Sounding the alarm on Project 2025
What’s at stake in the election this November? A lot, actually. The media chatter is all about candidates’ personalities or their personal lives—not so much about their policies or political goals. And that’s where Project 2025 comes in.
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Roberta Lynch |
Project 2025 is an initiative of the Heritage Foundation—a corporate-backed think tank—to create a governing agenda for a Trump administration. President Trump says he hasn’t even read it—and that may well be the case. But plenty of folks on his team have certainly done so. In fact, more than two-thirds of its authors served in the Trump administration. And 64% of the recommendations in a similar Heritage Foundation document issued a decade ago were implemented by Trump during his term as president.
Moreover, many of the ideas in the current document have already been incorporated in the 2024 Republican Party platform.
In other words, Project 2025 provides us with a very wide window to look ahead at what a new Trump administration would bring—and it’s an alarming vista for America’s working families.
It took generations to build a strong labor movement in our country with unions in almost every sector of the economy that can establish (and enforce!) rights on the job, foster safer working conditions, secure access to health care, and raise wages. Study after study has demonstrated that workers in unions on average earn 11% more than workers who don’t have union representation. That’s the union difference—and it makes a big difference in the quality of life for working people in our country.
Project 2025 backers want to throw a giant wrecking ball at the American labor movement. They would ban project labor agreements and repeal Davis-Bacon wage standards, striking at the heart of building trades unions.
They would weaken the National Labor Relations Board to make it harder for workers to form unions. And then they would gut labor laws to allow employers to push union decertification campaigns even once a union contract is in effect.
They want to weaken the “influence of labor unions” by pushing workers into powerless “employee involvement organizations.”
Even more dangerous, Project 2025’s promoters would lead the charge for a national law banning unions for public employees. Yes, they would try to prevent any public employee anywhere from being able to be part of a union.
And when all the unions are gone, they don’t want to stop there. They would change overtime regulations to reduce the amount employees receive. They would greatly reduce restrictions on child labor. They would provide exemptions for employers from the Fair Labor Standards Act. And they would eliminate civil service protections for federal employees and terminate them by the thousands.
There is much that a Trump administration could do by executive fiat—and Trump has repeatedly stated his intent to do so—especially since he knows the U.S. Supreme Court will back him up. In fact, the court has already more or less guaranteed him immunity even if he actually violates the law.
The reality is that Project 2025 is out to dismantle the system of checks and balances that have always been the hallmark of our democracy.
The document is almost 1,000 pages long so it covers more ground than I could possibly sum up here. But it’s safe to say that another key Project 2025 goal is the remaking of the American economy and of American society more broadly to provide more freedom for corporations to exploit workers, to rip off consumers, and to harm the environment, while providing less—far less—liberty for the average citizen.
That means shifting more of the burden for steadily rising health care costs onto the backs of consumers, especially senior citizens. Project 2025 calls for repealing the monthly cap on insulin costs under Medicare and blocking Medicare’s $2,000 annual limit on out-of-pocket drug costs that is scheduled to go into effect in 2025.
Its backers are big pushers of privatization in all its forms. They actually included a provision to repeal the federal standards that bar privatization of unemployment services.
No surprise, their biggest target is public education. They want to shift to a system whereby all federal funding for education goes to voucher programs rather than helping local governments to fund public schools.
Plus, they want to completely eliminate the Head Start program which has provided millions of low-income children with an early childhood education.
There’s much more, of course. But the bottom line is that the corporate elite is paying attention—a lot of attention—to policy matters. And we need to do so as well.
If we want to build our union ever stronger and see all of labor grow too, then we have to firmly reject Project 2025 and all of its offshoots that are embedded in the Trump campaign.
If we want to reduce the ballooning economic inequality in our country—with the numbers of billionaires steadily growing while so many people who work hard day in and day out can barely pay their bills—then we have to be prepared to take our commitment to fairness and justice straight to the ballot box.
And if we want to stop Project 2025 right in its tracks, we have to make sure that our families, friends and neighbors understand just how real the threat is. We can’t sit this one out—and we should try to make sure no one else does either. It will take all of us standing together—and voting together—to protect our freedoms and to improve our lives.
