More Hair-Raising Proposals From Project 2025

Yesterday, I focused on the theocratic elements of Project 2025. But those elements–horrific as they are–pale in comparison to several of the Project’s less-often-noted aspirations.

A cousin of mine participates in a study group that recently assembled a list of the proposals in Project 2025. He shared that document with me, and I am posting it in its entirety today. It displays a worldview that isn’t simply backward–it’s terrifying and dystopian. Anti-science. Anti-equality. Anti-American.

Allow me to share that (unedited) compendium of crazy with you–and remind you that this is the world we’ll get if the GOP prevails.

PROJECT 2025

•    100+ conservative think tanks involved

•    400+ contributors and writers

•    240 Trump former administrators among authors

•    31/38 chapters written by Trump administrators

•    920+ pages in length

•    Mentions “Trump” 320+ times

•    Trump 2023 — “This is great work, our roadmap”

•    Trump 2024 —  “I don’t know these folks”

•    Trump campaign manager calls it “a pain in the ass”

•    Trump 2024 – Keynotes a Heritage Foundation convention

FROM THE RIGHT

•    Spells out a bright American future

•    Rescues the nation from the grip of the Radical Left

•    A governing agenda, putting the right people in place

•    A definite plan to execute a conservative agenda on Day One lead by a strong executive

FROM THE LEFT

•    Authoritarianism, strips rights, destroys economy

•    Trump has selective amnesia about Project 2025.

•    Heritage President Kevin Roberts acknowledged that Trump’s claims of ignorance are a “politically  tactical decision”  — and then he was forced out of office. (April 2024)

Pillars of Project 2025:

•    Restore family as the centerpiece of American life and protect children.

•    Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

•    Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

•    Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

THE DEFENSE OF AMERICA

The plan “…unshackles America’s military from the long-term rot of misspent budgets, politically driven policies, and a lack of focus on the military threat posed by China.” Restore warfighting as the military’s sole mission

•    End the Left’s social experimentation in the military

•    Halt the admission of transgender individuals into the military

•     Reduce the number of generals, increase Army by 50,000

•     Move US troops stationed overseas to US borders

•     Grow Navy from 292 to 355 ships

•     Purchase 60/80 more Air Force F-35A’s/year

•     Triple the number of US nuclear weapons worldwide

•     Build an American “Iron Dome”

•     Increase fighting responsibilities for all Allies

•     Continue to provide nuclear protection to Allies

•     Shift war-planning from reaction to one of strength in denial

•     Preposition resources to anticipate threats

•     Reconstitute NATO or withdraw from the NATO alliance

•     Allies must pay for all US weapons provided to them

•     Disavow NATO Article Five

•     All alliances will be bi-lateral

•     Withdraw from arms reduction treaties

Governance Principles

•    Replace 50K civil service “deep state” employees. Most civil service employees to answer to the Chief Executive

•    Eliminate or re-write the First Amendment

•    Change the oath of office from “…protect & defend the constitution”

•    The government should “…operate on Christian Principles

Trade/Foreign Assistance Principles

•    USAID to defund women’s rights foreign aid initiatives

•    Withdraw from all multi-lateral trade agreements

•    Withdraw financial aid from Ukraine

•    Institute 60% tariffs on Chinese goods

•    10% tariffs on all imports worldwide

Principles for Educating Our Kids

•     Eliminate the Department of Education

•     Eliminate Head Start, Title 1, & lunch programs

•     Eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion efforts

•     10 Commandments posted in all classrooms

•     Books pertaining to race/gender be removed

•     Schools requiring vaccinations lose federal funding

•     Vouchers for private/Christian schools to be the law

•     Public high schoolers take a military entrance exam

•     Eliminate federal funds for certain special needs

•     Arm classroom teachers

•     Defund NPR and PBS

Principles To Direct Entitlements & Protections

•    Words “abortion” & “reproductive health” cut from all federal regulations, policies, and any legislation

•    Reinstate student debt (6.8%)

