Two Years In, These “Progressive” Companies Still Haven’t Negotiated First Union Contracts

The union wave at big U.S. retailers hasn’t yet resulted in first contracts for workers at Trader Joe’s, Starbucks and REI. But unions are proving their value in other ways.

Jeremy Gantz 

April 12, 2024

IN THESE TINES

Union workers protest outside their REI store.REI Union / Facebook

Claire Chang and Steve Buckley knew it wasn’t going to be easy. But the two retail workers-turned-union organizers had been heartened by progress made during the first year of contract negotiations with REI, the outdoor gear and apparel chain. By June 2023 — more than a year after Chang and Buckley’s store in Manhattan became the first REI location in the country to unionize — the bargaining committee on which they serve had reached a number of tentative agreements with the company. ​“It seemed like we were building up a rhythm,” says Chang, who has worked at the REI store in SoHo for more than six years.

Then, negotiations quickly went south, Buckley says. REI began working with Morgan Lewis, a management-side law firm known in union circles for hardline, union-busting tactics. The company sent its lawyers to bargaining sessions alone, without any corporate managers, which Buckley saw as part of a new strategy to stretch out negotiations and sap the union’s strength. As of April, there’s been no progress toward a first contract for nearly a year. ​“Blatant disregard and openly hostile negotiations aren’t productive,” Buckley says. The company has ​“continued to get worse and worse because they’re embracing their worst impulses.”

Talk to union members at Trader Joe’s, which (like REI and Starbucks) also has unionized retail stores across the country pushing for a first contract, and you’ll hear similar things. Four Trader Joe’s stores have unionized since July 2022 (and another has filed for union election), 9 REI stores have unionized since March 2022 (with another store election coming later this month) and nearly 400 Starbucks stores have unionized since December 2021. The efforts at these companies, which have all tried to burnish progressive reputations, provide a window into the challenging process of negotiating a first contract more than two years after a wave of unionizing first hit the retail industry.

Trader Joe’s Union (TJU) Vice President Sarah Beth Ryther describes contract negotiations this way: ​“Every single bargaining session is excruciatingly long. Eight hours where almost nothing happens.” The company’s strategy, she says, is: ​“We will waste all of your resources as much as possible, we will dangle tiny little treats that won’t come to fruition.”

Ryther and Chang are heartened by the recent news that Starbucks and its union, Workers United, would resume in-person bargaining in late April after a lengthy break. For the first time, the company has signaled support for a potential national labor accord, agreeing to meet with workers from union stores across the country. But the apparent breakthrough at Starbucks has yet to alter the bargaining dynamic at Trader Joe’s and REI. Workers at all three retail companies learned a painful truth over the past two years: Just because a corporation cultivates a progressive veneer doesn’t mean it will welcome a union.

The recent Starbucks news is ​“promising,” Ryther says. ​“But we’ve seen these enormous corporations make many of the same promises before.”

John Logan, a professor of labor history at San Francisco State University, is not convinced Starbucks’ new union rhetoric will lead to a strong first contract anytime soon. The company has said it wants to complete bargaining and contract ratification this year.

“It’s hard to imagine the company agreeing to a contract that provides an incentive for workers in non-union stores to unionize,” Logan says. Still, workers and their union will continue pushing for better wages, benefits and working conditions when bargaining sessions finally restart.

Waiting workers out

In lieu of progress at the bargaining table, the three unions that have kept organizing momentum going after initial historic victories — Trader Joe’s United, Workers United and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (which REI workers joined) — have spent a lot of time in court.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency charged with enforcing federal labor law, has ruled in the unions’ favor dozens of times on various matters, including illegal retaliatory firings and finding that Starbucks has failed to bargain in good faith. The NLRB has ruled similarly against Amazon, which still refuses to recognize the validity of Amazon Labor Union’s (ALU) sole warehouse union victory in April 2022.

