Project 2025 is a reactionary plan under which an imperial president with unchecked powers would demolish the federal government as we know it, including our constitutional checks and balances, and reshape our government according to a radical Christian agenda that seriously restricts the rights of women and rolls back the progress that has been made in protecting the rights of sexual minorities.
Project 2025 is the product of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank that wants to prepare the next conservative president of the United States [presumably Trump] with a Mandate for Leadership like the one that prepared Ronald Reagan for the U.S. presidency.
It is a 920-page blueprint of policy proposals that, according to the Mandate, should and can be implemented rapidly when Trump takes office as president for his second term while he has the political momentum and capital to do so.
The Introduction to the Mandate states: “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement … Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
The primary goal of Project 2025 is to shrink the federal government by eliminating departments and programs, and by cutting the number and types of tenured civil service positions. Many of these targeted civil service positions would be filled by presidential order, i.e., a form of patronage replacing trained, experienced civil servants with Trump loyalists.
The Mandate calls for the elimination of the federal Department of Education in order “to empower students and families” by restricting the federal government to the role of gathering statistical evidence on education. Education policy and curricular requirements would be totally determined on the local and state level.
The Mandate calls for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to “be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories” because its current administrators push unproven and harmful climate change theories.
Chapter 8 of the Mandate calls for eliminating all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) because of its liberal bias. The CPB is the largest source of funding for public radio and television, including NPR, PBS, Latino Public Broadcasting and many other organizations.
The Mandate calls for dismantling the Department of Homeland Security into multiple agencies with specific missions. The personnel of these reformed agencies would be directly under the control of the president. This direct control would apply also to the FBI and the Department of Justice making both obedient to the president. Additionally, it calls for an immigration department staffed by presidential appointment, militarization of the border, an end to refugee programs, and the termination of the legal status of Dreamer migrants.
Concerning women and sexual minorities, the Mandate calls for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to be renamed the Department of Life to focus the reformed department on protecting the traditional family. It requires the department to support faith-based organizations that “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family,” and to award grants “to faith-based recipients who reaffirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.”
On abortion rights, the Mandate would revoke FDA approval of the abortion pill; would use the Comstock Act to prosecute people who send abortion pills through the mail; would prosecute states that permit abortion through “abortion tourism” threatening to cut off their federal funds.
The Mandate calls for the elimination of federal funds for Diversity, Equality, and Inclusive programs and for the rollback of federal guidelines for protecting LGBTQ+ rights in federal documents, agencies, and projects.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 saying on his internet platform Truth Social: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.” CNN found that four of his former cabinet and 140 people who worked in his administration contributed to Project 2025. When Trump spoke at a Heritage Foundation dinner, he said, “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, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”
Oddly, this concerted effort to reform our federal government calls itself conservative, and even more oddly it considers Donald J. Trump a conservative. Project 2025 is a naked grasp for unchecked power which contradicts the fundamental tenet of conservative thought. And Trump, who is only interested in his own aggrandizement, has consistently violated every basic principle of true conservative politics. It is a pity that conservatives have deluded themselves into supporting his putsch for the presidency.
I am especially aggrieved that Christians, including many of my fellow Catholics, support Trump in some delusion that he is a man of faith who can save us from all the evils of our age. I ask my fellow Catholics to remember that it was the Catholic Center Party that enabled Hitler to assume power in Germany. They thought they could control Hitler and defeat Communism thereby. They got WWII. As for American evangelicals, have they forgotten the roots of their respective traditions – Traditions based solidly on the separation of Church and State, the liberty of the individual conscience, and the totally secular nature of the nation state.
I am prayerfully waiting for these Christians to awaken from their collective amnesia.
Donald J. Trump has hijacked the Republican Party, has co-opted the conservative movement, has conned American Christians, and has made a shambles of our political system.
Trump has the U.S. Supreme Court. The three associate justices Trump appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court were recommendations of the Heritage Foundation. With Speaker Mike Johnson he controls the House of Representatives. If Trump wins a second term and the Senate, he will control all three branches of our government – an unprecedented power grab that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.
Summer 2024 © nicholas.patricca@gmail.com