Project 2025 Isn’t Just Anti-Abortion. It Attacks Surrogacy, IVF, Contraception.
The right’s 922-page policy agenda for a Trump presidency offers an extremist plan for rolling back reproductive rights.
July 28, 2024
Source: TruthOut
From left to right: Cody Carnley of Crenshaw County, Alabama; Carrie McNair of Mobile; Veronica Wehby-Upchurch of Birmingham and Lindsey Shaw of Birmingham hold signs at a rally in aupport of legislation to protect in vitro fertilization on Feb. 28, 2024 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
Early childhood educator Sammi Gerken, a married mother of a 3-year-old, became a surrogate in late 2022 and calls the experience “rewarding on all fronts.” “I was proud and happy to give a couple who had struggled with infertility for 11 years what they’d dreamed of — a baby — something that would have been impossible without me,” she told Truthout.
Even as a child, Gerken says that she was fascinated by birth, pregnancy and motherhood. “I used to watch YouTube videos, which is where I learned about in vitro fertilization, surrogacy and infertility. Watching people struggle to achieve a healthy pregnancy pulled at my heart. I couldn’t imagine longing for a baby and not being able to have one. After a successful pregnancy with my daughter in early 2021, I felt it was time to explore becoming a surrogate.”
And, although Gerken said that she had to go through numerous medical procedures, including hormone injections, to sustain the pregnancy, she is “beyond glad” she did it.
She is also thrilled that she and the receiving family continue to be in touch. Throughout the pregnancy, Gerken said that they exchanged daily texts and frequently met over Zoom. Then, after the baby was born, she pumped breast milk for four months. “It was a beautiful way to stay connected,” she said. “Although we no longer text as often, I’ll see them in August for the baby’s first birthday. We all want to have a lifetime relationship. Our hearts will forever be connected.”
As Gerken speaks, it’s obvious that she is passionate about the efficacy of surrogacy. This is why Project 2025, a 922-page right-wing wish list and game plan that is explicit about its intent to impose a nationwide ban on abortion and limit access to contraceptives, IVF and surrogacy, enrages her. “Why should outsiders decide how people grow their families?” she asks. “Surrogacy is love. It’s a valid way to build a family.”
The right-wing, of course, disagrees — even as the Republican National Committee’s official platform strategically steers clear of a direct attack on reproductive autonomy. But Project 2025 is far more explicit, and its authors are hell-bent on creating what Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the organizational mastermind behind Project 2025, calls “the second American revolution.”
For Heritage and the more than 100 organizations that endorse the plan, that revolution involves the creation of a policy agenda for the first 180 days of a GOP presidency and lays “the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.” The plan also includes the creation of a personnel database of conservative movers and shakers, something that Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at Heritage and Trump’s former director of the Office of Personnel Management, likens to a LinkedIn or Facebook for the right. Should this roster include people new to government, he says, a Presidential Administration Academy has been established to train potential staffers for every federal agency. A series of free, online, asynchronous classes covers everything from how to get a security clearance, to “the dangers of the administrative state,” to how federal budget processes and procurements work. This, of course, is to ensure that a well-trained workforce is ready to jump in on day one to serve the MAGA cause.
What’s more, Project 2025 provides an agency-by-agency playbook that explains what each government department will advocate for and do.
In an interview with The Washington Stand, the daily news site of the Christian nationalist Family Research Council, Dans stressed that,
We want new folks to come in and serve, essentially, but to do that they need to know how this game is played and the rules of the road. That’s what we are hoping to do. We’re going to identify talent and then we’re going to teach you essentially what our core group of beliefs is…. We need to have an entire army of conservatives coming to Washington.… In the past, the transition effort has really been the second thought for the candidate.
But not this year.
“We want every potential applicant to curate his or her own page and upload their resume, list their social media, take some background diagnostic tests,” and make themselves known, Dans told The Washington Stand.
Unsurprisingly, anti-abortion credentials and a commitment to eroding access to reproductive health care are feathers in the cap of job applicants.