In fact, the NLRB has filed more than 125 complaints against Starbucks. Late in 2023, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union filed 80 unfair labor practice charges against REI with the NLRB, alleging a ​“concerted, multi-pronged union-busting campaign” including retaliatory firings, schedule changes and disciplinary actions. TJU has filed similar charges against the grocery store chain. Starbucks, REI and Trader Joe’s have denied all wrongdoing, although they have settled specific charges. An REI spokesperson said in an email that the company ​“is committed to and engaged in good-faith bargaining.” Starbucks and Trader Joe’s did not respond to emailed questions.

It’s amazing how much — and yet how little — can happen in two years, when it comes to first contract negotiations. It has long been a slow process, and it appears to be lengthening. Economic Policy Institute research found that between 1999 and 2003, 37% of newly unionized workplaces didn’t have a first contract after two years, while 30% didn’t have one after three years. A study of union elections in 2018 found that 63% didn’t reach a first contract in the first year after organizing and 43% still didn’t reach one after two years. That study also concluded that employer obstruction through unfair labor practices served as a major impediment to negotiating a first contract.

Such lengthy delays would likely increase if the courts side with anti-union forces’ latest tactics. In January, Morgan Lewis introduced a new innovation to the corporate anti-union playbook. The firm, which (along with REI) represents Trader’s Joe’s, Amazon and SpaceX, began arguing before the NLRB that the 89-year-old agency’s structure is unconstitutional. The argument, which challenges long-standing legal precedents, claims that the NLRB ​“violates constitutional separation of powers and due process protections by wielding different types of authority in the same case,” Bloomberg Law reported. Starbucks began making a similar argument in February in a case that will head to the Supreme Court for oral argument later this month. If the court rules in favor of Starbucks, the NLRB’s ability to reinstate workers fired during a union campaign could be curtailed.

These companies are ​“so frustrated that they’re working to basically take down the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the NLRB,” says Seth Goldstein, who represents both TJU and the Amazon Labor Union. ​“Because they can’t defeat us any other way. This is an attack on the American labor movement.”

During a contract bargaining session in February, Goldstein says he asked Trader Joe’s Deputy General Counsel Nancy Inesta whether she recognized the validity of the NLRA and the NLRB’s jurisdiction over the company’s practices. ​“She refused to agree to that,” Goldstein says. ​“It’s not normal to talk to someone like it’s 1920.” The NLRA, passed during the height of the New Deal in 1935, enshrined the idea of workers’ collective bargaining rights into federal law and created the NLRB.

Through their efforts to delay bargaining, including retaliation and litigation, companies are trying to turn time and employee turnover into an ally, hoping that worker morale drops, solidarity erodes and union decertification efforts multiply.


Two years into the retail unionization wave, and even with the most pro-union NLRB in decades calling companies out for their illegal tactics, corporate intransigence in the sector appears as strong as ever (with the exception of Starbucks). Through their efforts to delay bargaining, including retaliation and litigation, companies are trying to turn time and employee turnover into an ally, hoping that worker morale drops, solidarity erodes and union decertification efforts multiply.

In the face of opposition, how are unions proving their value to members and staying strong as the contract fight drags on?

Bringing embattled unions to life

Barista Parker Davis has one answer to that question: protect and defend the day-to-day and month-to-month needs of members whenever necessary.

In November 2022, just a few months after Davis’ San Antonio Starbucks store unionized, the building’s drains backed up, forcing a three-day closure. While the drainage problem was being fixed, management reduced shift lengths and sent many workers home. The union then asked for workers to be paid for their scheduled shifts, citing a ​“catastrophic pay” policy in the company’s employee guide that stipulates employees will be paid if a store is closed due to a natural disaster.

“We knew that other stores had gotten catastrophic pay when their power had been cut temporarily,” says Davis, who played a lead role in unioning his store two years ago. Similarly, ​“our water services weren’t working, essentially.”

