What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025, that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again,” Vice President Kamala Harris warned the audience at the beginning of the first and possibly last debate with her opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Trump responded that he had “nothing to do” with it–a claim journalists and pundits have repeatedly refuted.
Conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 in 2023 as a policy framework document for the Republican presidential candidate.
Although Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 in July, he endorsed the Heritage Foundation’s work on it while it was still being drafted. “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do,” Trump said at a dinner hosted by the foundation in 2022.
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From the far-right perspective, Project 2025 stands as a metaphorical Hoover Dam against “the long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions”. The introduction of the 900-page document claims: “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” The goal of the project is outlined as restoring “[the American] Republic to its original moorings”.
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One can be forgiven for thinking that more than 50 conservative think tanks and NGOs getting together to formulate policy for a future president is unprecedented. Yet, Project 2025 is hardly the first time a bunch of far-right Beltway policy wonks have colluded to help set an agenda for a would-be conservative presidency.
If the political class was truly being transparent, they would call this playbook Project 1965, because that is at least how far back the American right started working on resetting progressive policies.
There is certainly much to be outraged about even with a cursory read of Project 2025. Conservative policymakers want to privatise the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Food Insurance Program, the federal housing loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and all federal subsidised student loans.
The Project 2025 gurus also long for the elimination of the US Department of Education (DOE) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The DOE’s crime is they are “a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which – as the Covid era showed – is not particularly concerned with children’s education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination.”
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As for NOAA, they are “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and” are “harmful” because of their “fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable”.
If these far-right recommendations are not enough to spark consternation, there is plenty more. Project 2025’s authors also want the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to require states to track all abortions within their borders or threaten those states with “the cutting of funds”.
The CDC’s “abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate”, one Project 2025 author writes, as “liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism”. At the same time, he recommends the CDC “immediately end its collection of data on gender identity”, a scientific reality they labelled an “unscientific notion”.
On diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programmes, critical race theory, and gender identity, Project 2025’s authors write in multiple places about eliminating “social engineering … climate change [mitigation], critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarising policies”. They refuse to believe that “systemic racism” is a thing.
Yet, as shocking as Project 2025’s prescriptions are, many of them are not new. A great number of them have appeared in the Heritage Foundation-led publication Mandate for Leadership, which has been a mostly quadrennial manual for conservatives since 1981.
Initially, the Heritage Foundation and its collaborators made this playbook available to both the Democratic and Republican parties. With the rise of the conservatives to power, however, the Mandate for Leadership became fully-tuned to centre-right and far-right rule.
There have been nine Mandate for Leadership publications in all for every presidential election cycle since 1980, except for 1992, 2008, and 2012. Even in 1981, conservative policy wonks wanted to “revitalize our economy” through deregulation and massive tax cuts to “strengthen our national security” with beefed-up defence budgets and to “halt the centralization of power in the federal government” by privatising public goods.—Al Jazeera
