by Melisaundra Welles
Project 2025 is a blueprint for uprooting our democracy and sending this nation backward at least a hundred years. The plan was birthed by The Heritage Foundation (“Heritage”), a right-wing think tank founded in 1973 that often affects public policy in the U.S. The 900+ page plan is a roadmap designed for the next conservative president to wield inordinate power that will change the structure of our society.
Paul Dans, former Director of Project 2025, unabashedly writes in his descriptive Note, “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.”[i]
Dans means it when he says that. He and his colleagues, a team packed with numerous individuals from the previous Trump Administration, are chomping at the bit to unleash Heritage’s four-phase plan.
These four phases of Project 2025 are called “Pillars.”
▪ Pillar 1 is the expansive agenda for the next conservative president to overhaul federal agencies, firstly by firing federal employees the administration doesn’t want and replacing them with loyalists they prefer. Among other things, the policy proposes to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security and replace them with a patchwork of solutions that the administration deems appropriate. It would require the Department of Health and Human Services to cease the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone and to advance a pro-life task force and biblical concepts of family. They plan to cut and revamp Medicaid; replace Medicare with a private sector plan aimed to limit health care choices for senior citizens; and roll back regulations designed to combat climate change.
▪ Pillar 2 builds a database of potential employees by inviting interested conservatives to apply online. Project 2025 “coalition members” will vet applications from the database and make hiring recommendations to the incoming administration.
▪ Pillar 3 provides online training to inexperienced applicants who have been selected from the database. This training program is called the Presidential Administration Academy. Experienced government workers will get more in-person seminars and other types of advanced training.
▪ Pillar 4, the Playbook, consists of forming agency teams and plans that will be implemented immediately upon the new conservative president’s installation.
To justify the existence of Project 2025, Kevin D. Roberts, PhD pens in his 17-page Foreword entitled “A Promise to America” that Project 2025 aims to “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. He also states that the plan seeks to “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty”.[ii] Ironically, Roberts simultaneously declares that “[t]he next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms . . . diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” (Emphasis added.)[iii]
How, exactly, does any of those terms deprive random Americans of their First Amendment rights? The only Americans whose rights would be deprived are specifically the ones to whom those words describe. Clearly, implementing such an odious proposal would ensure that women, persons of color, and other minority individuals will no longer have rights because any terminology related to them will be “deleted” from every legal document that matters.
It is sad that Project 2025 cloaks itself in Christian values and love of country to entice portions of the U.S. population to embrace its policies. Instead of promoting free will and freedom of choice, it restricts them. Instead of encouraging the inquiring minds of all our children, it ushers in an expansion of vouchers for private schools, while eliminating federal funding to public schools. Instead of feeding the poor, it strips programs to leave our most vulnerable citizens in abject poverty.
None of that sounds like any Christian values I’ve ever read about nor does it resemble any love of country striving to be the “shining city upon a hill.”
It should be noted that Newsweek has reported that Paul Dans recently resigned from the Heritage Foundation. Some have speculated the resignation was a result of pressure from the Trump campaign leadership, as Project 2025 has had a negative effect on Trump’s campaign. Nonetheless, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation has stated, “Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels—federal, state, and local—will continue.[iv] And, apparently, so do the plans for the entire Project 2025.
We have a choice. The time to stop it is now.◘
[i] Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, A Note on Project 2025, Dans, P., Director, Project 2025, https://static.project2025. org/ 2025_MandateForLeadership_ FULL.pdf, p. xiv; retrieved July 6, 2024.
[ii] Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, Foreword, A Promise to America, Roberts, Kevin D., https://static.project2025. org/ 2025_MandateForLeadership_ FULL.pdf, p. 3; retrieved July 6, 2024.
[iii] Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, Foreword, A Promise to America, Roberts, Kevin D., https://static.project2025. org/ 2025_MandateForLeadership_ FULL.pdf, pp. 4-5; retrieved July 6, 2024.
[iv]Newsweek, https://www.newsweek.com/project-2025-director-steps-down-heritage-foundation-report-1932277; retrieved August 1, 2024.
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