But the company refused to pay the workers and, in response, the union demanded to bargain over the impacts of the store closure decision. Starbucks flew lawyers from union avoidance firm Littler Mendelson into San Antonio for a five-hour bargaining session. It was contentious, but the company ended up agreeing to compensate baristas for their scheduled shifts.

“It was such a small amount of money compared to the company’s overall profits,” Davis says. ​“It seemed like an odd thing to fight over. But it definitely strengthened [the union at] my store.”

That’s just one tangible win achieved without a contract at a unionized Starbucks store. Davis and his colleagues have banded together to defend their interests in other ways as well, such as pushing back against a manager’s plan to reorganize storage in the front and back-of-house. The union made clear such changes to working conditions would need to be negotiated with the bargaining unit, Davis says.

The ability to have a say in how supplies are stored is not the primary reason that around 400 Starbucks stores have unionized. But it’s an example of how the union is a tangible and valuable presence, even without a contract in hand. ​“At the end of the day, a union is workers coming together to care for each other,” Davis says.


Ste

orters in holding signs in support of a strike, outside of a Starbucks store in Arlington, Virginia, on November 16, 2023.(Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

TJU’s Ryther says that after it became clear Trader Joe’s was slow-walking contract negotiations, her union began framing conversations with workers differently. ​“A contract is the ultimate goal, but we’re focusing more on small wins, empowering folks, unfair labor practices and training media ambassadors,” says Ryther, a Trader Joe’s crew member in Minneapolis.

Without a contract in place, TJU can’t collect dues from members to fund its operations. But that hasn’t stopped the union from building a ​“kind of advocacy network” for unionized grocery stores. Each store has a Discord channel on which workers can post about problems with managers and disciplinary actions, learn about their rights as a union member, or just chat about shift swaps, Ryther says. (One example of a right that TJU members have taken advantage of: under federal labor law, union members can request union representation whenever an employer’s investigatory interview could lead to discipline.)

“A bunch of people will say, ​‘Here are your rights. This is legal or illegal. Here’s what it says in the Trader Joe’s handbook,’” Ryther says.

This is how a culture of unionism is being built at Trader Joe’s — member to member, one Discord chat or in-person conversation at a time. Ryther doesn’t see high store turnover rates as a big impediment to sustaining the union’s strength. ​“Sometimes folks’ lack of knowledge of unions plays to our favor,” she says. ​“Some people don’t even know what a contract is. But they start working at a store and say, ​‘This is great.’ People underestimate the power of an established store culture.”

Sustaining and growing the union in the face of steadfast corporate opposition starts with conversations that build relationships and trust. ​“You have to meet people where they’re at,” Ryther says. In-store organizing and member engagement is not transactional and it’s not about persuasion: ​“90% of the time, you should be talking about weather, sports, holiday plans, family traditions — it’s social skills 101.”

Buckley and Chang at REI echo the importance of whole-member organizing as contract fights continue. ​“We see our co-workers as whole people, not just who they are at work,” Buckley says. ​“We show up in each other’s lives. We’re building a community so that when the hard times come, we have each other’s backs.”

Having each others’ back can mean covering a shift that a coworker can no longer work, or connecting someone with a union lawyer to file an unfair labor practice complaint with the NLRB. But it’s also about helping a coworker get through a tough financial spot. Workers at the REI SoHo store created a REI Union Hardship Fund to support each other. In San Antonio, Starbucks union members have set up mutual aid systems, Parker says.

“Sometimes, it’s as simple as someone needing $20 for gas money,” he says. ​“Of course we’re going to offer that to them. It’s about always being there for someone.”

Marathon fights continue

Union workers at Starbucks, REI and Trader Joe’s know they’re running a marathon. Any initial optimism that contracts could be negotiated (relatively) quickly is now gone. In its place? A steely determination that comes from knowing exactly who they’re up against. And in workers who have now spent years pushing for change, an awareness of how leaning on each other can help prevent burnout.

