are equally safe. (36)

 

State inspectors, for example, don’t have the same level of inspection authority as that claimed by federal inspectors, the SFC argued. They also wouldn’t have any ability to recall tainted food sold beyond their borders. (36)

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WORKING AMERICANS

 

Project 2025 would hand the executive branch — the next conservative president— an unprecedented level of control over working people’s lives, and transfer power from them to others. (37)

 

Project 2025’s approach to policy for working Americans is simple —favor employers over workers, who get to work harder for less. Oh, and end abortion, too, of course.

Project 2025 is wholly reactionary, and would turn the clock back a century to relax child labor laws, curb overtime, undermine the right to organize and bargain collectively, while facilitating employer discrimination.

 

Research shows that Project 2025 would hurt working people by: (38)

• Allowing states to ban labor unions in the private sector

• Making it easier for corporations to fire workers who engage in collective action or organizing

• Allowing corporations to get rid of unions even when the workers are protected by a signed union contract

• Forcing workers to hold secret ballot elections to form a union even when their employer has agreed to voluntarily recognize it

• Eliminating overtime protections for workers

• Ignoring the federal minimum wage

• Eliminating the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which has relieved many government employees of overwhelming student debt burdens. Ending merit staffing in the federal government so Trump can hire unqualified loyalists for thousands of positions now filled by qualified, trained, nonpartisan career employees

• Eliminating federal rules that protect children from working in mines, meatpacking plants and other dangerous workplaces

 

Diversity makes them nervous

 

Project 2025’s authors believe there has been a “DEI Revolution” at the Department of Labor and want to reverse it, writing: “Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views.” (39)

 

They urge the next president to issue executive orders prohibiting the federal government from paying for any critical race theory trainings and prohibiting racial classification and quotas. They want the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to stop collecting employment data based on race and ethnicity. (39)

 

Abortion

 

The so-called blueprint calls on Congress to pass a law requiring employers who provide benefits for abortion services to provide equal or greater benefits to support pregnancy, childbirth, parenthood and adoption. They want the law to “clarify that no employer is required to provide any accommodations or benefits for abortion.” (39)

 

Get to work, kid! Child labor under Project 2025

 

The authors further believe that the Labor Department should relax restrictions on child labor and “amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent.” (39)

 

Project 2025 instructs the U.S. Department of Labor to issue new regulations allowing minors to work in dangerous jobs. The proposal builds on efforts by 28 states to weaken child labor laws and comes despite the fact that since 2019, there has been an 88 percent increase in cases where children were found to be employed in violation of child labor laws.(40)

 

Allowing employers to not pay overtime

 

Project 2025 proposes changing overtime eligibility and benefits and is designed to confuse and disempower workers. Its version of overtime would put more power in the hands of employers to exploit employees and pad corporate bottom lines at the expense of workers. Specifically, Project 2025 proposes letting employers set the time period in which hours are measured, lowering the overtime pay eligibility threshold, and giving employees time off—that employers would still approve or disapprove—in lieu of additional pay. Beyond the many ways Project 2025 proposes reducing employee power in the overtime system, even just reverting to the former overtime pay rules put in place by the Trump administration would take overtime away from 4.3 million workers. (40)

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Making it easier for employers to discriminate

 

Project 2025 sabotages the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, making it more difficult to track violations of the Civil Rights Act’s Title VII protections. Doing so would enable employers to more easily discriminate against people based on their identities. People of color, women, those with disabilities, and those who identify as LGBTQI+ would be disproportionately affected.(40)

Project 2025 is especially grim on its goals for federal employees.

 

Eliminate up to a million federal jobs

 

Because of the proposed deep budget cuts, elimination and privatization of agencies and programs, hiring freezes, caps on the number of personnel, and other anti-government policies, some have estimated that there would be a loss of up to a million federal jobs if Project 2025 is implemented. (40)

 

Declare public unions illegal and take away union rights

 

Project 2025 proposes a ban on “card check,” one of the main ways workers can organize a union and bargain collectively for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. The proposal also weakens the National Labor Relations Board’s watchdog role, which would make it harder to form a union and have that union recognized. Furthermore, the plan urges a ban on public-employee unions and allows states to ban unions entirely. According to the AFL-CIO, the plan also “make[s] it easier for employers to get rid of workers’ unions in the middle of … contracts.” Unions, of course, play a critical role in helping lift workers’ wages and growing the middle class. Finally, Project 2025 seeks to replace unions’ high-quality training and apprenticeship programs with lower-quality and likely substandard training programs designed to benefit corporations and pad their bottom lines. (40)