•    Repeal the Affordable Care Act

•    Eliminate Medicaid

•    Privatize Medicare — Advantage the default choice

•    Raise retirement age

•    Eliminate drug price negotiations

•    Limit benefits for veteran disability payments

•    Eliminate/repurpose EPA, OSHA, EEOC, FDIC

•    Privatize TSA

•    Federal elections done in 1-day, on paper, no mail-in, with ID

Principles Dealing With “Minorities”

•    Immediate mass deportation of the undocumented

•    Construct internment camps

•    Limit total immigrants (20K)

•    Limit foreign college education applicants

•    Deport existing “dreamers” & end birth-right citizenship

•    Muslims, Haitians banned from the country

•    Ukrainian refugee status reviewed

•    Roll back gay rights/invalidate homosexual marriage

•    Outlaw transgender rights

•    Outlaw no-fault divorce

Principles Guiding Climate Decisions

•    The climate is not changing and not to be taught

•    Eliminate climate and environmental protections

•    Eliminate greenhouse gas regulation

•    Defund FEMA & EPA. Emergencies are a state responsibility.

•    Dismantle NOAA and Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, halt climate research.

•    End Global Change Research Act of 1990. \

•    Withdraw from the Paris Accords.

•    Stop EV research, regulation, and tax initiatives

If this doesn’t motivate you to vote–and vote BLUE–I don’t know what will.

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The Theocracy At The Center of Project 2025

A writer for The Guardian recently read the entire 900+/- pages of Project 2025, rather than relying on what she called “snippets.” What she found was even more appalling than the various excerpts most of us have seen.

Basically, the Project lays out a road to theocracy.

The document repeatedly characterizes America as a country poisoned by “wokeness.” And it proposes, as an antidote to “wokeness,” remaking the government in accord with a fundamentalist version of Christianity.

Across multiple agencies, it would make access to abortion infinitely more difficult. It would change the name of the federal health and human services department to the “Department of Life”. It would criminalize pornography. There would be mass deportations and curtailments of legal immigration programs, including Daca. It would dismantle the Department of Education.

Throughout the manifesto, authors also recommend ways to increase funding for religious organizations by giving them more access to government programs – largely through increased use of school vouchers that could go to religious schools or by modifying programs like Small Business Administration loans to make religious groups eligible for funding.

In some parts, the project takes a more explicit Christian worldview. In the chapter about the Department of Labor, the manifesto suggests a communal day of rest for society because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest”. One way to enforce this idea would be for Congress to require paid time-and-a-half for anyone who works on Sundays, which the project calls the default day of Sabbath “except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time”.

In nearly all chapters, there is a mention of driving out any forces that seek to increase diversity in the federal government. And whenever LGBTQ+ rights are mentioned, it is to say there should be fewer of them.

Heritage might just as well have named Project 2025 “Project Christian Nationalism.” The document doesn’t stop with the enumeration of goals, either–it outlines the practical steps that would enable a Trump Administration to reach those goals.

Achieving the goal of “Christianizing” America would be the task of loyalists who would replace civil servants–as has been reported, Project 2025 advocates reclassifying thousands of federal jobs as “political” rather than non-partisan, in order to replace the civil servants who are currently doing those jobs with Trump loyalists.

The effort would also require taking control of the census.

The census helps decide how federal resources should be allocated to communities, but, for our purposes here, it’s most relevant that census data is used to decide how to divvy up seats in the US House and make electoral maps during decennial redistricting done by states. The census can alter the balance of power in statehouses and in Congress.

Given its influence, the project suggests an incoming conservative president needs to install more political appointees to the census bureau and ensure ideologically aligned career employees are “immediately put in place to execute a conservative agenda”. The next census isn’t until 2030, but plans for it are already under way.

That conservative agenda includes adding a citizenship question, something Trump tried to do for the 2020 census but was blocked by the US supreme court. The project says “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census.”

The project also suggests reviewing and possibly curtailing plans to broaden the race and ethnicity categories because “there are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”

There is much more, of course, but the quoted material is enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck, and probably the necks of most rational Americans.

