By Celine McNicholas, General Counsel and Director of Policy, and Naomi Walker, Executive Vice President
By now, you’ve likely heard of Project 2025, the policy mandate produced by the Heritage Foundation alongside more than 110 conservative groups that aims to completely overhaul U.S. government and society. You may have also heard about the recent staff shake-ups at the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025—as well as rumors that the project is shutting down—because of Donald Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the wildly unpopular proposals in the mandate. Those efforts are simply not credible—more than 140 former Trump administration officials, including 6 of his cabinet secretaries, helped author the proposals.
It’s also not credible that the massive operation will fade away into the night. Whether the project operates above or below ground, it’s clear that the candidates, organizations, and staff behind the project will continue to pursue their radical policy goals. In addition to the policy mandate, Project 2025 also includes a campaign to recruit right-wing staff who will commit to advance its policies as well as a training academy to teach them exactly how to implement these plans.
Over the next three months, EPI Action will produce a series of fact sheets and reports to illustrate the deep harm to workers if the Trump campaign and its allies have the power to enact Project 2025’s policies.
In particular, the policy mandate would:
- Undermine government by cutting federal public-sector jobs and retirement benefits while allowing the president to replace civil servants with political appointees loyal to the president.
- Gut union rights by banning public-sector unions and decimating collective bargaining rights for private-sector workers.
- Cut wages, overtime, and benefits by taking away overtime pay protections for millions of workers and weakening the protections for millions more; allowing states and cities to waive federal labor laws like the minimum wage; making it more difficult for unemployed workers to access unemployment insurance benefits; repealing the Davis-Bacon Act and ending mandatory Project Labor Agreement (PLA) requirements in federal contracts, which would undermine wages and benefits for workers on federal projects.
- Endanger children by rolling back decades of child labor laws and eliminating Head Start.
- Eviscerate civil rights protections by making it easier for employers to discriminate, banning the collection of data showing the prevalence of discrimination, and eliminating practices meant to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the federal government and higher education.
- Take away the economic and reproductive freedoms of women by further reducing access to reproductive care, imposing a national ban on abortion pills, and dismantling federal initiatives aimed at creating gender equity and workplace protections for women.
- Make health care coverage harder for workers and their families to access by repealing key provisions of the Affordable Care Act and taxing the employer-provided health care benefits of millions of workers.
- Deport millions of immigrants and end many types of legal immigration.
Some journalists and political analysts have described the policy blueprint as “aspirational” or a “wish list” for a Trump-led Republican Party. Characterizing these plans as pie in the sky benefits only one group: the conservative (MAGA) coalition behind them. By making these extreme plans seem like just the usual hard-right Trumpian rhetoric, it obscures the laser-focused intent of the authors to make these proposals reality. This characterization also ignores how Trump was far more successful in his first term at advancing a hard-right agenda than he is often credited with. Already, the proposals have heavily influenced House Republicans’ funding bills, and similar proposals have been implemented by state legislatures for decades.
Beyond attempts to characterize Project 2025 as just bluster, it’s obscene to call Project 2025 “aspirational.” At its core, Project 2025 is a set of highly regressive policies that would erase much of the progress made over the last 80 years and enshrine regressive structural reforms so deeply in law that it will take generations to undo the damage. These policies don’t nibble around the edges of reform but rather amount to radical changes to every sphere of American life: work, wages, education, family, health care, and retirement.
The policies would turn civil rights laws on their heads, essentially banning programs aimed at promoting race, sex, and gender equity and weaponizing anti-discrimination protections against those they were enacted to help. Moreover, the policies in Project 2025 privilege religious (i.e., “Judeo-Christian”) employers, largely exempting them from the limited worker protections remaining under the plan. The policies would create an economy rife with inequality and serve to punish the middle and working class—particularly workers of color and women—to privilege the wealthiest Americans and corporations.