Project 2025 and Republican Domination

Project 2025, Heritage Foundation, Republicans, MAGA, Capitol, Washington DC

Courtesy

One of the scariest things about the upcoming election is how ignorant many people are of the fundamental issues involved. Even well-educated, well-read and involved friends have never heard of Project 2025.

The media know about it but have, for the large part, ignored it. Somehow, this terrifying plan has escaped their attention.

Ignoring the Alligator

If they have read it, few have seen fit to write and/or broadcast about it. Some articles and podcasts exist but I think coverage should be louder and more frequent.60 Minutes comes to mind.

Alligator, water, threatIgnoring Project 2025 is like not looking at the alligator swimming your way because you don’t think it’s dangerous. Ignoring the threat usually means it will come to bite you.

So I am writing about Project 2025 to inform my readers and in the greater hope that you will hit the Share button and spread it among your friends and contacts.

What is Project 2025?

In a nutshell, Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation’s manifesto for taking over the country and ensuring that it stays in Republican hands forever, regardless of how the population votes. I say this guardedly, knowing that some readers will find this too much like a conspiracy theory and dismiss it out of hand.

Please don’t do that. Keep reading and you’ll find out why.

First of all, the Heritage Foundation does not keep their plan a secret. They have published it online for everyone to read. They don’t expect their opposition to actually read it, of course, because it’s long and complicated. You have to know about a lot of subjects in detail to understand it. For the most part, their assumption has been correct. But some people have read it, been terrified, and want to spread the word.

Those who studied Project 25 typically use stronger language than I. One reader described it as,”..to move the USA away from a Constitutional Democracy to a quasi-Christian Fascist Dictatorship.” According to Politico:

“They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.

And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it.”

Other Opinions

The Heritage Foundation prefers more anodyne and comforting words:

Project 2025 is a project by The Heritage Foundation that aims to prepare conservatives for the White House by offering a policy book, a personnel database, a training academy, and a playbook. The project aims to    lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.”

Wikipedia falls somewhere in the middle:

“Project 2025 (officially the Presidential Transition Project) is a collection of policy proposals to reshape the executive branch of the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.[2][3] Established in 2022, the project seeks to recruit tens of thousands of conservatives to Washington, D.C., to replace existing federal civil service workers it characterizes as the “deep state“, to further the objectives of the next Republican president.[4]

The Picture Emerges

Are you starting to get the picture?

Democracy, Autocracy, authoritarian, Project 2025Except that it doesn’t “reshape” the federal government as much as it takes over the entire thing and turns it toward partisan Republican purposes. The new president would be able to operate free of checks, balances, opposition, laws, rules, and regulations of any kind. We have a word for this: authoritarian.

The newly elected President Trump would be able to consolidate and restructure dozens of federal agencies to place them fully under Trump’s auspices.

Project 2025: A Radical Plan

Although it claims to be conservative, there is nothing  actually conservative about the plan. It threatens a very radical remake of the United States Government, one in which a strengthened Executive could operate with sweeping powers and without checks and balances.

I can’t possibly go into depth in just one blog post, so I will start at the top and follow up with subsequent posts.

To flesh out one of the four described by the Heritage Foundation—creating a presidential database—I direct you to their “Mandate for Leadership” document. This document describes itself as,

“A personnel database that allows candidates to build their own professional profiles and our coalition members to review and voice their recommendations. These recommendations will the be collated and shared with the President-elect’s team, greatly streamlining the appointment process.”

That doesn’t sound so bad—just a more efficient hiring process, really. And that’s the thing with documents like this: they sound so boring that the press will yawn and go on to the next outrageous thing their candidate has said in front of the cameras. But, as we all know, the devil is in the details.

The Devil in Schedule F

One of the details lies in Schedule F. Here’s how Mr. Roberts describes Schedule F:

“It’s an executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of government workers, taking away their employment protections. And some estimates say that hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be impacted. I think the civilian federal work force is something around two million.”

What he’s saying here is that they would eliminate the Civil Service program, fire from hundreds of thousands to two million Civil Service employees, and replace them with the committed Trump loyalists from their pre-approved database. If you, a member of your family, or anyone else you know is a Civil Service employees, he or she will either lose their job or have to sign a loyalty pledge to keep it.

Mr. Roberts asserts, “People will lose their jobs. Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that. Buildings will be shut down. Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry.” This is not the voice of a man who cares about the welfare of other people. When he speaks, it’s about power: power over the government, over people, over the Justice Department, over the United States.

The Civil Service has been one of the driving forces underpinning America’s middle class. It is, by design, non-partisan to keep employees from losing their jobs every time the administration changes. The Heritage Foundation will dump all these experienced, efficient employees and replace them with an army of Trump loyalists trained and eager to do his bidding.

Imagine the Impact of Project 2025

Given that they plan to implement Project 2025 starting at noon on Inauguration Day, imagine the impact on the U.S. economy of all those government employees being thrown out of work all at once. Calculate the cost of all that unemployment insurance. Think about the upheaval.

The Heritage Foundation touts the goal of Project 2025 as streamlining the federal government and making it more efficient. This is a smokescreen. It aims to take full control of the United States Government and place it under the direction of a newly elected President Trump. He would use its new powers to consolidate and retool dozens of federal agencies and put them under his direction. The U.S. Congress would be unable to intervene.

From Democracy to Autocracy

With an army of total loyalists running the country, the president would be able to turn America into an autocracy. While Project 2025 claims its priority is to “bring the permanent bureaucracy to heel,” what they really want to do is reshape it into their own permanent bureaucracy of MAGA loyalists that will run America without hindrance or obstruction. Future elections would have no impact.

We already have states where the majority of citizens vote Democrat but the government is majority Republican due to gerrymandering and voter suppression. Project 2025 would extend that goal nationwide. That’s why so many experts worry about the impact of the November election.

Read and Listen for Yourself

Project 2025, demonstration, Stop Project 2025, Heritage FoundationIf you think I’m hyperventilating or completely over the top, try reading what others have written about Project 2025. You’ll see that, if anything, I have downplayed the threat. That’s because I haven’t yet gone into this plan in depth. They have. Here’s just a few:

There are more. Just Google “analyses of Project 2025” and you’ll see them all.

I hope this blog post has provided you with not just information but incentive. Because the only way to ensure that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 doesn’t come to fruition is to ensure there is no second Trump inauguration day.