1) Concentrating power in the presidency: Trump’s allies believe that his first term failed because he couldn’t get enough “loyal” appointees in place and because the “deep state” bureaucracy sabotaged him. So a main recurring theme of Project 2025 is how to bend the executive branch to a conservative president’s will.
2) Longtime conservative priorities: The vast majority of Project 2025’s policy plan is focused on longstanding conservative priorities — with some tweaking and elisions for the Trump era. Though some are indeed quite extreme, they’re not all that new or specifically tied to Trump.
There are far too many to list here, but just as a flavor:
Education: Eliminate the Department of Education, give every parent a voucher-like option they could use to send their child to private school, zero out federal funding to low-income schools over the next decade, greatly cut “wasteful” school meal programs, and end Biden’s student loan forgiveness programs
Energy and environment: Deprioritize fighting climate change, repeal Biden’s clean energy subsidies, further unleash oil and natural gas production, roll back various environmental regulations
Health care: Majorly cut and overhaul Medicaid, roll back the recent law banning surprise medical billing
Immigration: Deny loan access to students at “schools that provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens,” ban non-citizens from living in federally assisted housing (even if they live with a citizen), reinstate and expand the horseback-mounted Border Patrol
On a few issues — trade, antitrust, the Export-Import Bank — the plan states that the conservative movement is divided, and lays out the thinking of two different sides on each issue. On the question of Social Security and Medicare, which Heritage has long supported overhauling but Trump does not, the document is basically silent.
3) A hardline religious-right agenda: There are also parts of Project 2025 that, while not exactly surprising for conservatives, are quite extreme in ways that are politically problematic for Trump. The plan calls for:
Revoking FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which is used in about half of US abortions (“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” the document states)
Using an old law known as the Comstock Act to prosecute people who send abortion pills through the mail
Ending the mandate for insurance to cover the “week-after” contraceptive pill Ella (which the document argues is a “potential abortifacient”)
Crack down on “abortion tourism” in liberal states by requiring states to report where women seeking abortions live and cutting federal funds if they refuse
Ending subsidies for stem cell or fetal cell research
In a fiery introduction by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, Project 2025 also calls for banning porn:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Roberts also adds that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” suggesting that he may define “pornography” much more broadly than is typical — that he may view any attempt to explain or teach about trans people as worthy of outlawing and imprisonment.
This is reflective of a broader push from religious and cultural conservatives. (The demand for porn prohibition does not show up in the document again after Roberts’s introduction, making it unclear how it would be implemented.)
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
A Vote For Trump Is A Vote For Project 2025
Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained
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