Analysis of Project 2025 Proposal
Rebecca Loell is an International & Comparative Politics major, graduating in Spring 2025. She grew up in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, USA.
Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation was written by Conservative politicians and intellectuals to convey the issues the Conservative party has with the current, more liberal policies now in place. This includes discrepancies with more gender-inclusive wording, pro-choice legislation, and global governance. Backed by the Republican Party, the document claims that a lack of conservative focus is what has led the United States of America (USA) into political turmoil. The authors of Project 2025 state that in order to fix the USA, we must prioritize past policies that have benefited the white majority and reduce government involvement in private affairs. Project 2025, in a nutshell, wants to refocus research from environmental concerns to maximizing energy profits, eliminating or moving government bureaucratic offices, and reducing language, literature, and resources that are available to the American people.
The main economic change that Conservatives suggest is to redistribute the United States’ labor force back to the USA instead of abroad. They claim to protect the workers of the USA by supporting unions and wanting to increase working land and profits from oil. With the fondness for oil workers and laborers, Project 2025 does not favor government workers and wishes to reduce the number of federal employees. To them, it “seems an obvious way to reduce the overall expense of the civil service.” (78) They never cite how exactly this would reduce costs but the effect of redistributing and minimizing government organizations would reduce the current resources these organizations and government departments support. The authors state that the “sprawling federal bureaucracy” (43) must be reined in. The plan included within Project 2025 would include reorganizing and eliminating women's health departments, and the Department of Education in favor of putting education legislation under the president. According to MSNBC, President Trump has already signed an Executive Order that will eliminate the Department of Education, saying that this new Executive Order “will only make the DoE (Department of Education) smaller.” (MSNBC) The rhetoric used within Project 2025 evokes an idea that the Conservative Party supports American workers but the legislation and changes that would be made would be detrimental to many government resources and workers and does not outline explicitly how they plan to fix the problems they cite.
With a disdain for government workers already established within Project 2025, the authors claim to have a plan to redistribute labor back to the USA to sustain the nation's infrastructure. The economic disparities the USA is now experiencing compared to the level of industry in foreign nations is one that was caused by a long history of cheapening labor practices. This was caused by the majority of the American industrial labor slowly leaving the nation and going to cheaper development options, for example Chinese manufacturers. Now that America is experiencing an economic deficit, Conservatives are turning their back on the manufacturing practices that relieved the country of major manufacturing responsibilities while allowing them to profit from the labor. Now that the foreign nations we once relied on for cheaper labor are surpassing the USA in many forms, the conservative solution is to completely reverse the decades of labor established in foreign countries and reintroduce a more state-based industrial force. The suggestion they give of rerouting USA labor back from foreign labor would be beneficial to American workers, but in practice, the USA has a finite amount of infrastructure that it has not maintained. The suggestion to build new complexes for industry is not realistic and would cost millions, if not billions, of dollars (674). The authors of Project 2025 claim they want to re-center labor to the USA, but when people coming from other countries search for labor within the local infrastructure, they are treated with prejudice and hate.
Project 2025 has a specific disdain for immigrants, especially those of Hispanic and Latinx origin. The authors propose restricting visa allocations, pleading for more funding, and suggesting less consideration from ICE officers toward the immigrants they hold captive. Project 2025 calls for Congress to support and “unequivocally authorize state and local law enforcement to participate in immigration and border security actions.” (150) This would allow untrained officers to exhibit a much larger span of authority and responsibility when it comes to immigration detainment. Project 2025 acknowledges that there is a dilemma with how little labor is being done within the USA, but they continue to blame the largest demographic of people who contribute to the economy. They blame the fentanyl epidemic in the USA on the cartels in Mexico and believe that they “should implement a sovereign Mexico policy, as our neighbor has functionally lost its sovereignty to muscular criminal cartels that effectively run the country.” (89) American involvement in foreign affairs, especially in the global South as well as in the Middle East, has been too invasive in recent decades. There is a rhetoric that the USA should be allowed to involve itself in global issues both economically and militarily, but when the topic of foreign aid comes into question within Project 2025, the response is to limit it as much as possible. The limit on aid in favor of military operations would be reversing the impact the USA wants to have on a global sphere. A nation governing with the fear of its military prowess should not be a nation governing on a global scale. Aid should be given as freely as possible but meddling in other state’s affairs should be left in the past along with many of the other points within this paper. This view on workers and immigrants would seem legitimate to the everyday white American, however, the majority of the American labor force is made up of immigrants and increased restrictions would be counter-intuitive to the cause. This new focus on oil and energy increases would continue to decimate the environment in the USA and add to the growing number of environmental catastrophes the American people face. Through the over-exploitation of land and resources within the USA, we have experienced major climate changes and can see a direct correlation between the overuse of land to the wildfires we are currently experiencing in California.
