Project 2025 - Plan for a Dystopian Future

While Donald Trump continues his attempts to dodge connection to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” some of the authors and contributors have been talking up their connection to the Trump campaign and telling the media how extreme the makeover of the federal government will be upon Trump taking office again. It’s important that the public be aware of the damage to governmental institutions and our lives four more years of Donald Trump will cause.

The “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise” which is the official title of the document known “Project 2025” says on page 592 “Congress should provide flexibility to employers and employees to calculate the overtime period over a longer number of weeks. Specifically, employers and employees should be able to set a two- or four-week period over which to calculate overtime. This would give workers greater flexibility to work more hours in one week and fewer hours in the next and would not require the employer to pay them more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period.” So if your employer wants you to work 60 hours one week and only 20 hours the next week there’s no need to pay you overtime and you can’t complain about the mess that makes of your personal life.

In 1932 at the peak of the Great Depression congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act to make the banking industry safer especially for average Americans. Those protections were largely repealed in 1999 and just 8 years later the country suffered the near collapse of the economy brought on by big banks taking on risky and overly complex investment scheme. This period often called the Great Recession was marked by tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes in foreclosure. Unemployment sky rocketed and banks failed. The response from congress was the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Almost as soon as it passed big banks and their Republican toadies started complaining and have been trying to overturn it. “Project 2025” page 705 calls for merging functions of the various regulatory agencies. “The new Administration should establish a more stream­lined bank and supervision by supporting legislation to merge the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Credit Union Administration, and the Federal Reserve’s non-monetary supervisory and regulatory functions.”

Banking interests claim have always claimed that restricting banks to taking deposits and making loans while preventing investment banks from taking consumer deposits makes markets less stable. We have now have empirical evidence that they’re wrong, the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall protections clearly led to 2007 banking collapse yet bankers and Republicans can’t see past the chance to make more private profit while socializing the losses on the backs of the American public.

It’s bad enough that Texas women have lost their bodily autonomy and continue to suffer the lasting health consequences of being unable to get medical care while a miscarriage leaves a rotting carcass in their womb. “Project 2025” states on page 458 that the FDA should “reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs” then goes on for another dozen pages on how abortion should be further restricted and what lies should be used to promote their nationwide anti-abortion agenda.

These are just some examples of the dystopian future that a Donald Trump win in November would bring upon you and your loved ones. It isn’t enough for you  to vote for Democrats, it is incumbent on you to inform your family, friends, and neighbors then encourage them to vote as well, otherwise we will all suffer.

 

Project 2025 - Plan for an Authoritarian State

 Donald Trump can deny knowledge of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” all he likes but the fact that 16 of the 39 named authors of the 920 page document are former members of his administration should tell you something. Some of the more well known members of the group are Benjamin S. Carson, Sr., MD who was Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Peter Navarro whom Trump appointed to the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and Ken Cuccinelli who served Trump as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. It’s hard to imagine that with that many of his former appointees involved in a project he wouldn’t know something about it.

The reason “Project 2025”; officially titled “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise”, is important for every American to be aware of is that it is a plan for how the next Republican administration can gut our federal institutions and remake this nation into a authoritarian state.

In 1883 the Pendleton Civil Service Act was adopted, requiring government jobs to be awarded to individuals based upon merit and not political affiliation. The Pendleton Act also made it illegal to fire government workers solely for political reasons. Trump already tried to overturn the protections of this act in his first term but waited too long to implement it. “Project 2025” offers a plan far more thorough, going deeper into all federal agency structures to replace scientists, accountants, and other subject matter experts with people whose sole qualification for the job is loyalty to Trump.

President Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Act in 1970 and it has been improved upon over the decades such that we now have cleaner air and water than we did a century ago leading to healthier lives for all. The author of the “Project 2025” section on the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that Trump’s hand waving reclassification of High-Level nuclear waste to Low-Level is a great way to complete cleanup of various retired nuclear facilities and sites. This attitude toward safe disposal of nuclear waste carries over into all forms of hazardous waste site cleanup. Reclassification doesn’t magically render hazardous materials less hazardous it just allows inadequately processed dangerous materials to continue to threaten the health and well-being of anyone who ends up living or working near the site or the disposal location in the future.

“Project 2025” proposes abandoning efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, including by repealing regulations that curb emissions, downsizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They want to abolish NOAA because the agency provides much of the data that enables scientists to track climate change and its effects.

“Project 2025” seeks to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and recommends simplifying individual income taxes to just two brackets, 15% and 30%, thus creating a nearly flat tax on wage income beyond the standard deduction. It aims to reduce the corporate tax rate to 18%, while suggesting setting taxes on capital gains and dividends at 15%. After these changes are implemented, it recommends that a three-fifths vote threshold be required to pass legislation that increases individual or corporate income tax, making it virtually impossible to ever change tax rates again. The Congressional Budget Office has reported that extending the 2017 tax cuts would increase the deficit by $4 trillion by 2028. You'll notice that Republicans only complain about the budget deficit when Democrats are in office even though it is Republicans who increase it the most.

There is much more that you should make yourself aware of.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 10, 2024