Donald Trump and Joe Biden are set to clash in the US presidential election. This time, the outgoing US president has made a number of blunders and missteps. This has led to the former president gaining a slight lead in the polls. In light of the political developments, the Republican-funded Heritage Foundation has formed Project 2025, a plan developed by former Trump advisers in collaboration with the foundation’s staff.
According to Washington Post ArticleThe 900-page plan includes radical policies, from mass deportations to politicizing the federal government in a way that would give the former president complete control of the Justice Department, to cutting federal services and promoting policies that encourage “marriage, work, motherhood, childbearing.” Parenthood and nuclear families. The 2025 plan places restrictions on abortion and proposes cutting climate change funding.
The plan is already gaining traction as Trump tries to moderate his stated positions to win the election, which is why he has criticized some of its contents as “absolutely ridiculous and absurd” and insisted that neither he nor his campaign had anything to do with the 2025 plan. Still, what is in the document is a good indication of what a second Trump presidency might look like.
Polls show Trump ahead of Biden
Main proposals
Project 2025 includes the following policies:
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Reshaping the Federal Workforce to Be Political:
Instead of neutral civil servants implementing policies on everything from health to education to climate, the executive branch would be filled with Trump loyalists. “It is essential to ensure that agencies and organizations have strong civil servants,” the plan states.
That means nearly every decision federal agencies make could advance a political agenda — such as whether to spend money in Democratic-leaning constituencies. For example, the plan calls for cuts to LGBT health programs.
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Reducing the resources of the Ministry of Education:
The 2025 plan would make sweeping changes to public education, cutting long-standing federal programs for low-income people and early education like Head Start, for example, and even the entire Department of Education. “Federal education policy should be reduced and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be abolished,” the plan states.
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Trump granted authority to investigate his opponents:
The 2025 plan would put the Justice Department and all law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, under direct presidential control. It calls for a “comprehensive overhaul” of the FBI, with the administration sifting through its investigations with a fine-toothed comb to weed out those the president doesn’t like. That would significantly weaken the independence of federal law enforcement agencies. “There would be a full-scale assault on the Justice Department and the FBI,” said Galston of the Brookings Institution. “That would mean tighter White House oversight of the Justice Department and the FBI.”
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Making access to reproductive care, especially abortion pills, more difficult:
The plan does not specifically call for a national ban on abortion, but abortion is one of the most talked-about topics in the plan, with scattered proposals throughout the plan encouraging the next president to “lead the nation in restoring America’s culture of life again.” They would do this by prosecuting anyone who ships abortion pills (the plan says abortion pills pose the greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world). It would increase the threat of criminalizing those who provide abortion care, use the government to track miscarriages, stillbirths, and abortions, and make it more difficult to provide emergency contraceptive care covered by insurance. It would also end the federal government’s protections for members of the military and their families to receive abortion care.
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Suppression of even legal immigration:
It would create a new “Border and Immigration Service” to revive Trump’s border wall, build camps to detain children and families at the border, and send the military to deport millions of people already in the country illegally (including Dreamers)—a deportation effort so massive that it could deal a major blow to the U.S. economy. “Illegal immigration must be ended, not reduced, and the border must be closed, not prioritized,” the plan states.
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Reducing climate change protection measures:
The 2025 plan calls for abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and monitors climate change, describing it as “one of the main drivers of the climate change warning industry.”
It would increase Arctic drilling and close the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change divisions, while facilitating increased fossil fuel production.
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Bans transgender people from military, considers reinstating mandatory draft:
“Bisexuality is incompatible with military service,” he says. The author of that part of the plan was the head of the Defense Department at the end of Trump’s presidency, and he told The Washington Post that the administration should seriously consider mandatory conscription.
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Federal Reserve Bank:
Consider abolishing the Federal Reserve and replacing it with some other form of banking where the federal government does not control interest rates or the money supply.
The former president went so far as to criticize the plan, despite agreeing with many of these positions.
Ways to implement the plan – what are the obstacles?
A big part of this plan is to hire and train people on how to move the levers of government or read the law in new ways to make these changes in federal policy. There is also a place on the project website where you can submit your resume.
There are still some big obstacles to achieving any of that, though, even if Trump and Republicans win control of Capitol Hill next year. First, Trump doesn’t seem to agree with everything in it. His campaign platform barely mentions abortion, while the 2025 plan focuses on the issue repeatedly.
Some of these ideas are impractical or even illegal. Analysts are divided over whether Trump could politicize civil servants to fire them at will, for example. The plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally questionable.
Ominously, one of the project’s leaders has opened the door to political violence to make all this a reality: “We are in the process of a second American revolution,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts recently warned, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it.”
Analysts’ comments on Project 2025
It’s not unusual for candidates to lay out plans for how they would govern if elected. What’s unusual is that many of these proposals are extreme. The Biden campaign, in contrast, sees the former president’s plan as an easy target for its campaign.
“It’s like reading a horror novel,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson. “Every page makes you want to read the next one, but when you’re done, you’re scared and disgusted.”
This is causing great frustration for the Trump campaign, which does not want any politically unpopular ideas associated with its campaign at a time when it is trying to moderate some of its positions to win the election.
“It’s not helpful to write down on paper all the crazy things you’re going to get attacked for while you’re running,” one adviser said recently. Trump in the Washington PostBut it’s fair to think of the 2025 plan as a pretty good indicator of what a second Trump presidency might look like, analysts say.
“It’s not like Trump is going to hand this to his cabinet on day one and say, ‘Here, do it,’” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But it reflects the real goals of important people in the Trump community.”
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