“It’s a real issue,” Ryther says. ​“Most of us are working full-time jobs, right? This is an incredible amount of work. It gets easier in terms of knowledge over time, but it doesn’t get easier in terms of having to build new relationships constantly.”

When you consider what the retail unions are up against — high employee turnover rates, an array of illegal union-busting tactics and now an apparent effort to dismantle the legal infrastructure that has governed businesses and labor in this country for generations — their willingness to go on offense becomes more improbable. Unionized workers have staged walkouts and a string of short, targeted strikes, including thousands of Starbucks workers at more than 200 stores in November 2023.

In the REI, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s campaigns, unions are calling attention to the gaps between the companies’ supposed progressive values and the way workers are being treated when they organize collectively.


In March, REI workers from across the country showed up uninvited at the company’s corporate office in Issaquah, Washington. They protested outside carrying signs bearing messages such as ​“Ask me about my raise (REI took it away).”

In the REI, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s campaigns, unions are calling attention to the gaps between the companies’ supposed progressive values and the way workers are being treated when they organize collectively. That’s particularly true of REI, which is structured as a member-owned cooperative, and whose leadership views climate change as an existential threat and has committed to becoming an ​“anti-racist” organization. There’s ​“tremendous opportunity for customers to be engaged and push for changes inside the co-op to be the kind of place they know it should be and they assume that it is,” Buckley says.

That kind of public pressure has yet to be seen. Still, Starbucks’ new stance may be partly an attempt to repair damage to its reputation, Logan says, as well as the result of unofficial boycotts over union-busting efforts and the appearance of a new, more pragmatic CEO. (Starbucks in February said it now wants to resolve outstanding litigation and come to agreement with Workers United on a ​“fair process for organizing.”)

“It’s not entirely clear why Starbucks decided to reverse course — assuming this is what has happened,” Logan says. A realization that the union wasn’t going away may have also been a factor, he adds.

It may not be a coincidence that, compared with REI and Trader Joe’s, Starbucks now has many more unionized stores. Store-based organizing may be the strongest argument to corporate executives that workers’ demands won’t dissipate any time soon. For these campaigns to succeed, they’ve ​“got to be based on empowering workers to organize their own stores,” Logan says. ​“That’s what young people want to do, and that’s the only way you can win against these companies.”

The fights continue. In February, baristas at 21 Starbucks stores informed the company they intended to organize. In mid-March, REI workers in Santa Cruz, Calif. announced their intention to unionize; they’ll vote later this month. And on April 8, Trader Joe’s employees in Chicago followed suit.

“We’re responding to [the company’s] legal onslaught with our own, while also trying to organize new locations,” Buckley says. ​“Any time we’ve seen massive changes in union density in this county, it’s when workers lead the campaigns and lead the shop floor.”

How the morbidly rich are sabotaging the very system that made them wealthy

Thom Hartmann, AlterNet
August 20, 2024 

Rich man lighting cigar with $100 bill (Shutterstock)

Recently, a reporter spoke with one of the chief architects of Project 2025 using a hidden camera and microphone and learned they’re still in tight with Trump, still planning to run his administration if he’s elected, still planning to gut the guardrails America has placed around capitalism over the past 100 years, and even planning to “pull the ladder up” to make it harder for entrepreneurs and small business people to succeed in America.

Their plan relies on a major reinvention of modern capitalism and is being pushed by people suffering from an identifiable metal illness. To see how they’re hoping to pull this off, it’s important and necessary to first understand that there are two types of capitalism: raw and regulated.

Raw capitalism — sometimes referred to as Laissez-faire (“leave alone”) or “unregulated” capitalism — reflects the very essence of predatory activity. As any Libertarian can proudly tell you, the only rule is that no capitalist can commit fraud against another capitalist and the only role for government is to provide a stable currency and a court system to prosecute fraud.

