In July, President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign said the demise of the conservative policy agenda Project 2025 was welcome.
Trump’s representatives went further by drawing clear lines, saying in a campaign statement, “President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way.”
And a day after Trump won the election, San Diego County Republican Party Chairman Corey Gustafson said he had no reason to doubt the president-elect.
“I believe that there have been many occasions where President Trump was asked if he's a part of Project 2025, and he has said 'no,' so I’m going to take the President at his word on that,” said Gustafson, who did not respond to a follow up query for this story about whether he’s still sticking to that stance.
Trump’s recent choices for chief posts bely those assertions and likely mean the plan, with its proposed cuts to services for the elderly, the poor and children, as well as extensive changes to environmental, reproductive and education rules and regulations, is still in play.
Trump has selected key contributors to Project 2025 for prominent White House jobs:
- Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget
- Tom Homan as border czar
- Brendan Carr as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission
- John Ratcliff as CIA director
- Karoline Leavitt as White House Press Secretary
Project 2025 includes funding cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, assistance to senior citizens and programs that feed children. It would also dismantle the department of education, would restrict women’s reproductive rights and give the president more power over prosecutions.
In October, KPBS analyzed Project 2025’s potential local impacts. Those include:
Eliminating Head Start, a program that offers health services and helps feed young children living in poverty. San Diego Unified School District Board Vice President Cody Peterson believes there is a racial element to Project 2025’s proposals.
“If you see who's victimized by these efforts, they're predominantly or at least disproportionately students of color, families of color because we can see the correlations between poverty and disadvantage, and race and ethnicity in America,” Peterson said.
Allowing the DOJ to take legal action against county district attorneys who refuse to prosecute some criminal offenses. The plan suggests going after local DAs who decline to bring cases “based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics” which are identified as race, “so-called gender identity and sexual orientation.”
Rebecca Blair, director of strategic initiatives at the nonprofit Fair and Just Prosecution, said that the proposed policy has a clear goal.
“Which is an attack on local control, an attack on democracy, an attempt to create a federal authority to determine whether a local community is making the right or wrong choice when they determine what kind of justice system they want,” she said.
- Reviving the 1873 law called the Comstock Act. UC Davis Law Professor Mary Ziegler, who specializes in the politics of reproduction, said since all abortions in the U.S. involve the mail or a common carrier, resurrecting the Comstock Act would amount to instituting a national abortion ban.
Breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. The National Weather Service is housed within NOAA. Its California weather forecast offices are staffed around the clock to predict the weather and issue warnings to residents.
Paul Heppner, co-chair of Friends of NOAA, said the National Weather Service is a critical system for coordinating with other government agencies.
“When they're issuing, for instance, a winter storm warning or something of that nature, they're collaborating amongst the offices to see how they can synchronize and tie in their warning so that you don't have gaps,” Heppner said.
Conservative writer Bill Kristol has little doubt Project 2025 will be implemented and said the new administration has every right to do so.
“But they don't have the right to do it out of the daylight,” Kristol said. “They don't have a right to go around Congress. They're talking about impounding funds that Congress has appropriated and so forth. So it's one thing to have an aggressive agenda. It's another thing to really try to undermine the functioning and the institutions of government.”
Trump has also announced plans to create a Department of Government Efficiency, a step widely seen as a Project 2025 goal to rid the federal government of "deep state,” a conspiracy that a network of people across the federal government are secretly manipulating policy decisions.
The president-elect has appointed tech billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to lead that effort.