Project 2025 Threatens Reproductive Care
According to Media Matters for America, a media literacy and watchdog organization, the Project 2025 plan, officially called the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” aims to remove the word “abortion” from all federal laws and regulations; roll back the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medication abortion; use the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era law that was passed in 1873, to ban the mailing of abortion pills and stop clinics from receiving shipments of supplies and equipment; and limit access to birth control, in vitro fertilization and surrogacy. Moreover, Project 2025 seeks to end research using fetal tissue and stop the sale of nonprescription emergency contraception, including the popular over-the-counter pill Ella, which it erroneously claims is an abortifacient.
The Media Mattersreport, “Inside Project 2025’s Attacks on Reproductive Rights,” further states that Project 2025 hopes to elevate draconian state policies, like a Louisiana law that makes “carrying abortion medication without a prescription” a crime, into federal law.
Additionally, Media Matters zeroes in on Project 2025’s promotion of fallacies, among them that taking a daily birth control pill causes infertility; that IVF is unregulated; and that frozen embryos are children. Media Matters also points out that “at least 17 partner organizations of Project 2025 have published and publicly presented anti-surrogacy arguments,” including the idea that surrogacy is “morally wrong.”
“From the moment of conception,” Project 2025 states “every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race or abilities.”
This statement is a particularly bitter pill to swallow for Stetson Law School professor Robyn M. Powell, a nationally recognized expert on disability law and its intersection with reproductive justice. “The anti-abortion movement has used disabled people as pawns for years, and the idea that legal abortion encourages eugenics — policies that dictate who is fit and who is unfit to have children — is absurd,” Powell told Truthout. “People with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by anti-abortion policies that tell us what we can and can’t do with our bodies.”
In addition, she says that despite lip service about the value of every human life, those who oppose abortion do little to nothing to support or improve the lives of those living with disabilities. “As disabled people, we understand that attacks on the rights of the poor, the LGBTQIA+ community and women are attacks on us since we are part of multiple marginalized communities,” she said.
In addition, Powell sees Project 2025’s emphasis on deregulation as another potent area of attack, since eliminating federal agencies such as the Department of Education and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — long-standing goals of the Heritage Foundation as well as many others on the right, and explicitly advocated in Project 2025 — would cause irreparable harm to the disabled.
“Project 2025 impacts everything,” Powell told Truthout. “It is infuriating.”
Andrew Beck, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, agrees that the project has deep tentacles, but is keeping his eyes on Project 2025’s implications for abortion access. “Despite Trump’s efforts to obfuscate the issue, abortion is on the ballot this year,” Beck told Truthout. He calls Project 2025 “a 900-page nightmare,” and says that some of the document’s most egregious provisions are buried deep within it.
“The Comstock Act is never mentioned by name,” Beck noted. (Instead, the document references “long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.”)
“For many decades, the Comstock Act was assumed to have no application whatsoever for abortion care,” Beck said. “But in the last few years, a drumbeat has been heard and echoed by Project 2025 to use Comstock, a law that is already on the books, as a back door to a nationwide abortion ban. This statute makes it a crime to mail or ship ‘any article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.’ If they use Comstock, they do not need Congress to pass an abortion ban.” Project 2025, he continues, is also “gunning for medication abortion. This has been a target of anti-abortion politicians for a long time, but now that two-thirds of all U.S. people who have abortions use pills, this goal has been heightened.”
Beck further notes other potential incursions that could impact reproductive health, including the desired weakening of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), passed in 1996 to keep medical information from being shared without the patient’s permission, and an end to the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraceptives.
“The ACLU is doing all it can to raise the alarm about Project 2025 to elevate public concern about a second Trump administration,” Beck said. “We’re also working with members of Congress to address the threat the Comstock Act poses.”
Repealing Comstock
That effort got a boost from Tina Smith (D-Minnesota), who introduced the Stop Comstock Act into the Senate in June. The bill has 18 co-sponsors: A companion bill was introduced in the House by Representatives Becca Balint (D-Vermont), Cori Bush (D-Missouri), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-New Jersey), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) and Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pennsylvania).