Raw capitalism could be called the law of the jungle; only the strong survive, and those who are the most ruthless and cutthroat end up with all the money and power while everybody else stands on the outside looking in. It favors psychopathy in the executive suite.

A handful of families, typically one for each industry, end up fabulously wealthy while their companies monopolize market sectors to keep new entrants and entrepreneurs out.

Workers, at the bottom of the hierarchy, are screwed: no unions are allowed, wages reflect how desperate working people are, and consumers live in a caveat emptor (“buyer beware”) world where ripoffs are common, food and products are often dangerous, and the environment is poisoned to keep cleanup costs low and thus profits high.

Raw capitalism is how most of the world ran until the first decades of the 20th century. You can read the story of it in most of Dickens’ novels. By the 1880s-1920s era, it had made a handful of families (Rockefellers/oil, Carnegie/steel, Vanderbilt/railroads, Astor/real estate, Armour/meatpacking, Morgan/banking, DuPont/chemicals, etc.) mind-bogglingly rich and succeeded in limiting the middle class to about 10 percent of Americans, mostly doctors, lawyers, and shopkeepers. Everybody else was dirt poor.

Regulated capitalism is an altogether different animal that expands a capitalist system to aid workers and consumers as well as capitalists.

With regulated capitalism, the rules of capitalism are expanded to benefit all of society, rather than exclusively the capitalists themselves. While it was championed in Adam Smith’s books A Theory of Moral Sentimentsand Wealth of Nations(1776), and highlighted repeatedly by David Ricardo five decades later, it didn’t really come into fruition until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His embrace of Keynesian economics transformed America and, ultimately, the entire free world.

President Roosevelt, when accepting his renomination in 1936, took on the advocates of raw capitalism — which had run the world just four years earlier — head-on:
“[O]ut of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.”

It was a radical separation from the old order, and his audience cheered wildly as they realized FDR wanted to make capitalism, and America, a fairer and more compassionate nation.

“There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.”

He challenged the most powerful men and companies in America, promising to strip them of the power to write laws and control politicians that they’d enjoyed for over a century. He called them out and took them on.
“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”

And he pointed out how this corrupt system of raw capitalism had destroyed opportunity in America for average people while making a small group of “princes” richer than the kings of old.
“Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.”

Roosevelt beat the oligarchs and was successful in bringing regulated capitalism to America. His policies included the right of workers to unionize, aggressive enforcement of the nation’s new anti-monopoly laws, high levels of taxation on profits and great wealth, and consumer and worker protections guaranteed by government.

The result was the world’s first middle class that included more than half of all citizens.

Donald Trump, JD Vance, their billionaire donors, six Republicans on the Supreme Court, and Project 2025 have declared war on Roosevelt’s regulated capitalism; they want to turn the clock back to the raw capitalism Gilded Age of the 1920s by stripping regulatory agencies out of government, cutting taxes on the morbidly rich, and ending protections for labor.

Russell Vought was the guy who put Donald Trump's executive order banning the teaching of Black history (“CRT”) and other diversity training for federal employees into place when he was director of the Office of Management and Budget. Now he’s a principal architect of Project 2025 and the lead cheerleader for ending regulated capitalism and reverting to raw capitalism.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said in the secretly-taped recording. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence.”

In this effort, and the Supreme Court’s recent destruction of the Chevron Deference that authorized regulatory agencies to protect workers, consumers, and the environment, these reactionary (arguably “revolutionary”) Republicans are trying to pull up the ladder so a new generation of entrepreneurs will face a wall of monopolies and other barriers to achieving business success.

They are trying to gut the very system that created a large enough middle class to provide customers for their products, thus making them rich. They want to return us to the era of FDR’s libertarian “economic royalists,” an effort that will impoverish America just as it has every other country that’s tried it (Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, etc.).