 

Seeking to end collective bargaining for public-sector workers, they would encourage Congress to “consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place.” (41)

 

In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of employees working for TSA, DOJ, USCIS, and FEMA would have their union rights stripped away by executive action on national security grounds. For other agencies that still have contracts in place, they would reinstate Trump’s executive orders busting unions and directing agencies to renegotiate contracts to obtain the strongest possible management rights. (40)

 

They would reinstate Schedule F, which seeks to reclassify any career federal employee whose job is in any way connected to federal policy. This new classification politicizes the civil service, allowing the administration to hire and fire for political reasons. More than 500,000 employees could be affected and lose their work protections as they intend to use authority that’s already in the law to target jobs they say are “of a confidential, policy-determining, policymaking or policy-advocating character”. There are 508,000 Grade 13-15 jobs in the federal government, and the number they will convert is unknown. (40)

 

Gut federal workers’ pay and benefits 

 

They would replace the General Schedule and Wage Grade systems with a pay system that would decide raises based on occupation and how well employees carry out orders, whether legal or not. Describing federal retirement programs as overly generous, they would reduce retirement benefits to match “the market”, noting that half of private sector firms do not offer any retirement benefits. They also want to cut Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age. (40)

 

Implement discriminatory practices

 

They would restore either IQ tests or aptitude tests or both as requirements for federal hiring, despite the fact those tests have been found to be discriminatory. They identify the absence of these tests as the “root cause” of the poor performance of federal employees generally and say no merit system can exist without these tests. (40)

 

They also propose abolishing so-called “disparate impact” – adverse impact of a facially neutral requirement or process – as grounds for challenging the legitimacy of the new civil service exams. (40)

 

They would prohibit DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts in most agencies including VA and at the Department of Labor. They would end data collection that showed differences by race and ethnicity and rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. They would also use the Department of Justice to police federal hiring government-wide to ensure that race, religion, and sex are not considered. (40)

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LGBTQIA+ RIGHTS

 

Much of Project 2025 relates to gender, sexuality and race, aiming to end most all of the federal government’s efforts to achieve equity and even collect data that could be used to track outcomes across the public and private sectors. 

 

The blueprint encourages the next presidential administration to disband the Gender Policy Council created by Democratic President Joe Biden and undo all of its work. Heritage suggests eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government. The authors also want to take the following terms out of every rule and regulation: sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), DEI, gender, gender identity, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health and reproductive rights. (39)

 

Magically, no more transgender people!

 

Project 2025 envisions a federal government that denies the existence of transgender people, undermines the rights of same-sex married couples and dismantles services for LGBTQIA+ Americans wherever possible, primarily via the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which the Heritage Foundation proposes renaming the Department of Life. (39)

 

Even worse, Project 2025 equates the act of being transgender, or “transgender ideology,” to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed. (39)

 

Fathers and mothers only, thanks!

 

The plan calls for the laughably named Department of Life to take the official stance that families are made up of a married father and mother and children and to redirect federal funds to support a “biblically based” definition of family. (39)

 

Turning the CDC into an ostrich

 

The bigots at Project 2025 want the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to hide its head in the sand, and deny the existence of transgender people. The CDC, says Project 2025, should “immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa).” The report also calls for the National Institutes of Health to fund studies into “the short-term and long-term negative effects” of gender-affirming care, from social affirmation to surgery, and the likelihood of convincing children that they are not transgender through therapy. (39)

 

Not surprisingly, the plan is also to repeal education policies from the Obama and Biden administrations that recognize nonbinary and transgender identities.  (39)

 

Pushing a failed GOP anti-trans initiative 

 

Project 2025 heartily wishes the next Administration to rescind a Biden-era revision to Title IX that strengthened protections for sexual assault victims and LGBTQ+ students, something Republicans in Congress have tried but failed to do.Title IX is a 1972 civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination by educational programs that receive federal money.

 

Project 2025 says the next administration should reimplement Title IX interpretations from the Trump administration that defined “sex” in the statute as only “biological sex at birth.” (39)

 

Don’t tell us your name, kid: We’ll tell you!

