Project 2025: America's 'Divided' States
Journalist Mete Sohtaoğlu wrote for Fokus+ about the changes awaiting the US with the "Project 2025" prepared by the conservative "Heritage Foundation", which proposes comprehensive changes in the federal administration and is planned to be implemented with the election of Trump.
Voters have been hearing more and more about “Project 2025” in recent weeks as President Biden and Democrats try to predict what might happen if former President Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House.
The multifaceted initiative, overseen by the conservative Heritage Foundation, includes a detailed plan for the next Republican president to lead a radical change in the executive branch. It is planned to be implemented if Trump is elected.
Of the 38 people who helped write or edit the guide, 31 served in some capacity in Trump’s administration or during the transition.
This would not be the first time the Heritage Foundation has had direct influence over a U.S. administration. In 1981, at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it issued the first Mandate for Leadership to “liberate the American people from Washington dysfunction.” Sixty percent of its proposals for combating the recession and winning the Cold War actually became policy.
2025: A Bloodless Second American Revolution
Project 2025 is a proposed presidential transition project consisting of four key elements: a policy guide for the next presidential administration, a LinkedIn-style database of potential staff in the next administration, training for a pool of candidates called the “Presidential Management Academy,” and a playbook of actions to take in the first 180 days after taking office.
The project is led by two former Trump administration officials: Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management and director of the project, and Spencer Chretien, a former special assistant to Trump and now associate director of the project.
Project 2025 is managed by the Heritage Foundation but also has an advisory board made up of more than 100 conservative groups.
Project 2025 includes the first leg, a nearly 900-page policy book that outlines an overhaul of the federal government. The book, “Leadership Memoranda 2025: The Conservative Promise,” is based on Ronald Reagan’s “leadership mandate,” first published in January 1981 and intended to serve as a roadmap for the new administration.
The proposals outlined in the sweeping plan reach every corner of the executive branch, from the Executive Office of the President to the Department of Homeland Security to the little-known Export-Import Bank.
The Heritage Foundation also created a “leadership mandate” in 2015 ahead of Trump’s first term. In his second year as president, it reported that Trump had implemented 64 percent of his policy proposals, including withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, increasing military spending, and increasing offshore drilling and developing federal lands. In July 2020, the Heritage Foundation gave an updated version of the book to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Many chapters include familiar names from the Trump administration; Russ Vought, who runs the Office of Management and Budget; Chris Miller, the former acting secretary of defense; Roger Severino, the director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Much of the group’s “work” is expected to be integrated into the Trump campaign.
Candidates for office who apply to the Heritage Foundation’s “Presidential Personnel Database” are screened for a range of political stances, including whether they agree with statements such as “life is entitled to legal protection from conception to natural death” and “the president should be able to advance his agenda through the bureaucracy without being obstructed by unelected federal officials.”
Some of the policies on the Project 2025 agenda have been discussed by Republicans for years or are supported by Trump himself, including less federal intervention in education and greater support for school choice, work requirements for able-bodied and childless adults on food stamps, stricter immigration enforcement, mass deportations, and a secure border with construction of a border wall.
The right-wing’s 922-page wish list for Trump’s comeback also includes tips on foreign policy and defense.
As the US election approaches, polls suggest that former president and convicted felon Donald Trump could return to the Oval Office as early as 2025.
Bloodless American Revolution
The 922-page book is essentially a how-to guide for a right-wing model of governance, proposing a radical overhaul of the federal government with plans to expand presidential power and purge “liberals” from public service.
The guide focuses largely on dismantling the “Deep State,” but also offers foreign policy tips, taking a hawkish tone about prioritizing China’s nuclear weapons development and restricting international aid programs, “the greatest threat to American security, freedom, and prosperity.”
On defense and foreign policy, Project 2025 aims to make a definitive break with President Joe Biden’s administration and term.
Christopher Miller, who served as Secretary of Defense under Trump, criticized Biden’s leadership record, calling it a “disturbing decay” and a “dangerous decline” in “the nation’s capabilities and will.”
“The signs are all there,” Miller says. “The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, our impossibly complicated China strategy, the increasing political involvement of senior military officials, and deep confusion about the purpose of our military.”
Project 2025 has long-term costs for the world in general because it prioritizes military programs over humanitarian ones. The costs of the guideline will be huge when it comes to food insecurity, climate change, and conflict. We will see millions, billions of people suffering globally, and we will see reverberations around the world.