When psychologist Eric Fromm identified people as having either a “doing” or a “being” orientation, he nailed the personality characteristics of the billionaires and their well-paid toadies who’re promoting this dystopian future for America.

He argued that there’s a specific “hoarder” personality afflicted with a compulsion to constantly accumulate more, more, more stuff. When they’re poor, their apartments fill up with newspapers and tin cans. When they’re rich, their money bins fill up with cash.

In either case, they’re mentally ill and perpetually miserable. If they’re rich enough, their mental illness causes them to mercilessly exploit others for their own gain.

This is the psychology of this generation of wannabee economic royalists, and their plan to replace regulated capitalism with the old laissez-faire system will also destroy the remnants of the American middle class that FDR created.

We can’t let them get away with inflicting their mental illness on the rest of us. Double-check your voter registration and show up this fall!

 

 ‘Guardian angel’ megadonors give $196M to influence 2024 elections  

• By Albert Serna Jr.
• August 19, 2024 
• OPEN SECRETS 

• 

U.S. President Joe Biden awards the Medal of Freedom to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on May 3, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Contributions from “guardian angel” megadonors totaled about $196 million between the start of the 2023-2024 election cycle through June 30 — a total expected to grow even more as the November election approaches.

Of the 31 donors who are considered guardian angels, a term for big donors who supply 40% or more of a committee’s funds and are a political group’s top contributor, 19 supported conservative candidates while eight contributed to liberal-leaning groups.

Conservative megadonors not only outnumbered their liberal counterparts but also gave more overall between the start of the election cycle and the end of June. But guardian angel contributions to nonpartisan and third party groups outpaced donations to liberal groups despite the latter attracting twice as many donors, OpenSecrets’ analysis of Federal Election Commission data found.

With less than four months until Election Day, Senior Counsel for the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program Ian Vandewalker said that he wasn’t surprised the flood of money megadonors have poured into 2024 elections. 

“That number doesn’t strike me as enormously high for what’s going to be the most expensive election ever, but I predict it’s going to go up a lot,” Vandewalker said.

Some of 2023’s biggest megadonors continue to top the list of guardian angel donors, including billionaire investor Jeffrey Yass, who contributed more than $37.6 million to conservative political groups as a guardian angel donor through June 30 .  

Conservative groups received $36.8 million from Yass who also donated to help oust anti-school voucher Republicans in Texas earlier this year

 The billionaire contributed $8.7 million to AFC Victory Fund – about 70% of the committee’s total funding. He also gave $5.2 million to School Freedom Fund, making up 59% of the super PAC’s total contributions. Yass’ biggest angel donation was $14 million which accounted for 97% of Protect Freedom PAC’s total funding.

Yass also gave $800,000 to Moderate PAC in support of Democrat Bhavini Patel’s failed primary challenge against incumbent Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa).

Billionaire shipping supply magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein were also among the top megadonors, pouring $32.5 million into conservative political groups. The billionaire founders of Uline, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer of cardboard boxes and other packaging supplies, have a sweeping web of financial influence from super PACs to “dark money” groups, and activists spreading disproven theories about former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.  

The Uihleins’ biggest contributions of the 2024 cycle include $20.9 million to Restoration PAC, which accounted for about 89% of the committee’s total funding this cycle. 

Liberal billionaire Michael Bloomberg was also on the list of top guardian angel megadonors, with his $7.5 million putting him in the top 10 donors on the list during the 2023-2024 cycle. The former presidential hopeful, media mogul and longtime New York City mayor gave $7 million to Everytown-Demand a Seat PAC, accounting for nearly 88% of its funds. The PAC launched in 2021 as part of Everytown, a gun control advocacy operation launched and largely funded by Bloomberg. Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund, the group’s main political arm, is largely funded by Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, which is also funded in part by Bloomberg.

During the 2024 cycle, Bloomberg also accounted for the bulk of funding to Neighbors for Results, a super PAC that helped support former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo in his ongoing bid for California’s 16th Congressional District. 

