“Be afraid! Be very afraid!
—Gena Davis from the movie, ‘The Fly II’
A second Trump term would be—as a University of Virginia constitutional law professor called it—the equivalent of a ‘banana republic’ that would paint a bullseye on the backs of anyone who would stand-up to him and call out his autocratic actions.
Much of Trump’s and his allies’ ‘retribution’ can be found in a plan that has been dubbed, ‘Project 2025,’ which is comprised of 75 groups in a collaboration organized by the Heritage Foundation.
According to Wikipedia, Project 2025 is a plan to reshape the executive branch of the United States federal government in the event of a Republican victory (Trump or no Trump) in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
But, the plan is crafted to support the agenda of Trump.
The Heritage Foundation is an activist American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Founded in 1973, it took a leading role in the conservative movement in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose policies were taken from Heritage Foundation studies, including its ‘Mandate for Leadership.’
Called “the manifesto of the Reagan revolution,” Mandate for Leadership is a series of books published by the Foundation that are guidelines for reducing the size and scope of the federal government through specific policy recommendations.
In total, Project 2025 runs to more than 900 pages, with contributions from over 30 authors.
More than 50 conservative-leaning campaign groups, think tanks, educational institutions and publications are listed on its advisory board, including the Claremont Institute, Young America’s Foundation and the Defense of Freedom Institute.
Project 2025 leans heavily on what legal scholars refer to as a ‘unitary executive theory,’ which suggests that Congress cannot limit the president’s control of the executive branch.
But critics of that theory, like Columbia University law professor Peter Strauss, believe that this way of thinking is a fundamentally misguided—and limited—interpretation of the Constitution.
“The Constitution can only properly be understood as making the president the overseer of the government that Congress creates, not its commander,” Strauss said.
“The president is the commander of the military, but the power explicitly defined for him over ordinary domestic government is much less.”
Ultimately, the fear is that applying the unitary executive theory in this way would usher in a return of a political spoils system and lead to the development of an autocracy, in which one ruler has absolute power.
The Project 2025 team that put the new mandate together was created and led by Paul Dans, director of the Heritage Foundation.
The plan includes draft executive orders that would deploy the U.S. military domestically under the ‘Insurrection Act,’ according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by the Washington Post.
Last updated in 1871, the Act authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
According to communications and internal discussion revealed by the Post, the proposal was an immediate priority. In the final year of the Trump presidency, his supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did.
Since then, Trump said publicly he regretted not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate doing so in the future.
The Post reports the overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders.
Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president’s agenda in his first term.
They’ve reportedly said they are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in the West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s demands.
Project 2025 has been constructed to be reliably MAGA conservative—not just for the next conservative Republican president, but for a long time to come—and that the White House maintains total control of a ‘slashed-down’ bureaucracy.
Aside from dismantling the DOJ and the FBI, Project 2025 will also break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name a few of its larger targets.
Project 2025 would also give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.
Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.
The Project 2025 team is scouring records and social media accounts to rule out heretics—effectively administering loyalty tests—and launching a so-called ‘Presidential Administration Academy’ that tutors future MAGA bureaucrats with video classes in ‘Conservative Governance 101.’
Dan says 17 lectures have been prepared (with titles such as ‘Oversight and Investigations’ and ‘The Federal Budget Process’), with another 13 in production, and nearly a thousand potential new bureaucrats recruited from around the country are already in training.
These efforts are intended to ensure that the chaos and high-level defections of Trump’s first term never happen again, along with prosecutions like the ones the ex-president now faces.
Unpacking Project 2025
• Approximately 50,000 federal workers—career professionals or ‘civil servants,’ the bedrock of our democratic government—would be fired.
Federal workers are the body of government officials who are employed in civil occupations that are neither political nor judicial.
Many civil servants transition from administration to administration, a kind of inherited progression that cannot be fired based on their leanings or political beliefs.
