Time to look at the nuts and bolts of this. In detail. Bear in mind the whole thing is 900 pages. (Ellipses show where I have removed a lot of text from the Axios article.)
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The [Heritage] foundation boasted that the GOP presidential nominee carried out roughly two-thirds of its 2015 recommendations within a year of taking office the first time.
Here is some of what it wants during a second Trump presidency.
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Privatizing weather forecasts
The project calls for dissolving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and either transferring its functions to other agencies or eliminating them entirely.
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Shrinking the social safety net
Critical federal programs meant to support people experiencing economic hardship and children living in poverty would be significantly overhauled or eliminated under the plan.
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The foundation would also like to make it harder for people to qualify for SNAP benefits if they also receive aid from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, another federally funded assistance program.
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Eliminating free preschool
The foundation wants to end another key federal program: Head Start, which offers free early childhood education, health and nutrition services to children from low-income families.
… Capping funding for Medicaid
The plan calls for caps to how much federal funding states may receive to help pay for Medicaid costs, though it doesn’t specify how such caps would be determined.
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Under the project, states would also be allowed adopt work requirements for people to receive Medicaid benefits and “more robust eligibility determinations” for people to qualify for coverage.
Ending student debt relief
The plan’s architects propose ending all “time-based and occupation-based student loan forgiveness.”
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Defunding public broadcasting
Project 2025 calls for defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which has long been a Republican target.
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Banning adult entertainment
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, writes in Project 2025’s foreword: “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
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“It has no claim to First Amendment protection,” Roberts writes of adult entertainment.
Every single one of those things have been on the GOP’s hit list for over 20 years (some much longer).
None of them have happened. Not under Bush, not under Trump the first time.
They won’t touch Medicaid - too many of their rural voters depend on it. They won’t touch porn - too many of their new young male voters depend on it to get off.
Maybe the CPB. But that’s been on the hit list since Nixon and has survived.
Head Start… maybe. But again we’re not talking about a huge amount of money here. SNAP… yeah, that will likely get cut. But that comes with the territory for the GOP. Maybe enough voters will be effected to bother to come out to vote next time.
NOAA? I guess that’s a climate-change thing but I think the military uses it too (NOAA Corps). So I highly doubt it’s going anywhere.
Why do you think that matters? One, trump promised we’d all be freed from the toil of voting ever again, so who cares about farmer votes. Two, they’ll find some way to blame democrats.
As I indicated, SNAP increases will be rolled back, as will the ACA subsidies for private plans that were in the IRA.
Medicaid block-grant cuts and significant cuts? Maybe. I’m doubtful, but it will be close.
It’s also important to remember that many of these programs (ACA and SNAP in particular) were increased pretty heftily recently as part of the IRA, so the GOP can claim “cuts” when it’s really just returns to 2020 levels, at least in some cases.
Correct, project 2025 includes a plan for how to get it done. Namely, purging anyone in opposition.
Mark my words, the federal workforce is going to get slaughtered starting next year. Anyone not on board with the plan is going to find themselves on the curb, federal employee protections be damned. If they have a problem with that, they can take it up with the courts, which will be packed with MAGA judges. The SCOTUS will back them up.
This election is the end of an era of political stalemates.
This is possible. We may be heading back towards the era where the tops of all of the federal bureaucracies are replaced every time the administration changes - the spoils system from before the 1880s.
They will touch all of this and somehow claim the Democrats did it.
If they don’t enact this agenda, it will be purely because a clown car like the Trump administration doesn’t have enough hours in the day to push it through.
That helped last time. Will it help this time? I won’t bet on it.
They don’t have to succeed in all these cases to be a disaster. As you say, enough of these things have good reasons to exist, so I expect they will fail in their attempts to get rid of them entirely. But they don’t have to get rid of them “entirely” to do a lot of damage.
For popular things, like medicare and SNAP, just “adjust” the qualifications needed to apply for and receive benefits, and underfund the department responsible for processing applications. “Sorry it took us two years to process your claim, btw, we’ve denied it. Feel free to re-apply after the statute-mandated 1 year grace period.”
For other things, like NOAA, just make they pay-for-play. No free weather reports, so the department brings in revenue, while reducing services to citizens. Organizations that really need weather reports, like airlines, will pay for them, and pass the cost along to the customers. The economy continues, just being that little bit more anti-consumer.
There’s lots of ways to throw sand in the gears of government, and ultimately, that’s what they want to do. Make government as inefficient and indifferent to the needs of citizens as they’ve always claimed it to be.
So was federal protection for abortion. Now it’s gone. The rest of the bodies on this list are up for the chop, too, regardless of their benefit to the public or necessity for smooth functioning of governance and national security. You seem to be under the misapprehension that this is just politics as normal with a right-leaning slant. It is not; these are people willing to pull the temple down upon their heads, turning the United States into a third rate post-industrial shell like Russia just to get the totalitarian Christian Nationalist theocracy they think they want while paying off the oligarchic class in concessions, tax breaks, and resources for as long as they are needed, and then turning on them once their utility is complete.