Those of us tempted to dismiss Project 2025 as a theocratic fever dream unlikely to be realized even in a Trump administration need to understand that the people committed to imposing their beliefs on the rest of us are nothing if not patient. They worked for fifty years to overturn Roe v. Wade. If Trump wins, their wait will be shorter–as the article notes, to the (very limited) extent that Trump has enumerated any policies (or would recognize one if he encountered it), they’ve aligned with those in Project 2025. Even if he loses narrowly, they will be encouraged to dig in.

Even a massive loss–a Blue Wave–will only slow them down. They will bide their time and continue trying to “return” the country to a place that existed only in their twisted imaginations. Americans who want to protect our constitutional system will need to stay perpetually alert.

As the saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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The Indiana GOP’s Theocratic Ticket

My sister says we need “brains, not Braun.”

Braun’s recent, mis-named “education plan” reinforces that observation. As State Affairs has reported, Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Braun wants to remove all income limits for the state’s private school voucher program. Currently, only the wealthiest Indiana families are excluded from the use of our tax dollars to attend private–overwhelmingly religious–schools, so this proposal would further enrich the wealthy Hoosiers who disproportionately constitute Braun’s donors.

But it would do far more than that–and its disregard for evidence sheds a lot of light on why Braun has been such an undistinguished Senator.

When voucher programs were first introduced, some advocates were sincere in believing that they would improve education. We now have mountains of evidence that they don’t–that test scores of voucher students not only don’t improve, but often decline. That would be reason enough to oppose them, but the documented negative consequences go well beyond their lack of efficacy. Vouchers not only haven’t improved educational outcomes, they have increased racial segregation, facilitated religious discrimination, and been a windfall for the wealthy (many of whom already had children in private schools), all while robbing the nation’s public schools of desperately needed resources.

Braun is endorsing a program that all available evidence tells us has failed miserably while diverting millions of dollars that would otherwise be available for public education and underfunded physical and social infrastructure purposes.

(Braun’s disregard for evidence joins his disregard for public opinion. Just recently, he joined other Republicans in the U.S. Senate in defeating a bill that would offer legal protection for IVF. )

 Granted, of the four candidates on Indiana’s GOP ticket, Braun has been the least militant Christian Nationalist. For that matter, he  comes across as one of those candidates running for office in order to “be someone” rather than “do something.” It is probable that–just as with his dutiful obeisance to Trump–he’s just going with the GOP’s far Right flow. If that’s the case, we certainly can’t count on him to oppose the “theocrats-R-us” positions of the rest of the ticket.

I’ve previously reported on the extremist, unconstitutional ambitions of Micah Beckwith. (Since that enumeration, Beckwith has confirmed that he opposes the exceptions for rape and incest in Indiana’s draconian abortion ban.) At least Beckwith is honest; he publicly embraces a Christian Nationalist identity.

I’ve also written numerous times about the odious Jim Banks, running for U.S. Senate. Banks is an anti-woman, virulently anti-LGBTQ, pro-gun, climate-denying culture warrior who lives in a million dollar home in Virginia. He wants a national abortion ban with no exceptions. 

And I can’t even count the number of posts I’ve devoted to Indiana’s unethical publicity-hound Attorney-General Todd Rokita. (Here’s just one of those numerous commentaries…) I’m hardly the only one who has reported on Rokita’s efforts to pander to the most extreme MAGA folks–and his persistent use of the office to pursue culture-war efforts unrelated to the duties of an Attorney General.

The Democratic ticket, on the other hand, is refreshingly competent and sane.

Jennifer McCormick is a warrior for public education. She’s pro-choice. She wants to legalize medical marijuana. She’s the only candidate with an actual property tax plan. Terry Goodin, running for Lieutenant Governor, has significant experience with farm policy–a primary task of the LG’s office. Valerie McCray, running for Senate, is a mental health professional who is pro-choice, pro-human-rights, and concerned with the needs of America’s veterans. Destiny Wells is an Army Reserve Lt. Colonel in Military Intelligence, and an attorney committed to returning the office of Attorney General to its proper functions.

If survey research is to be believed, the Democratic ticket is far more representative of the beliefs and priorities of Indiana’s citizens than the Republican ticket. That said, Hoosiers who follow politics have recently been treated to two contending polls, one of which shows the Democratic ticket within striking distance of the theocrats, and one of which shows the Hoosier electorate still comfortably wedded to them, albeit somewhat unenthusiastically.

