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Project 2025 has officially entered the chat.
It’s not often a 900+ page plan is mentioned at the BET Awards, but that’s exactly what host Taraji P. Henson did, asking viewers to learn about Project 2025 and how it would impact millions of Americans.
![Image of Taraji P. Henson hosting the 2024 BET Awards. She has long, brown, curly hair and is dressed in a lovely and fancy looking yellow top. She is speaking directly to the camera with the audience visible behind her and the caption underneath her says "the project 2025 plan is not a game."](https://progressnownm.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Taraji-P-Henson.jpg)
To understand what it Project 2025 is, and where it came from, you have to go back to when Trump was first elected in 2016. His team was shocked by the win, like most of us, and they struggled to hire and appoint key roles.
If he wins this November, things will look very different, largely due to his top advisors working closely with wealthy billionaire donors and extremist organizations, including the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society, which played a significant role in appointing MAGA Justices to the Supreme Court.
The result is Project 2025, a far right agenda that Trump loyalist Steve Bannon, who is currently serving four months in a federal prison, has called a “blueprint” for a second term, if Trump is elected.
The detailed plans and tactics in it cover every area of American life. Among the proposals:
- Expanding tax cuts for corporations and the 1%
- Allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime
- Mass deportations and incarceration of immigrant families
- Banning abortion access even in cases of medical emergency and allowing the government to potentially prosecute pregnant people if they miscarry
- Eliminating the Head Start program, ending preschool education for children of low-income families.
- Drastically cutting social security benefits by raising the retirement age
- Ending marriage equality for LGBTQ+ families
- Cutting free and reduced school lunch programs for kids
In short, Project 2025 is a dangerous takeover that would eliminate our freedoms and benefit Trump, his wealthy billionaire donors, and a select group of loyalists, all of whom are dangerous, power hungry, and extreme.
Let’s look at the plan in more detail, and how it would impact American families…
Deep Dive: What’s in Project 2025
![GIF image. There is read and white text against a dark grey background and a magnifying glass. The main title in read reads MAGA's Project 2025. When the magnifying glass rolls over it there is white text that is enlarged and that contains policies in the project, including banning abortion, controlling public education, creating unchecked executive power, and inserting white christian nationalist ideology into the military.](https://progressnownm.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/magnifying-project-2025-2.gif)
Over the last 3 years, Project 2025 has been gaining traction among ultra-conservative circles in the United States. The plot poses significant threats to the fundamental rights and freedoms that Americans hold dear. It aims to reshape our country by stripping away individual rights, giving handouts to billionaires, and undermining our democracy.
Project 2025 is far from being a mere theoretical concept, it’s backed by powerful forces with a proven track record of implementing similar plans.
One glaring example is the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which has had profound impacts on reproductive rights in America. Billionaires like Leonard Leo have worked in lockstep for decades with the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society. During Trump’s first term, they partnered to overturn Roe by installing radical MAGA Justices on the Supreme Court, and they’re all key partners in this project, too.
This should serve as a stark warning about what could become reality under Project 2025.
In other words, the implications of this plot are not abstract or distant; they would be felt immediately and tangibly by all of us, no matter our beliefs or backgrounds. The most basic freedoms we enjoy today – freedom of speech, right to privacy, and access to healthcare, among others – are all on the line.
How it would alter life for millions of Americans
Economic Inequality – By rolling back labor protections and weakening unions and worker rights, the plan would lead to lower wages and unsafe working conditions. For example, it includes allowing employers to stop paying overtime wages to hourly employees. Changes like these would benefit a select few at the top while leaving millions of hard working Americans worse off.
Education – Project 2025 would eliminate the Department of Education, get rid of teachers unions, and tear down regulations on education spending, proposals that were created in collaboration with extremist groups like Moms for Liberty advancing a radical reshaping of public education. It also aims to eliminate the Head Start program, leaving low-income families without access to preschool.
Healthcare Access – It would dismantle critical healthcare policies, including the Affordable Care Act, and impose a new tax on health insurance for millions of people who get insurance through their employer, making it harder for average citizens to access affordable care. This could result in increased medical costs for families, especially those with pre-existing conditions or who require regular treatment and medication for conditions like diabetes, asthma, and heart disease.
