What is Project 2025? Project 2025 is a blueprint for actions the Trump administration should take once it regains power. It was sponsored and paid for by the Heritage Foundation, and an extreme right-wing think-tank.

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but he can’t. The name “Trump” is mentioned approximately 201 times in the text, not counting footnotes or author bios. The people who wrote Project 2025 are all Trump adherents and colleagues. More than 140 people who formerly worked for him are involved, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows and advisor Stephen Miller. J.D. Vance wrote the forward. Six of his former Cabinet secretaries were also involved. (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-claims-not-to-know-who-is-behind-project-2025-a-cnn-review-found-at-least-140-people-who-worked-for-him-are-involved/ar-BB1pN666?ocid=feedsansarticle) If you go to the full text of Project 2025 that I posted at https://theobsidianmirror.net/project-2025-in-its-entirety/ , you will see a lot of names from the Trump Administration. So I think we can lay to rest the notion that Trump doesn’t know the people behind Project 2025 or anything about it, as he claims.

The following is just a smattering of the extreme and dangerous measures Project 2025 advocates. I had to cherry-pick or this post would be as long as the Project document. The interpretation of what is being proposed is mine. If you disagree with my take, please go read Project 2025 for yourself at https://theobsidianmirror.net/project-2025-in-its-entirety/

What actions does Project 2025 advocate? Project 2025 is nearly 900 pages long, and the language is not always as direct as its meaning. For example, it says, “”For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.” This does not baldly state that Republicans want one man with one woman to be the only legitimate form of marriage–but it clearly means that the Republicans want one man/one woman to be the only form of acceptable marriage.

If you want to take solid action against Project 2025, I recommend filing a formal complaint against the foundation with the IRS for violating the injunction against political activity or expression for 501c3 non-profits. If you read Project 2025 or have a good understanding of it, it is clearly in violation of the foundation’s non-profit status. I have created a page on this blog called “Filing a Complaint Against the Heritage Foundation (https://theobsidianmirror.net/file-a-complaint-against-the-heritage-foundation/), and it contains a copy of the complaint form and accompanying letter that I filed with the IRS–so I’ve done the work for you. Start by downloading Form 13909 from irs.gov.

Family and Marriage: Project 2025 is clear that the only legitimate marriage is between one man and one women. A quote from the Project: “Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” When they say “Biblical,” they are specifically leaving out all but the Christian and (maybe) Jewish religions. Of course, anyone familiar with the Bible knows that there are many different versions of marriage on offer in the Bible, but the authors of Project 2025 are oblivious to this.

From Project 2025: “Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.” Obviously, by “nuclear families,” they do not mean “same-sex families,” and they are making that clear.

“Additionally, Congress should pass the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act62 to ensure that providers and organizations cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage.” In other words, religious-based adoption agencies will be free to discriminate against LGBTQ+ couples and anyone who doesn’t fit the Republican definition of marriage.

“The HMRE program should receive a fair and realistic assessment. Additionally, the positive role of faith-based programs should be protected— 481 —Department of Health and Human Services and prioritized so that these programs do not receive undue scrutiny or pressure to conform to nonreligious definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act.” In other words, discrimination against anyone who does not conform to the ReThuglikkkon idea of marriage is fine.

“Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.” This references a study performed by The New Family Structures Study (abbreviated NFSS), a sociological study of LGBT parenting conducted by sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin. The study surveyed over 15,000 Americans of ages 18 to 39. The first research article based on data from the study was published in July 2012 in Social Science Research, and concluded that people who had had a parent who had been in a same-gender relationship were at a greater risk of several adverse outcomes, including “being on public assistance, being unemployed, and having poorer educational attainment.” From Wikipedia: “The study was met with considerable criticism from many academics and scholarly organizations. Of note, only two children in the study had actually lived with homosexually partnered parents for their entire childhoods, because many of the same-sex partnered parents were in previous heterosexual marriages. Thus, negative outcomes or events cannot be attributed to having same-sex parents, because many of these children also spent their childhoods with opposite-sex parents, and experienced family disruption and parental divorce. A 2015 reanalysis raised serious questions about the validity of the study, finding misclassification of families, inconsistency in answers suggesting mischief, and evidence that many respondents did not live with their non-heterosexual parents. When these cases were excluded, differences in outcome between children raised by parents in opposite-sex and same-sex relationships largely vanished.”

“For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.” This clearly states that the Republicans want one man/one woman to be the only form of acceptable marriage.

Health: “…the project recommends withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market and stopping the drug from being mailed, eliminating mandated insurance coverage for the week-after pill, prohibit funding for patients traveling across state lines for reproductive health care and prohibit funding for health care centers that provide abortions.” (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/project-2025-conservative-presidential-list/story?id=111952315)

Quote from Project 2025: “The Office of the Secretary should eliminate the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.” Additionally, HIPAA law will be revised to assure that all fetuses are regarded as fully human beings.

 The Office of Science and Medicine will withdraw all recommendations for gender-affirming care. “…the project proposes eliminating several terms from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists” including: “sexual orientation,” “gender,” “gender equality,” “gender awareness,” “gender-sensitive” “abortion,” “reproductive health,” “reproductive rights,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and more.” (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/project-2025-conservative-presidential-list/story?id=111952315)

Immigration: The border will be sealed. ICE will be given full reign to arrest immigrants anywhere in the United States, as there will be no sanctuary zones. Immigrants will be evaluated for legal entry based on their skills and not on their need–“…gang violence and domestic violence are not grounds for asylum.”