Polls typically report the preferences of “likely” voters, not registered voters. Pollsters have what are called “likely voter screens,” and in normal election cycles, their assessments of who among the registered voters is likely to go to the polls is reasonably accurate–although, as these dueling polls show, they can differ. But this year, there is evidence that–much like the year in which Obama was elected–a lot of unlikely voters may turn out. Registrations have spiked, and enthusiasm for the Harris/Walz ticket is palpable.

In Indiana, unusual turnout might give us a respite from 20 years of increasingly theocratic Republican control.

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A Different Kind Of Homelessness

I recently had breakfast with two former faculty colleagues. The bulk of our conversation focused on the upcoming election, and thinking back on it, a couple of things struck me: despite MAGA folks’ belief that all college professors are left-wing socialists or communists, in a former, more rational time, all three of us would have been considered somewhat right of center.

But of course, the center has moved. A lot.

In 1980, I ran for Congress as a Republican. I won a Republican primary. I was pro-choice, and (to the extent it even came up then) pro-gay rights. For a couple of years after I lost the general election, people came up to me and said things like “I just couldn’t vote for you because you were so conservative.”

My husband and I met as officials in a Republican city administration; when we married, a reporter who covered the city (we had those back then) told me “the press guys like both of you, but you are both kinda right-wing.”

I don’t think I was ever “right-wing” –my positions were more consistent with what was then the GOP mainstream than with the Rightwing fringe of the party–but I was a traditional Republican.

Since 1980 I’ve changed positions on a few issues, because I learned more about them, but my basic political philosophy and approach to policy has not changed–yet today, I’m considered “far Left.”

I stood philosophically still, but the Overton window moved.

Part of the problem is political vocabulary. Americans talk about Liberals and conservatives, but those terms don’t describe our contemporary politics. MAGA and Trump are anything but Conservative as that term has historically been understood. (For that matter, they lack any coherent political philosophy at all, unless grievance and animus can be considered political positions.)

That reality has left genuine conservatives politically homeless. There’s a reason so many prominent conservative Republicans have endorsed Kamala Harris. (When George Will supports Harris, you know the GOP has jumped the shark.)

To the extent Trump has any policy positions, they are anathema to real conservatives. When the GOP was a genuine center-right party, it championed free trade, not tariffs and protectionism. Conservatives wanted limited government– Barry Goldwater insisted that “Government doesn’t belong in your boardroom or your bedroom.”  As Reagan left office, he made a speech about the importance of immigration. In foreign affairs, conservatives were strong supporters of NATO and opponents of dictators–and they understood the importance of joining with liberals in a unified approach to issues beyond the “water’s edge.”

Real conservatives venerate the Constitution and its checks and balances. They celebrate freedom of speech and a free press. When the GOP was conservative, it stressed the importance of respect for democratic processes and institutions, for law and order. Trump and MAGA constantly attack the very foundations of a working democracy– the press, the Department of Justice, the FBI, even our military leadership and especially the integrity of the electoral system. The old GOP might have disagreed with Democrats and liberals about how these principles should be applied, but they endorsed the principles.

Let’s be accurate: whatever else today’s GOP may be, it is not conservative.

As an essayist in USA Today recently put it,

As someone who works in the world of words, I understand that their meaning – and use – can change over time. Yet, something I greatly resent is how the Republican Party has conflated Donald Trump with conservatism… To me, conservatism means a belief in free markets, individual liberty and limited government.

As a result of the party’s move toward neo-fascism and theocracy, authentic conservatives have found themselves homeless. Thoughtful conservatives–appalled by what the GOP has become and unwilling to call themselves Democrats–have nowhere to go. Many of them will vote Blue this year rather than holding their noses and voting for Trump (or, in Indiana, for our Hoosier Christian Nationalists). Some won’t vote at all.

The disaffection and homelessness of genuine conservatives will help Democrats this year, and in a year where our choices really are between good and evil, that’s something to celebrate. But going forward, the transformation of one of the major parties in a two-party system into an anti-democratic cult is a disaster, and not just for real conservatives.

