Things About Project 2025 That Don't Make Sense

In the heat of the 2024 election, a lot of people said a lot of things about what each candidate might do with the power a victory could confer upon them. After all the votes were cast and the president-elect prepared to retake office, the American people began living in an uncertain reality with only the threats and promises of their elected officials to guide their hopes and fears. One issue throughout the race was the extremely controversial Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project and its 922-page "Mandate for Leadership."

Released in April 2023, Project 2025 was the latest in a long line of similar policy guides constructed by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that works tirelessly to reshape the federal government. They've been a critical aspect of right-wing politics since the 1980s, when they offered a similar document called "Mandate for Leadership" to Republican President Ronald Reagan, which guided many questionable aspects of his administration. The Heritage Foundation pitches these policy guides to almost every Republican candidate who runs for president with varying levels of success. Project 2025 wasn't Trump's document — though it did match some of his policy proposals – but it's worth looking into some of the many things about Project 2025 that don't make sense.

Of all the things the Project 2025 website could focus on, its creators bizarrely spent a lot of time denying connections between the document and Donald Trump. Just before a list of important details about the plan, the site featured a USA Today article that straightforwardly explains that Project 2025 isn't Trump's personal scheme. This was followed by even more "Fact Check" articles denying any link between Project 2025 and Trump or his running mate, JD Vance, and made it clear how critically important the site's authors thought that readers knew Trump had nothing to do with the document.

Nonetheless, Project 2025 became a massive talking point for Democrats during the 2024 election, and so the Heritage Foundation needed to create as much distance as possible between the controversial "Mandate for Leadership" and the then-candidate. While it's definitely true that Trump didn't have a hand in writing Project 2025, the list of those who did includes former members of Trump's inner circle. While Trump and the Project 2025 effort publicly disavowed any connection to each other to secure votes, the link between their shared policies became clear as his path to the White House opened.

The First Amendment, which guards the citizens of the United States against legal consequences for most of their speech, is one of the most contested elements of the nation's defining document. Conservative political figures often talk about the importance of the U.S. Constitution, and Project 2025's "Mandate for Leadership" states, "The next conservative president must defend our First Amendment rights." However, though the document reaffirms a commitment to the history of the Bill of Rights, it also has some contingencies that fly in the face of long-standing jurisprudence on the matter.

Pornography, for example, has historically been protected under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has allowed restrictions on obscenity, but pornography can exist outside of that standard, protecting most examples of adult material so long as it doesn't contain anything uniquely offensive. Yet, the Mandate for Leadership straightforwardly states, "Pornography should be outlawed," arguing that it has (or should have) no First Amendment protections. As part of a wider trend of applying specific conservative and religious standards to laws, explicitly challenging the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, the document appears to simultaneously protect the First Amendment and declare certain types of expression free from its defense.

One of Project 2025's many requirements for the Department of Defense is to "eliminate politicization, reestablish trust and accountability, and restore faith to the force," which follows another about raising the physical fitness standards to ensure greater "lethality and excellence." The first obvious question is how one would remove politics from the military, and the listed suggestions for this depoliticization process are, themselves, intensely political. However, the specific language makes Project 2025's intentions extraordinarily clear on the matter. 

In the process of getting politics out of the military, Project 2025 recommends further empowering military chaplains to "carry out their ministry according to the tenets of their faith." Paradoxically, it also states that any decisions "motivated by purely partisan motives should be identified as threats to readiness," but the same series of instructions requires removing any and all "Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs" from education and staffing protocols without any definition of those terms (Marx was no fan of religion, of course). Perhaps most notably, the new politics-free military under Project 2025 would ban all transgender servicemembers and halt any public spending on abortion, both of which are clear appeals to partisan policy ... or politics.

Historically, American laborers began following the now-common 40-hour, five-day workweek in 1938, when controversial president FDR passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. While many workers already had Sunday off for worship purposes, the new act capped a legal workweek at 44 hours and instituted a policy of time-and-a-half pay for hours worked beyond that. In 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics placed the average weekly hours of American workers around 34, while the American Time Use Survey put the average hours worked on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays at around five and a half. Project 2025 seeks to endanger some of the overtime potential, but they want to guarantee overtime for those working on Sunday.