Therefore, their political leanings and beliefs cannot be grounds for their release from service.
In a Washington Post article surrounding this plot, Jason Miller the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) describes their importance this way:
“The reason we put a nonpartisan civil service in place 140 years ago was so that the American people could trust that their government worked for them, irrespective of which party was in power.”
In other words, civil servants should be able to be trusted by all members of society and should never be divided by partisanship. The polarization of this bedrock could derail society’s entire relationship to the federal workforce. Project 2025 aims to do just that.
But if Project 2025 is implemented with a Trump or DeSantis win (it’s unlikely—don’t hold us to this—that the other GOP candidates running for president would implement the plan) tens of thousands of career civil servants would be stripped of their employment protections.
This would make it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to Trump’s agenda.
• Eliminating three U.S. Department of Energy offices
The three offices are crucial for the energy transition, and also calls to slash funding to the agency’s grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable energy deployment.
• Gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
The conservative initiative would move the EPA away from focusing on the climate crisis, and cutting the agency’s environmental justice and public engagement functions. The plan would shrink the department as a whole by terminating new hires in ‘low-value programs.’
Project 2025’s plan for the EPA includes blocking the agency from enforcing new pollution limits on power plants and tailpipe emissions or from implementing controls on mercury and other toxic air pollution, and effectively shuttering a critical program for deploying carbon-free energy.
Other environmental initiatives that would be hurt by the conservative initiative would be the Endangered Species Act, remove protections for the greater Yellowstone ecosystem’s population of grizzly bears, and bar the Department of Interior from creating a working group to help restore bison populations.
Here are some of the goals of Project 2025 and their effort to ‘save’ America and democracy (which is —editor’s note here—Orwellian double-speak for, “kill democracy, burn the constitution—and while they’re at it—blow-up the statue of liberty”:
• Outlaw “pornography,” by which they mean “Talking about trans people ever” and imprison anyone who produces it.
• Register teachers and librarians who provide any such material to children as sex offenders, thus destroying their livelihood.
• Shutter all technology firms that “facilitate” it.
• Exclude critical race theory from all public schools.
• Exclude “gender ideology” from all public schools.
• Rule any affirmation of a trans child’s gender to be child abuse.
• Ban anyone under 18 from using social media without parental consent.
• Bust all public sector unions.
• Use the army for border protection (the excuse is drugs)
• Make more nuclear weapons.
• Put the military recruiters in secondary schools and address ‘discouraging’ people from signing up.
• Require all kids to take a military aptitude test.
• Throw all trans people out of the military.
• Use the U.S. military’s ‘special forces’ on American soil.
• ‘Investigate’ afghan evacuees the U.S. rescued from the Taliban.
• Put unaccompanied minors who cross the border in tent camps.
• Make it harder to get asylum.
• Remove visas given to victims of ‘human trafficking’ unless they ‘cooperate’ with law enforcement
• Repeal Temporary Protected Sta-tus, which is given to people in ‘genuine danger’ while asylum proceedings take place.
• Remove subsidized flood insurance (this would make homes uninsurable in swatches of the nation facing natural disasters on a constant basis.
Also at stake is religious freedom, certain forms of art, removing necessary regulations as it relates to food safety, workplace safety, nuclear power, toxic waste, pharmaceuticals, air pollution, water pollution, child labor laws, or any essential activities keeping people safe.
Project 2025 will—if implemented—destroy everything that makes America the beacon of hope in the world.
Anyone who values freedom and democracy must stand against it regardless of party ideology or political stance (Red or Blue, Democrat or Republican, traditional Conservative or Liberal/Progressive).
—Article compiled by MCJ Editor Thomas Mitchell, Jr.
Sources used for this article: washingtonpost.com, Newsweek.com, Wikipedia, politico.com, katiecouric.com, bpr (Berkley Political Review).berkeley.edu, theguardian.com, the New York Times, Jenniferrpovey.medium.com