The border wall will be completed. We all know how effective that will be. For one thing, most immigrants aren’t coming into this country across the border. They come in airplanes. (https://www.npr.org/2019/01/10/683662691/where-does-illegal-immigration-mostly-occur-heres-what-the-data-tell-us)

Foreign policy: End our economic relationship with China. (I hope I need not point out how economically disruptive this would be.)

All ambassadors who have liberal views or have expressed negative opinions about Trump will be fired and replaced with Trump loyalists.

Bear in mind that much of Project 2025 is based on misinformation. In the area of foreign policy, Project 2025 states, “…the Obama Administration threw the brutal regime an economic lifeline by giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the Iranian government and providing other sanctions relief.” The facts of the matter are that Obama made $1.7 billion dollar payment in non-US currency as the resolution of an arbitration case that had gone on for years. (https://apnews.com/united-states-government-fd4113419276444eba1d2a46d5c29752) Obama used the payment as leverage to free US hostages.

From Project 2025: “Shift strategic focus from assistance to growth. Reorient the focus of U.S. overseas development assistance away from stand-alone humanitarian development aid and toward fostering free market systems in African countries by incentivizing and facilitating U.S. private sector engagement in these countries.” In other words, exploit African resources to the fullest extent to the benefit of U.S. corporations and abandon humanitarian and financial aid. A return to 19th-Century-style economic colonialism.

Withdraw support from international organizations unless they directly serve U.S. interests. “.For example, the Trump Administration withdrew from, or terminated funding for, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and the WHO. The results were redeployment of taxpayer dollars to better uses—and other organizations “getting the message” that the United States will not allow itself and its money to be used to undermine its own interests.” A selfish and self-serving policy that typifies Project 2025 throughout.

Governance: We all are aware that Republicans want “smaller government,” even if that means destroying the value that we have built over the years. Project 2025 refers to federal employees as “…largely underworked, overcompensated, and unaccountable federal civilian workforce.” It states that federal employees are “ideologically aligned, not with the American
people—but with one another, posing a profound problem for Republican government, a government “of, by, and for” the people.” This is just untrue. Statistics show that the American people in general are “unaligned” with Republican values. For example, 62% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most cases (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/07/15/key-facts-about-the-abortion-debate-in-america/) A majority (57%) of adults say the U.S. hasn’t gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights with men. (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/13/key-takeaways-on-americans-views-on-gender-equality-a-century-after-u-s-women-gained-the-right-to-vote/) This is in direct opposition to Republicans, who have taken the right to abortion away from women, and are clearly working on other means of controlling and suppressing women.

Social Services: “…according to the American Main Street Initiative’s analysis of official federal tallies—Medicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.” This is just a baldfaced lie. Medicare is not funded through taxes, but by individual contributions and investment. Medicare has NOTHING to do with the deficit, and Republicans are well aware of this. Medicaid is funded through a joint partnership of the states and the Federal government. Medicaid and CHIP combined are only 13% of the nation’s spending on healthcare, so it is not an obvious villain in this piece. The largest spending is 70% on something labeled “Other Federal Outlays.” (https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/faqs-on-health-spending-the-federal-budget-and-budget-enforcement-tools/) Maybe someone should be looking into “Other Federal Outlays.”

And yet, the stated intention is to end Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. There are no plans to replace these services.

Taxes: Republicans have been unable to wean themselves from the idea that giving more money to already obscenely wealthy people will result in general prosperity. Trump gave billionaires a tax break and sent the National Debt into the stratosphere. FromProPublica: “The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.”(https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump)

And they want to do it again under a new Trump administration. This approach is completely false, has never worked, never will work, and will create more economic chaos. Ordinary citizens will wind up paying more than billionaires (which they already do in many cases). (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/project-2025-wants-radically-change-230008655.html)

Education: “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” No substantiation for this is provided, and I believe it just means they don’t like historical facts–like the way slaves were treated in the United States.

“Through the CCP’s Confucius Institutes, Beijing has been just as successful at compromising and coopting our higher education system as they have at compromising and coopting corporate America.” Again, no substantiation is offered, and my basic response is, “Huh?”

The Department of Education will be “shuttered,” returning 100% of responsibility for education to the states. I think we know what the result of that will be: red-state children will be thoroughly indoctrinated in extreme right-wing ideologies, while children in blue states will get an actual education.

Unions: Re unions of public employees: “Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place. The bipartisan consensus up until the middle of the 20th century held that these unions were not compatible with constitutional government.” Spoiler alert: they are not in favor of public employees having unions.

All unions in the Department of Homeland Security would be removed “for national security purposes.” It never states how unions would be a national security threat.

“The next Administration should make new options available to workers and push Congress to pass labor reforms that create non-union ’employee involvement organizations’ as well as a mechanism for worker representation on corporate boards.” Translation: we will replace unions with pro forma organizations within corporations composed of both workers and management. I think we all know how that one goes.

This is just a sampling of the ill-conceived, thoughtless, radical changes that Trump will be making if he is re-elected. If he is not re-elected, don’t think Project 2025 goes away. They’ll just pursue it a lot more quietly. Vote blue.