Dan Goldman has a series of short videos on Project 2025 for anyone who doesn’t want to read 900 odd pages of “blueprint” that reads like Margaret Atwood’s extensive background notes for A Handmaid’s Tale:
I have read about half of the Project 2025 book (which was as much as I could stomach), and those videos are in no way an exaggeration of anything I read. This is literally a policy guide for a totalitarian theocracy, and it is every bit as horrifying as you might imagine.
Yeah, it’s certainly possible that some of the long-term targets will get hit. As they say, elections have consequences. I think it’s important for the opposition to figure out which hills to fight on, and make a plan for convincing GOP Senators that some of these cuts are bad politics.
And I think that, in a world where Trump BSed his way back into the presidency, winning not just the Electoral College, but the popular vote, we have to readjust our notions of what constitutes “bad politics”. None of the goals listed were secrets during the election, but none of it mattered.
Certainly possible. I wouldn’t be shocked if some of the ideas on that last are very possible. Most people probably don’t give two figs about the CPB, and would be fine it it were defunded. Food Stamp cuts are always popular with conservatives, but not so much with farmers. It will be a political balancing act like it always is. The size of the cuts will come down to exactly how many GOP Senators there are and how big the House majority is (if there is one).
Medicaid I can see going either way. Most folks I talk to here in Missouri like the part that pays for elderly care (my wife takes care of many MAGA types that live in Medicaid rooms in nursing homes) but would also be fine with cuts that effect poor children and families. Whether Democrats can successful paint “Medicaid cuts” as the cutting the former more than latter will be huge.
Project 2025, which I have also read large parts of as eye-glazingly boring as it can be, is the most extreme version of the same conservative agenda we’ve been fighting against since the 1990s or earlier. The truly scary stuff, at a fundamental “changing the way government works”, is the proposed changes to how the civil service is staffed and the way the executive and DOJ interact. How aggressively Trump works to purge the high ranks of the executive bureaucracy and how aggressively he “directs” the DOJ to start prosecuting his enemies will tell a lot about just how dark the next 4 years will be.
That’s how they plan to do all this. You’re thinking of “cuts” in the traditional way. They submit a budget that shows Plan X, that got $10billion in funding last year, gets $5billion next year. Everyone sees it,and gets upset.
But you don’t have to put a cut like that in the budget, if you control the department that runs Plan X. Every government agency has some degree of latitude in how it carries out its job, and it’s well-established that they can crate “priorities” for work, based on the desires of the political overlords, who have the ultimate authority to run things.
So put in someone who understands, “You have a 10billion budget on paper, but we expect you to only spend 5billion of that.”
This is happening in several Canadian provinces right now, with our health care. Our system is largely funded by the Federal government, but they provide those funds to the provincial governments, who administer the actual programs, and spend the money. And in Ontario and Alberta (at least), Conservative parties have simply decided to not spend a lot of the money they’ve been given. They hire fewer doctors and nurses, and put fewer of each on every shift at the hospitals, and just look the other way when hospital wait times are skyrocketing. And there’s essentially nothing that anyone can do to stop this, since these governments keep getting re-elected.
So expect things like that, throughout the US government.
That is interesting perspective, thanks. And that is inline with the plans to “block grant” Medicaid to the states so state governments have to figure out how to do the cuts.
I think most of the traditional safety net programs (TANF, SNAP) are run by the states. So while red states could certainly do what you describe, I don’t think there is much that can be done to cut blue-state funding without an act of Congress.
If these programs were run directly by the federal government then there would certainly be more cause for concern. I guess he could appoint people to totally fuck up ACA enrollment at HHS. But breaking things on purpose doesn’t tend to make you popular, and the actual administration of our health care system is done by private insurance companies and hospitals, not the state.
ETA: Again I guess it goes back to just how unlawful does he intend to be. I guess you could appoint somene who just refuses to send the checks to the states.
But that would require the people who voted for him to understand that they are breaking things. When they can’t even figure out that they’re being lied to about who pays for tariffs, there’s no way they’re going to delve into the swamp of the nitty-gritty of the ACA.
And it doesn’t all have to be done in one fell swoop. Incremental change, so things just gradually get worse is the way to go. And every step of the way, the changes will be blamed on Democrats and their illegal migrants, and the MAGAs will buy it. “We need to just turn the screw one more notch, and Trump will have fixed everything™. Six more months of sacrifice, and then we’ll all be rich and prosperous!”
Now you’re getting it. Congress can’t repeal any of these laws because Rs don’t have the 2/3 majority in the senate, so they’ll just neglect to use their oversight powers to force the executive to send out the checks. And anyone who sues the federal government will face MAGA judges who will support the executive’s right to ignore the law.
The civil service stuff genuinely worries me, because Trump would absolutely love a way to punish his “enemies,” and it’s one of the places where his personal priorities align with a far-right ideological agenda. Most of the rest of it, though, seems like a mix of standard right-wing wishlist items that the Heritage Foundation has been calling for forever, and wacky wingnuttery that is likely to be wildly unpopular even in MAGA-land (banning porn when your voting base skews heavily toward dudebros?) Some of the items in the first category may pass, but probably in a watered-down form, because it’s hard to cut Medicaid or Head Start without incurring backlash. The ones in the second category certainly won’t; nobody is even going to want to talk about them.