With the false news received from social media that has been bought out by the Republican party’s biggest supporters, we can no longer trust what is released onto our feed. Along with the control the Republicans have over major news networks, corroborated information has become more and more difficult to find within American spheres. This restriction of information goes beyond the media and has begun to bleed into our school systems and our ability for free speech. Project 2025 outlines how it wishes to remove certain words from our vocabulary, and it plans on doing this through harsh regulations on the schooling of children. Not only do they request federal-wide bans on teaching critical race theory or gender terminology, but they also claim that there is too much government involvement in education and that, “For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.”(285) This hypocrisy does nothing to better the education of children but limits it more so and by returning control to the states, the curriculums country-wide would become impossible to regulate and monitor what should be the standard of education. They wish to erase any language regarding gender and critical race theory (259). I suppose the authors hope that if one does not acknowledge the errors of our past, then they do not exist, such as the restrictions put on the LGBT+ community and years of mistreatment of people of color within the USA throughout its history (344). These changes to the education system and how it functions are claimed to be to support the parents of children and restore more autonomy to the family. To counter this, I raise the point that schools are for the education of children, not the perpetuation of what parents want to be pushed. The public education system is a separate entity from the home where children can truly explore and by turning the focus from the children to the parents, we lose the objective of educating the future with better ideas than our own. Project 2025 blatantly labels a marriage as between a man and a woman and a family as one made up of a man, woman, and children, reducing what marriage has previously been stated by the US Supreme Court (481). As well as trying to limit educators and our freedom of expression and speech, they are also attempting to re-categorize women as “only for the household and the Family.”(259) Throughout the paper, there are many instances where the authors want to reconfigure the bureaucratic offices of the US government. This reconfiguration of government departments would cause major confusion, because there was no reason as to why these changes were necessary stated in the document. In my opinion, these departmental changes would only lead to confusion and a more difficult time finding the resources a US citizen may need. This recategorization calls for the next conservative Administration to “rename the USAID Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) as the USAID Office of Women, Children, and Families; refocus and realign resources that currently support programs in GEWE to the Office of Women, Children, and Families.”(259) This change of departmental support of women’s well-being as being only associated with children and family negates the fact that women are separate entities outside of the family, just as much as men are. The plan to completely gut a government administration that aims to help empower half the population of the USA should not be considered as it would desolate the resources available to women within the entirety of the country.
This document outlines how the Republican Party hopes to restructure the government into one that operates by and for the president and the conservative party. They aim to reorganize the departments currently under the federal government leading to more presidential control and confusion on the part of the common citizen looking for resources. It also outlines how the government will completely de-fund environmental policies in favor of new oil expenses and research in military equipment. They also hope to restrict the children and women in the USA by not allowing them the full scope of their education, expression, or freedom of speech and by further reducing women’s empowerment to women being just a part of the family. This document, if implemented, could have disastrous consequences for the majority of the US population, including women, people of color, and the general public hoping to access resources. The Republican party is no longer the party of the people but rather the party of those who were in control and now fear losing that control to those they once intimidated into submission. The USA cannot better itself by running to the past, which this document emphasizes. Only by adapting to the times and finding a new structure for our government can we rectify the mistakes we have been making for more than a century.
Bibliography
Dans, Paul, et al. “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2025”. The Heritage Foundation, 2023.
MSNBC, “Trump Set to Sign Executive Order Which Will Eliminate the Department of Education.” MSNBC, NBCUniversal News Group, 20 Mar. 2025, www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/trump-set- to-sign-executive-order-which-will-eliminate-the-department-of-education-234964037798.
Image Credits:
https://www.project2025.org/policy/