Reproductive justice activists and care providers know that getting the Stop Comstock Act passed is important — albeit a long shot in a GOP-controlled House of Representatives — but they also know that much more is needed to keep Project 2025’s policies at bay.
“Abortion is a vehicle to access our full humanity,” Merle Hoffman, president and CEO of Choices Women’s Medical Center in New York City, told Truthout. As a care provider since 1971, when New York State first legalized abortion, Hoffman says, “We need a unified movement to fight a defensive battle.” She explains that one way to do this is to train and mentor the next generation of physicians, midwives, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants and social workers — something that Choices has made part of its mission.
“The people behind Project 2025 are serious and they believe wholeheartedly in what they’re advocating,” she said. “Heritage has worked on this agenda for decades and the pro-choice movement has underestimated them and treated their aspirations as ridiculous and unachievable. At the same time, the Democrats have certainly not been knights on white horses. They’ve allowed abortion to be referred to as something that should be safe, legal and rare rather than a normal part of reproductive health care. They’ve allowed the Hyde Amendment to cut off Medicaid funding for abortion. They have never been our saviors … neither they nor the courts will save us.”
She and others are working tirelessly to fight back and she is cheered that the newly formed Abortion Access Now coalition has unveiled a 10-year plan to win back abortion access and move beyond what Roe v. Wade provided. The $100 million initiative will bring nine groups together. Among them are the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Freedom for All. These groups pledge to work together to build “a future where abortion, and all sexual and reproductive healthcare, is not only legal but also accessible, affordable and free from stigma or fear.” The Hill reports that the 10-year plan includes “lobbying efforts, grassroots organizing and public education initiatives” to “build a long-term federal strategy to codify the right to abortion.”
Despite this formation, Hoffman concedes that the magnitude of the attacks on reproductive freedom can feel overwhelming but says we can’t let fear and demoralization keep us from organizing and educating people about the threats we’re facing. “It’s all of our responsibility to fight for abortion and reproductive justice without borders,” she says.
From left to right: Cody Carnley of Crenshaw County, Alabama; Carrie McNair of Mobile; Veronica Wehby-Upchurch of Birmingham and Lindsey Shaw of Birmingham hold signs at a rally in aupport of legislation to protect in vitro fertilization on Feb. 28, 2024 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
Early childhood educator Sammi Gerken, a married mother of a 3-year-old, became a surrogate in late 2022 and calls the experience “rewarding on all fronts.” “I was proud and happy to give a couple who had struggled with infertility for 11 years what they’d dreamed of — a baby — something that would have been impossible without me,” she told Truthout.
Even as a child, Gerken says that she was fascinated by birth, pregnancy and motherhood. “I used to watch YouTube videos, which is where I learned about in vitro fertilization, surrogacy and infertility. Watching people struggle to achieve a healthy pregnancy pulled at my heart. I couldn’t imagine longing for a baby and not being able to have one. After a successful pregnancy with my daughter in early 2021, I felt it was time to explore becoming a surrogate.”
And, although Gerken said that she had to go through numerous medical procedures, including hormone injections, to sustain the pregnancy, she is “beyond glad” she did it.
She is also thrilled that she and the receiving family continue to be in touch. Throughout the pregnancy, Gerken said that they exchanged daily texts and frequently met over Zoom. Then, after the baby was born, she pumped breast milk for four months. “It was a beautiful way to stay connected,” she said. “Although we no longer text as often, I’ll see them in August for the baby’s first birthday. We all want to have a lifetime relationship. Our hearts will forever be connected.”
As Gerken speaks, it’s obvious that she is passionate about the efficacy of surrogacy. This is why Project 2025, a 922-page right-wing wish list and game plan that is explicit about its intent to impose a nationwide ban on abortion and limit access to contraceptives, IVF and surrogacy, enrages her. “Why should outsiders decide how people grow their families?” she asks. “Surrogacy is love. It’s a valid way to build a family.”