 

Not even a kid’s name is safe from these so-called freedom lovers. Project 2025, in its persecution of trans students, would actually prohibit public educators from using names of students other than on their birth certificates without written permission from their parents or guardians and from using pronouns that are different than the sex assigned to the student at birth without permission, or at all if is “contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral activities.” (39)

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FEDERAL AGENCIES: PRIVATIZE, PRIVATIZE, PRIVATIZE

 

Don’t care about free weather reports? Well, Project 2025 will make you happy, because it plans on eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which not only provides weather reports for the entire world, but also tracks hurricanes and alerts us to bad weather.

 

Say bye bye, if Project 2025 is implemented.

 

The author of the section on NOAA, Thomas Gilman, argues that NOAA needs to be dismantled because of its outsized bureaucracy that garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $13 billion annual budget and accounts for half of the department’s personnel. (42)

National Weather Service under threat

 

NOAA's six offices, including the National Weather Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, "form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity," the guide states. (3)

 

The guide claims that each of NOAA’s functions could be provided commercially at a lower cost and with a higher quality, and specifically mentioned AccuWeather as an example of a private company whose services are “more reliable than those provided by the NWS.” (42)

 

In the United States, as in most other countries, weather forecasts are a freely accessible government amenity. The National Weather Service issues alerts and predictions, warning of hurricanes and excessive heat and rainfall, all at the total cost to American taxpayers of roughly $4 per person per year. Anyone with a TV, smartphone, radio, or newspaper can know what tomorrow’s weather will look like, whether a hurricane is heading toward their town, or if a drought has been forecast for the next season. Even if they get that news from a privately owned app or TV station, much of the underlying weather data are courtesy of meteorologists working for the federal government. (43)

 

Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates. (43)

 

End Dept of Homeland Security, created in 2002 under Bush

 

The Department of Homeland Security, established in 2002, should be dismantled and its agencies either combined with others, or moved under the purview of other departments altogether, the policy book states. For example, immigration-related entities from the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Health and Human Services should form a standalone, Cabinet-level border and immigration agency staffed by more than 100,000 employees, according to the agenda. (3)

 

Other proposals include:

• Reviewing the work of the National Hurricane Center and the National Environmental Satellite Service to ensure their data is presented neutrally without supporting any one side of the climate debate.

• Transferring the National Ocean Service’s survey functions to the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Geological Survey to reduce spending.

• Streamlining the National Marine Fisheries Service and simplifying their work to focus on saltwater species, while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service focuses on freshwater species.

• Downsizing the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, claiming the office is the source of much of NOAA’s “climate alarmism.”

• Elevating the Office of Space Commerce, saying it’s going to be one of the most crucial industries of the future.

 

Other federal agencies Project 2025 would shove onto the block for cutting or privatization include:

• Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized. DHS and TSA were created in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks to coordinate our national security efforts, facilitate intelligence sharing, and prevent another terrorist attack. Both agencies have done an amazing job protecting our homeland. Bringing our country back to the pre-9/11 era is not only irresponsible but also puts all of us at risk. (44)

• Department of Education would be eliminated and oversight of education and federal funding for education will be handed over to the states. Also being gutted are regulations prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (44)

• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be eliminated and moved to the Department of Interior or the Department of Transportation if combined with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The costs of disaster preparedness and response would be shifted to states and local governments. (44)

• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s many regional labs and entire offices of enforcement and compliance and scientific integrity and risk information would be eliminated. This will endanger public health by giving corporations and big businesses a greenlight to pollute the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. (44)

• Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to “privatize as much as possible” and close many hospitals and clinics. This will hurt veterans who rely on the VA’s expertise on illnesses unique to veterans. Veterans will also be talking to robots or chat bots instead of a live person when much of the Veterans Benefits Administration is automated. (44)

• Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be taken apart and send much of its work to states and other agencies – bad news for low income and working-class families who rely on its meagre assistance. (44)

• Department of Justice (DOJ) would lose its independence and be under control of the President. They believe that DOJ decisions should “always be consistent with the President’s policy agenda and the rule of law.” (44)

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would be drastically reduced and split into two entities: one gathering scientific data and one making public health recommendations and policies. Breaking up the CDC could hinder its ability to prevent and mitigate an outbreak. The CDC would also privatize all test development and laboratory functions and focus on providing guidance in these areas instead of “competing with the private sector.” They would move CDC’s data infrastructure and management to a public-private partnership, causing the government to lose ownership and control of the data. (44)​