Good policy requires negotiation and compromise among good-faith advocates of varying perspectives. Civic peace requires respect for democratic institutions. This country needs two adult parties equally committed to the democratic process.

It is increasingly doubtful that the GOP can be redeemed from its current status as the new Confederacy, but unless that happens– or a third party somehow emerges– genuine conservatives will remain homeless.

NOTICE: TOMORROW evening at 7:00 P.M. I will introduce a Zoom event featuring four candidates who have the ability to shift four seats in the Indiana House from Republican to Democrat and break the super-majority’s stranglehold:  Josh Lowry, District 24; Tiffany Stoner, District 25; Victoria Garcia Wilburn, District 32 (incumbent); and Matt McNally, District 39. I will begin the event by explaining why one-party rule keeps dragging Indiana in the wrong direction.

You can register here. There is no charge.

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The Real “Deep State”

Trump and the MAGA movement have used their conspiratorial belief in a “deep state” to suggest that all government workers engage in nefarious efforts to change “their” America into the hellscape pictured by Trump’s disordered brain.

A recent, lengthy essay in last Sunday’s Washington Post provides a good antidote to that alternate reality.

The article begins by explaining the genesis of a little-known award issued by the Partnership for Public Service.

Founded the year before by an entrepreneur named Samuel Heyman, it set out to attract talented and unusual people to the federal workforce. One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about. There was thus little incentive to do something great, and a lot of incentive to hide. The awards were meant to correct that problem. “There’s no culture of recognition in government,” said Max Stier, whom Heyman hired to run the Partnership. “We wanted to create a culture of recognition.”

The award got off to a slow start. Among the first recipients were two FBI agents who cracked the cold case of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Another went to a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who designed and ran a program that delivered a billion vaccinations and eradicated polio in India. A third was given to a man inside the Energy Department who had been sent to a massive nuclear waste dump outside Denver, containing enough radioactive gunk to fill 90 miles of railroad cars, and told to clean it up. He finished the project $30 billion under budget and 60 years ahead of schedule — and turned the dump into a park.

All these people had done astonishing things. None had much to say about them. The Partnership called the Colorado guy to see if he wanted to explain the miracle he’d performed. “I just managed the project,” he said. End of story. No story.

This year’s list included a woman at the Agriculture Department who reduced food waste by creating products from fruits and vegetables unsuitable for market, a 400 billion dollar problem; a man in the EPA who conceived and started a service called AIRNow that supplies Americans with the best air-quality forecasts in the world; and a special agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration who led a team that seized 919,088 capsules of especially lethal fentanyl.

The bulk of the article–and although it is fascinating, it is definitely “bulky”–focused on this year’s winner: a man named Christopher Mark, who led the development of “industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first ever year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States.”

Mark is identified as a former coal miner. That description is accurate, although incomplete: he earned a doctorate in engineering after rejecting college for a few years of mine work and political activism after high school. He has used his fixation with mine safety to solve problems previously thought to be insoluble, and in the process has saved many lives.

As Mark has noted, improvements in mine safety relied upon more than just his very significant breakthroughs. In response to a suggestion that his innovations had been the sole reason for the dramatic safety improvements, he clarified that two things had been necessary: new knowledge plus legislation enhancing enforcement. It took enforcement to ensure that mine owners would actually follow the rules and put the new knowledge into practice. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce.”

The article is fascinating, not simply for Mark’s story, but for its rare–and refreshingly honest–look at government work.

When I joined the Indianapolis city administration back in 1977, I brought with me many of the widespread negative impressions of “government workers,” who were–I assumed–folks unable to get jobs in the private sector, people who worked relatively short hours, etc. It didn’t take long for me to discover how very wrong I was. There were certainly some duds, as there are in every workplace, but most of the people I worked with during my three-year stint as head of City Legal were whip smart and devoted to public service. Many worked long hours. Almost all of them cared deeply about what Mayor Bill Hudnut used to call “building a great city.”

They’re the real “deep state.” We’re fortunate to have them.

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