The right-wing, of course, disagrees — even as the Republican National Committee’s official platform strategically steers clear of a direct attack on reproductive autonomy. But Project 2025 is far more explicit, and its authors are hell-bent on creating what Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the organizational mastermind behind Project 2025, calls “the second American revolution.”
For Heritage and the more than 100 organizations that endorse the plan, that revolution involves the creation of a policy agenda for the first 180 days of a GOP presidency and lays “the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.” The plan also includes the creation of a personnel database of conservative movers and shakers, something that Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at Heritage and Trump’s former director of the Office of Personnel Management, likens to a LinkedIn or Facebook for the right. Should this roster include people new to government, he says, a Presidential Administration Academy has been established to train potential staffers for every federal agency. A series of free, online, asynchronous classes covers everything from how to get a security clearance, to “the dangers of the administrative state,” to how federal budget processes and procurements work. This, of course, is to ensure that a well-trained workforce is ready to jump in on day one to serve the MAGA cause.
What’s more, Project 2025 provides an agency-by-agency playbook that explains what each government department will advocate for and do.
In an interview with The Washington Stand, the daily news site of the Christian nationalist Family Research Council, Dans stressed that,
We want new folks to come in and serve, essentially, but to do that they need to know how this game is played and the rules of the road. That’s what we are hoping to do. We’re going to identify talent and then we’re going to teach you essentially what our core group of beliefs is…. We need to have an entire army of conservatives coming to Washington.… In the past, the transition effort has really been the second thought for the candidate.
But not this year.
“We want every potential applicant to curate his or her own page and upload their resume, list their social media, take some background diagnostic tests,” and make themselves known, Dans told The Washington Stand.
Unsurprisingly, anti-abortion credentials and a commitment to eroding access to reproductive health care are feathers in the cap of job applicants.
Project 2025 Threatens Reproductive Care
According to Media Matters for America, a media literacy and watchdog organization, the Project 2025 plan, officially called the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” aims to remove the word “abortion” from all federal laws and regulations; roll back the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medication abortion; use the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era law that was passed in 1873, to ban the mailing of abortion pills and stop clinics from receiving shipments of supplies and equipment; and limit access to birth control, in vitro fertilization and surrogacy. Moreover, Project 2025 seeks to end research using fetal tissue and stop the sale of nonprescription emergency contraception, including the popular over-the-counter pill Ella, which it erroneously claims is an abortifacient.
The Media Mattersreport, “Inside Project 2025’s Attacks on Reproductive Rights,” further states that Project 2025 hopes to elevate draconian state policies, like a Louisiana law that makes “carrying abortion medication without a prescription” a crime, into federal law.
Additionally, Media Matters zeroes in on Project 2025’s promotion of fallacies, among them that taking a daily birth control pill causes infertility; that IVF is unregulated; and that frozen embryos are children. Media Matters also points out that “at least 17 partner organizations of Project 2025 have published and publicly presented anti-surrogacy arguments,” including the idea that surrogacy is “morally wrong.”
“From the moment of conception,” Project 2025 states “every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race or abilities.”
This statement is a particularly bitter pill to swallow for Stetson Law School professor Robyn M. Powell, a nationally recognized expert on disability law and its intersection with reproductive justice. “The anti-abortion movement has used disabled people as pawns for years, and the idea that legal abortion encourages eugenics — policies that dictate who is fit and who is unfit to have children — is absurd,” Powell told Truthout. “People with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by anti-abortion policies that tell us what we can and can’t do with our bodies.”
In addition, she says that despite lip service about the value of every human life, those who oppose abortion do little to nothing to support or improve the lives of those living with disabilities. “As disabled people, we understand that attacks on the rights of the poor, the LGBTQIA+ community and women are attacks on us since we are part of multiple marginalized communities,” she said.