Another guardian angel donor, billionaire and transportation executive Timothy Mellon, gave more than $25 million to American Values 2024, accounting for almost 50% of the super PAC’s total receipts. Although Mellon has previously been a conservative donor, American Values 2024 supported Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Looking forward to November and at the current rate of giving, Vandewalker said that a continued rise in guardian angel donations should be expected and that there are reasons why megadonors who are the main support for a committee give in large amounts.

“A lot of outside money comes in relatively late and guardian angel donors you would think are going to be the biggest slice of it,” Vandewalker said. “These megadonors tend to want to be the biggest donor to a super PAC, and then they can tell the super PAC what to do.”

Senior Researcher Doug Weber contributed to this report.

What to Know About Project 2025, Trump’s Second-Term Blueprint

By Andrea González-Ramírez, a senior writer for the Cut who covers systems of power.

 2024 election Updated Aug. 19, 2024

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: AP, Getty Images

What’ll happen if Donald Trump wins the presidency in November? His administration will likely follow the road map of Project 2025, a transition plan that includes a laundry list of far-right policies and has been called “authoritarian,” “dystopian,” and a “blueprint for destroying our democracy.”

The plan focuses on obvious conservative priorities ranging from gutting abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights to ending efforts to combat climate change and income inequality. But it also outlines several insidious policies that would change the country as we know it, including what amounts to the most dramatic transformation of the federal-government workforce since the 19th century.

During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the party dedicated time to outlining what Project 2025 entails. “They went ahead and wrote down all the extreme things that Donald Trump wants to do in the next four years,” Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow said on Monday. “And then they just tweeted it out, putting it out on the internet for everybody to read. “

Below, you’ll find a breakdown of who is behind the transition plan, what they are proposing, and Trump’s disingenuous efforts to distance himself from Project 2025.

What is Project 2025, exactly?

Project 2025 is a transition plan that conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organizations have put together to serve as a road map for the next Republican administration. The playbook, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, comprises 900 pages detailing policy proposals for major federal agencies. Though the document does not mention Trump by name, key players involved in the plan’s conception have worked with his administration in the past or have close connections to his team.

Who is behind the Project 2025 plans?

The plan was conceived by the Heritage Foundation in collaboration with more than 100 right-wing organizations, including the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ legal-advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, which overturned Roe v. Wade; the NRA; Moms for Liberty, which has spearheaded attacks on education across the country; and America First Legal, which is led by anti-immigration hawk and former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. The groups have been explicit in their call to completely remake the federal government and the country in their image. In a recent interview with Steve Bannon, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

What does Project 2025 say about reproductive rights?

Project 2025 would have major repercussions for access to reproductive health care, including abortion care and contraception. Some of the transition plan’s proposals include:

• Enforcing the Comstock Act, which would allow the prosecution of people who send abortion pills through the mail. The law isn’t referred to by name in the document, but the footnotes use its code number, 18 U.S.C. § 1461. (Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has pulled this trick, too, during oral arguments in recent abortion cases.)
• Rescinding the FDA’s two-decade-old approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortion.
• Tracking abortion seekers through the Health and Human Services Department by using “every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”
• Rescinding the Biden administration’s guidance on EMTALA, which currently requires hospitals receiving federal funding to provide emergency, life-saving abortions.
• Codifying the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortion care, and prohibiting organizations that perform abortions from receiving family-planning grants that help low-income patients access birth control.
• Excluding emergency contraception from the Affordable Care Act’s no-cost coverage mandate.

And education?

The most dramatic proposal related to education would eliminate the Department of Education entirely. The plan also calls for ending Head Start, which has served more than 39 million low-income children since it was implemented nearly 60 years ago. Another proposal would restore the Trump administration’s Title IX regulations, which advocates say place nearly impossible barriers in front of survivors of sexual violence who seek recourse in their schools and universities. Project 2025 would also impact those with student-loan debt, as the authors propose limiting or ending student debt-forgiveness programs, as well as phasing out income-driven repayment plans.

