What is Project 2025? (Part 2)
A Presidential Transition Project from The Heritage Foundation
What is Project 2025?
This is Part 2 in The Savvy Citizen’s new series: What is Project 2025? If you’re new to the series, be sure to read Part 1 first since this is a building series - each post builds on the post before. I also explain My Approach to the series in Part 1, so I won’t repeat it here.
Let’s pick up where we left off in Part 1, and continue with the text from Project 2025’s page: The Truth About Project 2025 …
» Debunking the Lies
Project 2025 is a plan from Trump: FALSE
Even liberal USA Today’s fact checkers have rated this claim as false. They wrote unambiguously that “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump.”
» Government
Terminate the Constitution: FALSE
Project 2025 actually represents an attempt to restore Constitutional governance, not terminate it. Bringing the administrative state more firmly under the control of the president, whose authority traces directly from the Constitution, could not be further from terminating this quintessential founding document.
Give the Government more power over your daily life: FALSE
Project 2025 aims to weaken the bureaucracy that churns out tens of thousands of pages of rules every year. A more restrained administrative state translates into less control over Americans’ daily lives, not more.
» Civil Rights
Ban books and curriculum about slavery: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership does not advocate for banning books or curriculum about slavery.
Continue to pack the Supreme Court and lower courts with right-wing judges: FALSE
The only people calling for packing the judiciary are those on the Left, who do it every time the Supreme Court or a lower court makes decisions they don’t like.
End civil rights: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership calls for respecting the civil rights of all Americans, including those who have been censored by the government or had it weaponized against them. Mandate advocates for the end of divisive, race-based, anti-American propaganda in the federal workforce.
End DEI protections in government: TRUE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership advocates for the end of divisive, race-based, anti-American propaganda like DEI in the federal workforce.
Promote and expedite capital punishment: TRUE
The appropriateness of capital punishment divides Americans, and conservatives, of good will. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership calls for the enforcement of the federal death penalty where appropriate and applicable, and recommends a future presidential administration pursue the death penalty for the most heinous crimes, including those involving violence and the sexual abuse of children, unless Congress says otherwise through legislation.
» Military & Veterans
Cut military benefits for veterans and service members including housing, TRICARE, retirement, and secondary education: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership makes no cuts to any veteran benefits. It does propose reforms to the VA to deliver improved care in a more efficient and timely fashion to America’s veterans. The VA has long been mismanaged and has not served our nation’s veterans for some time now. Project 2025 demands that the VA improves and modernizes.
The VA needs more aggressive recruitment of doctors, mental health professionals, and other staff to meet urgent needs at overburdened care centers. VHA centers should be required to see more patients per day. All VA medical centers should consider extending weekday hours and adding Saturday hours to meet excess capacity or delay in care for veterans. The VA should improve the timeliness of claim adjudication and benefits delivery to deliver benefits without frustrating delays. Most importantly, the VA should develop a new pilot “Express 30” commitment to complete a veteran’s first disability claim in 30 days.
» Marriage & Family
End no-fault divorce: FALSE
Divorce is not mentioned in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.
End “marriage equality”: FALSE
The legal recognition of same-sex marriage is not discussed in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. Mandate calls for the protection of faith-based grant recipients who maintain support for the traditional definition of marriage. Mandate also supports conscience protections for those who do not wish to participate in same-sex marriages.
Complete ban on abortions without exceptions: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership calls for the government to comply with laws that prevent federal funding of abortion. It also calls for federal support for alternatives to abortion, including adoption.
Ban contraceptives: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership says nothing about banning or restricting contraception.
Ban IVF: FALSE
IVF is not mentioned anywhere in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.
Condemn single mothers while promoting only “traditional families”: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership suggests that a future HHS Secretary replace the policies of the Biden administration that promote the LGBTQ+ agenda, subsidize single motherhood, disincentivize work, and penalize marriage with policies that instead encourage marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.
Outlaw pornography: TRUE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership calls for the criminalization of pornography production, distribution, and consumption. Pornography has no claim to First Amendment protection and its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.
» Health Care
End the Affordable Care Act: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership offers policy suggestions to curb the abuses of the Affordable Care Act.
Raise prescription drug prices: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership offers proposals to lower drug prices through competition and innovation.
» Education
End free and discounted school lunch programs: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership advocates that the Food and Nutrition Service be moved from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Health and Human Services. Mandate condemns the Biden administration’s decision to threaten schools that do not comply with radical transgender policies by taking away their funding for school meals for needy students. Additionally, Mandate supports prioritizing school meal programs for those students who are truly needy by reforming or eliminating the often-misused Community Eligibility Program, which creates an entitlement for many students regardless of family income levels.
Use public, taxpayer money for private religious schools: TRUE
Americans are able to use taxpayer money to choose where they shop for groceries, attain housing, and obtain higher education. Religious schools often outperform public schools, and families should have the choice to send their children to these schools.
Shut down the Department of Education: TRUE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership calls for the end of the Department of Education. Since the Department was created, educational outcomes have not improved, and the American school system has increasingly fallen behind other countries. Giving more control back to state and local governments, and expanding school choice, would improve education outcomes for all Americans, especially underprivileged communities. Some functions of the Department of Education would be moved to other departments including Labor, Justice, and Commerce.
» Economy & Workers
Cut Social Security: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership does not advocate cutting Social Security. Even liberal CNN’s fact checkers have confirmed this, stating unambiguously: “Fact check: Harris falsely claims Project 2025 blueprint calls for cutting Social Security.”
Eliminate unions and worker protections: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership presents different ideas about a conservative labor policy. It calls for combatting the excesses of the Deep State’s bloated federal employee unions, which have ensured that federal employees keep their jobs even if they engage in illegal behavior or perform their jobs poorly.
Raise the retirement age: FALSE
Raising the retirement age is nowhere advocated in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.
Cut Medicare: FALSE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership does not advocate cutting Medicare.
» Immigration
Mass deportation of illegal immigrants: TRUE
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership does not advocate cutting Medicare.
» Energy & Environment
Deregulate big business and the oil industry: MOSTLY TRUE
America needs energy that is plentiful and affordable. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership calls for an all-of-the-above energy policy that would promote the development of our domestic energy supply, and for fewer burdensome regulations for ALL businesses.
Increase Arctic Drilling: TRUE
The Arctic is of immense strategic importance to America. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership advocates a strong pursuit of American interests in the region, through economic freedom; through ensuring free and open shipping lanes; and through the development of the vast energy resources of the Arctic.
We’ll pick back up tomorrow with the philosophical underpinnings of the Project (which are very standard conservative principles that have been around for decades).
Meanwhile, I continue to urge you to peruse Project2025.org and read their claims so you can support it, object to it, or perhaps a little of both, based on actual knowledge, not invective and inuendo (a horrible byproduct of our ridiculous electoral environment)!
I hope you’ll find this review as useful as I have …
xo,
Kelley for The Savvy Citizen Team
October 15, 2024