In addition, Powell sees Project 2025’s emphasis on deregulation as another potent area of attack, since eliminating federal agencies such as the Department of Education and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — long-standing goals of the Heritage Foundation as well as many others on the right, and explicitly advocated in Project 2025 — would cause irreparable harm to the disabled.
“Project 2025 impacts everything,” Powell told Truthout. “It is infuriating.”
Andrew Beck, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, agrees that the project has deep tentacles, but is keeping his eyes on Project 2025’s implications for abortion access. “Despite Trump’s efforts to obfuscate the issue, abortion is on the ballot this year,” Beck told Truthout. He calls Project 2025 “a 900-page nightmare,” and says that some of the document’s most egregious provisions are buried deep within it.
“The Comstock Act is never mentioned by name,” Beck noted. (Instead, the document references “long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.”)
“For many decades, the Comstock Act was assumed to have no application whatsoever for abortion care,” Beck said. “But in the last few years, a drumbeat has been heard and echoed by Project 2025 to use Comstock, a law that is already on the books, as a back door to a nationwide abortion ban. This statute makes it a crime to mail or ship ‘any article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.’ If they use Comstock, they do not need Congress to pass an abortion ban.” Project 2025, he continues, is also “gunning for medication abortion. This has been a target of anti-abortion politicians for a long time, but now that two-thirds of all U.S. people who have abortions use pills, this goal has been heightened.”
Beck further notes other potential incursions that could impact reproductive health, including the desired weakening of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), passed in 1996 to keep medical information from being shared without the patient’s permission, and an end to the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraceptives.
“The ACLU is doing all it can to raise the alarm about Project 2025 to elevate public concern about a second Trump administration,” Beck said. “We’re also working with members of Congress to address the threat the Comstock Act poses.”
Repealing Comstock
That effort got a boost from Tina Smith (D-Minnesota), who introduced the Stop Comstock Act into the Senate in June. The bill has 18 co-sponsors: A companion bill was introduced in the House by Representatives Becca Balint (D-Vermont), Cori Bush (D-Missouri), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-New Jersey), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) and Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pennsylvania).
Reproductive justice activists and care providers know that getting the Stop Comstock Act passed is important — albeit a long shot in a GOP-controlled House of Representatives — but they also know that much more is needed to keep Project 2025’s policies at bay.
“Abortion is a vehicle to access our full humanity,” Merle Hoffman, president and CEO of Choices Women’s Medical Center in New York City, told Truthout. As a care provider since 1971, when New York State first legalized abortion, Hoffman says, “We need a unified movement to fight a defensive battle.” She explains that one way to do this is to train and mentor the next generation of physicians, midwives, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants and social workers — something that Choices has made part of its mission.
“The people behind Project 2025 are serious and they believe wholeheartedly in what they’re advocating,” she said. “Heritage has worked on this agenda for decades and the pro-choice movement has underestimated them and treated their aspirations as ridiculous and unachievable. At the same time, the Democrats have certainly not been knights on white horses. They’ve allowed abortion to be referred to as something that should be safe, legal and rare rather than a normal part of reproductive health care. They’ve allowed the Hyde Amendment to cut off Medicaid funding for abortion. They have never been our saviors … neither they nor the courts will save us.”
She and others are working tirelessly to fight back and she is cheered that the newly formed Abortion Access Now coalition has unveiled a 10-year plan to win back abortion access and move beyond what Roe v. Wade provided. The $100 million initiative will bring nine groups together. Among them are the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Freedom for All. These groups pledge to work together to build “a future where abortion, and all sexual and reproductive healthcare, is not only legal but also accessible, affordable and free from stigma or fear.” The Hill reports that the 10-year plan includes “lobbying efforts, grassroots organizing and public education initiatives” to “build a long-term federal strategy to codify the right to abortion.”
Despite this formation, Hoffman concedes that the magnitude of the attacks on reproductive freedom can feel overwhelming but says we can’t let fear and demoralization keep us from organizing and educating people about the threats we’re facing. “It’s all of our responsibility to fight for abortion and reproductive justice without borders,” she says.