Reproductive Rights – As seen with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reproductive rights are under severe threat from Project 2025. People’s autonomy over their bodies and their right to make personal reproductive health decisions could be drastically limited, including bans on abortion access and contraception, even in emergency cases or when there is a miscarriage. And when we thought it couldn’t get scarier, it does. Project 2025 would also allow the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry.
Environmental Protection – The push for deregulation under Project 2025 also extends to dismantling the EPA and eliminating multiple clean energy projects and offices, gutting environmental protections, cutting spending on clean energy, and repealing restrictions on the fossil fuels industry. This would lead to increased pollution levels, endangering public health and exacerbating climate change effects, like out of control wildfires, floods, and extreme heat. It also seeks to eliminate the National Weather Service, which is currently responsible for preparing for extreme weather events like heat waves and floods.
Immigration – The plan aims to severely restrict legal immigration to the United States, including dismantling the DREAM Act, restricting the DACA program, limiting temporary work visas, and punishing anyone who happens to live with or in close proximity to anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. Mass deportations, detention camps, and ripping apart millions of families are also part of the agenda.
Project 2025 is already in motion
![Meme style image in two panels. The top panel has Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker from the Spiderman movies squinting with his eyeglasses pulled down, and to the right there is a cover letter style image that says Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project.
The bottom panel has him putting his glasses on to reveal that the panel on the right is actually the cover of George Orwell's book 1984.](https://progressnownm.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/project-2025-1984-600-x-600-1.jpg)
Can Trump and the billionaires and extremists pushing this takeover actually do everything in it?
Unfortunately, the truth is that many of the proposals and tactics are already happening or are set up to go forward immediately if he takes office.
Republican-led state legislatures have passed many of the key proposals found in Project 2025 – there are already total abortion bans in states like Alabama, Arkansas, and Indiana, even in cases where someone needs abortion access afs emergency care or due to a miscarriage. Many have also passed laws interfering in patient/doctor decisions and removing the basic rights of LGBTQ+ communities.
That legislation is then replicated and used as a playbook in new areas. For example, some of the people behind Project 2025 are now enacting Christian Nationalism in public education, with Louisiana’s state legislature passing a law requiring the 10 Commandments in every classroom and Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Education directing all Oklahoma public schools to teach the Bible.
If and when legislation in different states is in conflict, legal challenges passed upward to the Supreme Court could then set precedent for the entire country. Speaking of which…
The Supreme Court made two big decisions this term that pave the way for Project 2025.
#1 – The Supreme Court’s MAGA Justices granted Trump king-like immunity and radically expanded judicial power – earlier this month the court gave past and current presidents full immunity for official acts. While there is still defining of official vs. unofficial acts to be hashed out in lower courts, as Josh Kastenberg, law professor at the University of New Mexico, noted in an interview this week, the decision empowers presidents to:
- Violate the law
- Hold on to power even when voters elect a replacement
- Aid other elected officials in holding on to power.
#2 – The MAGA Justices also overturned the 40 year old Chevron Doctrine – this strips away the ability for scientists, researchers, and technical experts to offer guidance and oversight on topics like the economy, climate change, and healthcare.
Because of these two decisions the court just made, if Trump is elected in November he would already have the power to directly enact huge swaths of Project 2025 in all 50 states.
How we can fight back
![GIF image. Black background with red and white text that says Stop Project 2025.](https://progressnownm.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/stop-project-2025.gif)
The good news is that Project 2025 is now out in the open, and people are talking about it.
As evidenced by all of the above, there’s a lot of work to do, including reversing the devastating decisions by courts and state legislatures.
The first step is talking with friends, family, and colleagues to ensure everyone understands what’s in the Project 2025 takeover plot, so that Trump is not elected in November.
Project 2025 represents an existential and wildly authoritarian threat to the values that define us as Americans – freedom, equality, justice, and democracy. Trump and the billionaires behind it seek to reshape America in a way that benefits only a select few while causing harm to millions, taking away our freedoms and controlling our lives.
We have the collective power to resist this regressive vision of America. This November, our voices and votes must be heard, and we must stop Project 2025 from turning into a grim reality.