What about LGBTQ+ rights?

The document calls for the federal government to follow a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family, which the group clarifies means “heterosexual, intact marriage.” Other proposals include:

• Requiring that the Health and Human Services Department promote “a family agenda,” explicitly stating that “men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure.”
• Reinstating Trump’s policy banning transgender people from serving in the military, including expelling current service members with “gender dysphoria.”
• Prohibiting public teachers from using a student’s preferred name and pronouns without their parent or guardian’s consent if it doesn’t correspond to their “biological sex.”
• Rescinding federal anti-discrimination protections “on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”

And climate change?

The transition plan calls for a “whole-of-government unwinding” of the Biden administration’s efforts to fight climate change. The proposals include ending subsidies for wind and solar power, eliminating energy-efficiency standards for appliances, and prioritizing the use of fossil gas and oil. Others would dismantle the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); get rid of the Clean Energy Corps, which is tasked with researching, developing, and deploying solutions to climate change; and prohibiting that greenhouse-gas emissions be taken into consideration when authorizing gas pipelines and liquefied natural-gas export facilities.

How about immigration?

The plan goes much further than Trump’s attacks on immigration during his last term. The proposals include:

• Increasing the standard of credible fear for asylum seekers.
• Limiting which immigrants can qualify for employment authorization.
• Eliminating T and U visas, which are available for victims of certain crimes, including human trafficking.
• Blocking Dreamers — people who were brought to the U.S. as children without authorization, and who are protected from deportation under DACA — from having access to federal student-loan programs.
• Making it harder for Dreamers to renew their DACA permit by having immigration agencies deprioritize those cases.
• Pushing Congress to end the Flores Settlement Agreement, which limits how long migrant children can stay in detention and requires them to be in the “least restrictive conditions” possible while in custody.

Is there more?

Yes. The most dramatic proposal in Project 2025 calls for the reclassification of tens of thousands of federal workers, which would allow Trump to fire career public servants and replace them with political appointees who side with his administration. “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” the authors of the document say in the foreword. It’d be the most dramatic change in the federal workforce since the 1880s. The implications can’t be overstated: Imagine a pandemic happens again. Many workers at key federal agencies would be Trump loyalists, rather than high-skilled experts who’ve remained in their positions from administration to administration regardless of their political affiliation.

Project 2025 also calls for ending the independence of the Justice Department and the FBI; slashing Medicaid funding; accelerating the production of nuclear weapons; changing the tax code to favor high-earning individuals in a way that’d hurt low-income people; and making it harder for Americans to unionize.

What has Trump said about Project 2025?

Trump has tried to distanced himself from the transition plan, posting on Truth Social on July 5: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”

That is demonstrably false. Not only do the policies outlined in the Trump campaign’s Agenda 47 mirror most of Project 2025’s main proposals, but the top directors of the transition plan — Paul Dans, Spencer Chretien, and Troup Hemenway — worked in the Trump administration. Many of Mandate’s authors are also Trump alumni. The list includes Housing secretary Ben Carson, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn, director of the Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights Roger Severino, acting secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, Homeland Security official Gene Hamilton, assistant to the president Peter Navarro, and Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought.

In a secretly-recorded video, published on August 15 by the non-profit Centre for Climate Reporting, Vought admitted that not only had he been in contact with Trump in recent months, but the former president has also “been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it.” He added: “He’s very supportive of what we do.” He went on to say that Trump’s denials were just a “very, very conscious distancing himself from a brand. It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”

And despite Trump’s half-hearted attempt to disavow the Heritage Foundation, the organization itself boasts in Project 2025’s website that “the Trump administration relied heavily” on its previous Mandate document, “embracing nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office.” So there’s plenty of reason to believe a second Trump administration would do the same.

S