The authoritarian, dystopian settings that the U.S. created in so many places across the world are being reconceived by ultra-conservative forces affiliated with Trump for the purpose of introducing them here.
By CJ Polychroniou
July 28, 2024
Source: Common Dreams
Since the rise of the United States into a global power, U.S. policymakers have been keen on halting the spread of popular government abroad by undermining democratic institutions; overthrowing or assassinating elected leaders; and installing brutal, vicious military dictatorships. Indeed, the fact of the matter is that the United States has invaded more countries, organized more coups, and installed more military dictatorships than any other imperialist power in the course of history. During the Cold War alone, Washington staged dozens of invasions, orchestrated or sponsored numerous coups that installed subservient governments, and engaged in total in over 70 attempts at regime change.
U.S. involvement in foreign coups was so widespread that a common joke was that there has never been a coup d’état in the United States because there is no U.S. Embassy there. Of course, the joke was before the political era of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump and thus has lost some of its sting. Because what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a coup attempt incited by the rhetoric of an outgoing president as part of his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Moreover, Trump has warned voters of a “bloodbath” for the country if he is not elected in November 2024.
The roosters have come home to roost. The U.S. is sleepwalking toward democratic collapse and into a Trump proto-fascist dictatorship. If Donald Trump gets elected in November, “the gloves are off… its four years of scorched earth,” as Republican National Committee boss Lara Trump proudly announced to an audience a few months ago. Never mind people like John Bolton who tried to make the argument that Trump did not attempt a coup on January 6 because he is not competent enough to have done so. Those who entertain such thoughts seem to imply that it takes brilliance to destroy democracy. Yet, a reactionary revolt against democracy (or what’s left of it in the U.S.) has been underway since Trump gained control of the GOP. Trump encouraged violence during his 2016 campaign and levied harsh attacks against his opponents. Upon assuming office as president, he exhibited blunt authoritarian tendencies and levied attacks against the press. And when he lost a free and fair election in 2020, he tried to block a peaceful transfer of power.
There should be little doubt in any concerned citizen’s mind that the reactionary forces in this country, led by one of the most authentic con artists in political history, are as close as they have ever been to dismantling U.S. democracy.
But even if Trump isn’t capable enough to draw up a plan on his own for the dismantling of our democracy from within, there are plenty of extreme right-wingers able and willing to show him how it can be done. Indeed, the authoritarian, dystopian settings that the U.S. created in so many places across the world from the end of the Second World War to the present—through Washington’s support of oppressive political regimes that committed massive violations of human rights against their own citizens and forced them to live under constant threat—are being reconceived by ultra-conservative forces affiliated with Trump for the purpose of introducing them here inside the United States. This is precisely the aim of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation plan to reshape the United States in a manner consistent with the ideology and vision of neoliberal proto-fascism.
Project 2025 is not Trump’s plan, but a plan for Trump. It’s also fair to point out that Trump has publicly denied knowing anything about the dystopian Project 2025. Yet, many of the people who worked in high-level positions during his presidency served as authors of the project. In fact, CNN reported finding some 240 people “with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump.” It is thus ludicrous for Trump to claim ignorance of this extreme far-right agenda and having “no idea who is behind it.” Also, Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at The Heritage Foundation and who had previously served in the Trump administration as the chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, said on a radio show during the Republican primary race last year that “Trump’s very brought in with this.” Last week, the same person suddenly claimed that the idea that Trump is attached to Project 2025 is a “hoax.”
More important, while Trump and his campaign staff have pointed out that Agenda 47 is their official policy platform for the 2024 presidential election, Project 2025 and Agenda 47 have a lot of overlap in terms of ideas and policy plans. They both contain plans for the reshaping of U.S. government and civil society that can only be described as “fascist.” They both assert that the mission they serve is to rescue the country from the influence of the radical left.