What are the key foreign policies of Project 2025? Countering China
China is the guideline’s primary defense concern. Miller worries that China is “engaged in a historic military buildup” that “could result in a nuclear force that equals or surpasses America’s own nuclear arsenal.”
China aims to subordinate Taiwan or the Philippines to US allies such as South Korea and Japan, thereby upsetting the “balancing coalition designed to prevent its hegemony over Asia.”
As the US grapples with what Project 2025 presents as Beijing’s aggression, Miller wants US allies to “step up”; some should help it in the fight against China, while others should take more of a lead in “dealing with threats from Russia in Europe, Iran, the Middle East, and North Korea.”
Project 2025 looks at US-China dynamics from a conflict perspective.
Increasing nuclear weapons
Project 2025 calls for the US to “modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal.” Project 2025 will include a significant increase in nuclear production and the acceleration of the development and production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. This would include testing nuclear weapons again at the Nevada National Security Facility, in violation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, to which the US is a signatory.
If the authors of Project 2025 get their way, there will be little resistance within the Trump administration to implement these changes.
A major purge of the deep state
The project proposes an overhaul of the federal government, which would lay off up to 50,000 “liberal” employees and replace them with enthusiastic loyalists already listed in a database. It is a plan to reshape the civil and foreign services with ideologists and loyalists.
What does Project 2025 propose on the domestic front?
Much of the manifesto closely resembles Trump’s well-known policy trends, including mass deportations of more than 11 million illegal immigrants, giving states more control over education, and restricting initiatives on issues such as LGBTQ rights. But on some issues, it goes even further than Trump’s campaign, calling on federal officials to ban pornography and revoke approval of the abortion pill Mifepristone. It also calls for prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills through the mail.
Project 2025 is steeped in religious-right values, promising to “restore the family to the center of American life and protect children.” In a section titled “Family Agenda,” the proposal calls for the head of Health and Human Services to “proudly declare that men and women are biological realities” and “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have the right to be raised by the men and women who gave birth to them.”
In addition, a program within the Department of Health and Human Services should protect “a biblical, social science-backed definition of marriage and family.”
Trump banned transgender people from serving in the military during his first four years in office. Biden has reversed that policy, but his Project 2025 policy book calls for the ban to be reinstated.
It calls for longstanding federal agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to be scaled back.
The guide says six of its offices, including the National Weather Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, “pose a tremendous threat to future U.S. prosperity, having become a major driver of the climate change crisis industry.”
The policy book says the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002, should be dismantled and its agencies either merged with others or placed entirely under the purview of other agencies.
The Project 2025 policy book calls for the next presidential administration to eliminate or revise more than 40 years of dietary guidelines issued by the Department of Agriculture, which the authors claim are “infiltrated” with issues such as climate change and sustainability.
Immigration
Trump has made immigration a cornerstone of his last two presidential races and has continued to emphasize the issue throughout the 2024 campaign. Project 2025’s agenda not only proposes to finish the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, but also calls on the next administration to take a “creative and aggressive approach” to responding to drug cartels at the border. That approach includes using active-duty military personnel and the National Guard to assist with apprehension operations at the southern border.
The policy book says Immigration and Customs Enforcement should withdraw a document that prohibits enforcement actions in “sensitive” places such as schools, playgrounds and churches.
When the Secretary of Homeland Security determines that there is a “real or anticipated mass migration of aliens” that requires federal intervention, the agenda says the secretary can make rules and regulations, including deportations, for as long as necessary.
What are Democrats saying?
Replying her support for Biden, Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson called Project 2025 “a brutal 920-page plan by MAGA Republicans to end U.S. democracy, hand out handouts to the rich, and take away Americans’ freedoms.”
What are Republicans saying about Project 2025?
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told “State of the Union” that Trump’s message to voters is focused on “restoring common sense, working-class values, and making decisions accordingly.”
“This is a 900-page document,” Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” "I guarantee Trump has his likes and dislikes in this 900-page document. But he's the one who's going to set the agenda for the next administration."
Muhafazakar “Heritage Foundation” vakfının hazırladığı, federal yönetimde kapsamlı değişiklikler öneren ve Trump’ın seçilmesiyle hayata geçirilmesi planlanan “Proje 2025” ile ABD’yi bekleyen değişiklikleri gazeteci Mete Sohtaoğlu, Fokus+ için kaleme aldı.
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