Project 2025 envisions the end of the administrative state by placing the entire federal bureaucracy under direct presidential control. In other words, the plan is for Trump to rule as a Unitary Executive, long considered a pathway for autocracy. Likewise, Trump’s plan in Agenda 47 is to dismantle what it calls the “deep state” by firing thousands of civil servants and replacing them with party hacks (though in Agenda 47 they are called “patriots who love America”). In doing so, Trump claims, federal bureaucrats and politician will be “held accountable to the American people.” Not to the president, mind you, who will now have complete control of the federal bureaucracy, but to the American people. Of course, not a single word is mentioned in Agenda 47 about how the “people” even enter the power equation of holding bureaucrats and politicians accountable to the popular will. But authoritarian leaders and wannabe dictators have always been masters of propaganda who engineer techniques of mass manipulation through the politics of illusion. And no propaganda tool is more effective in the authoritarian playbook than the one that justifies the dismantling of checks and balances as “corrupt obstacles to the popular will.”
State control over public education and teachers has always been an integral component of fascist ideology and strategy. In the neoliberal proto-fascist mentality that guides the thinking of the architects of Project 2025, the contention made however is that federal intervention in education should be severely limited and that, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. This is because their reactionary vision for the future of the United States would not object to the conversion of public schools into religious zones and calls for the rejection of “gender ideology” and the banning of “critical race theory.” Thus, it is of paramount importance that complete authority over primary and secondary education, including funding, transfers to the state and local level. Likewise, Project 2025 also endorses universal school choice and allowing families to access public funds to pay for private school tuition. Moreover, Project 2025 wants to ban any public education employee or institution from using a pronoun in addressing a student that does not “match a person’s biological sex” without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.
The call for the banning of “critical race theory” is utterly revealing of the ideological underpinnings of the architects of Project 2025. They want to see “critical race theory” forced out of classrooms because, they argue, its emphasis on the racist history of the United States “disrupts the values that hold communities together.” It’s rather shameful though that they omitted mentioning slavery as one of the values that should “hold communities together.”
As for higher education, which comes under severe attack by the reactionary minds behind Project 2025 for being “hostile to free expression” and “American exceptionalism,” student loans and grants should be placed into the hands of the private sector. They also call on the next president to downplay the value of a bachelor’s degree by removing it as a requirement for any federal job unless it is specifically demanded.
Agenda 47 is an even more extreme version of Project 2025 on the issue of education and comes much closer to authentic fascism. Trump’s proposals for K-12 schools call for, among other things, ending federal funding to any school teaching “critical race theory,” certifying only teachers who embrace “patriotic values,” firing Department of Education employees deemed radical zealots and Marxists, pushing prayer in public schools, and abolishing teacher tenure.
Trump’s Agenda 47 and Project 2025 also share the same extremist views on immigration and climate change. Project 2025 wants to demolish the entire U.S. immigration system while Trump wants to engage in draconian measures against undocumented immigrants, which includes a pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
Regarding climate change, Project 2025 is all about a project that backs a fossil fuel agenda and wants to go so far as to eliminate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it’s “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” Trump’s stance on energy and climate as expressed in Agenda 47 is in full alignment with Project 2025 and can be summarized by three words: “DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”
Finally, both the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47 (along with his already established record on the matter) make abundantly clear that serving the interests of a plutocracy is of equal importance to them as destroying the environment and turning back the clock on social and cultural progress through the implementation of extreme authoritarian measures. Among other major changes to the tax system, Project 2025 calls for reducing the corporate tax to 18% and cementing the tax on capital gains and dividends at 15%. A second Trump presidency would most certainly also see another round of tax cuts targeted at the very rich.
In sum, there should be little doubt in any concerned citizen’s mind that the reactionary forces in this country, led by one of the most authentic con artists in political history, are as close as they have ever been to dismantling U.S. democracy and replacing it in turn with a dystopian setting guided by the very same vision, values, and even tactics that have been the hallmark of U.S. imperialist efforts to install and support neo-fascist regimes around the globe.
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CJ Polychroniou
C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
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