Project 2025 suggests an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act that would "require that workers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath." This would be a considerable boon to most employees who work on weekends, but only four pages later, Project 2025 insists on weakening the ability of employees to earn overtime in any situation not specifically ordained by the Bible. Project 2025 rolls back Joe Biden's struck-down overtime expansion, impacting at least 50,000 employees. The mandate also suggests restricting the overtime pay to only include basic salary, rather than any additional benefits, and allowing employers to use a two- or four-week calendar, potentially allowing them to shift schedules to avoid paying overtime.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 37% of the American workforce (as of 2023) is between the ages of 16 and 19. Of those many young workers, a separate BLS study found that 26% worked in the "leisure and hospitality" industry, 17% worked in the "retail trade industry," and 13% worked in "education and health services." While teens can do many jobs, there are quite a few jobs that teenagers are legally disallowed from taking on. The Fair Labor Standards Act regulates the types of jobs young people can take on in four stages, locking those under 14 out of all non-farm jobs and freeing those over 18 to take on any jobs. Regulations for workers between 14 and 18 keep them out of "hazardous jobs," such as forest firefighting, dealing with radioactive materials, and coal mining, which was notoriously dangerous in 19th-century America.

Project 2025 seeks to amend the Department of Labor standards on hazardous jobs, allowing young workers to try out handling explosives and packing raw meat, among others. They specifically request allowing "teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent." The mandate contends that this would allow teenagers to train in these fields while also closing worker shortages. Unfortunately, the CDC reports workers between the ages of 15 and 24 experiencing workplace injuries at a far higher rate than older workers, which has undeniably motivated the implementation of existing regulations in the first place.

During the late 19th century, Anthony Comstock was a dominant figure in the U.S. government who led a campaign to stamp out perceived obscenity. A returning Union soldier and traveling salesman, Comstock drafted an anti-obscenity bill that Congress introduced into law in 1873. The Comstock Act created harsh penalties against obscene materials and anything to do with abortion through the mail. Comstock would work as a special agent for the post office for the rest of his life, rooting out everything he disapproved of. After the Supreme Court's 1973 historic decision in Roe v. Wade, the Comstock Act largely lies dormant, but Project 2025 suggests waking it up.

Thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Women's Health Organization, Project 2025's mandate sees a path to revive the Comstock Act. The text suggests enforcing "18 U.S. Code 1461 and 1462 Against Providers and Distributors of Abortion Pills That Use the Mail." This would be a return to a law that has been largely ignored over the past 50 years. The Comstock Act has technically remained on the books since it was introduced in 1873, and several states have similar restrictions that are in place with considerably more force. Unfortunately, removing access to safe and legal abortion procedures, like the by-mail use of mifepristone, endangers underprivileged Americans. The AMA suggests that the ban will lead to "worse health and economic outcomes for women."

The adoption system in the United States requires a large pool of parents willing to dedicate themselves to nurturing and raising a child. In 2021, the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) released a report detailing the lives of the over 100,000 children awaiting adoption. Of those, over half were living with non-related foster parents for an average term of 33.7 months. UCLA's School of Law found that same-sex couples are seven times more likely to raise adopted or foster children than their heterosexual counterparts. They also found that the children of LGBTQ+ parents enjoyed similar outcomes to those of straight couples, despite the consistent fervor against their desire to adopt. 

Project 2025's mandate calls the incoming president to defend "faith-based adoption agencies that serve these children," who allegedly cannot receive government funding due to their refusal to pair children with same-sex couples. They seek to repeal aspects of the Code of Federal Regulations' Title 45, which restricts federal funding for programs that engage in discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The mandate also calls for the installment of H.R. 1750, an act that protects religious child services providers' desire to deny service to certain couples. This scheme seeks to increase the options for children who need adoption, yet will allow many adoption organizations to explicitly refuse service to at least 100,000 couples.

When an American president takes office, one of their many assignments is filling around 4,000 politically appointed positions in the executive branch and beyond. Of those, around 1,200 require Senate approval, making the process of staffing those political offices a considerable amount of work for each incoming president. However, those political appointees represent a tiny drop in the bucket of federal employees, most of whom are career hires who remain in the job regardless of the presidential administration. In October 2020, Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a new classification of government workers and freeing up the administration to fire many career employees who would usually not be subject to change. Biden's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) created a 2024 final rule that would protect those employees, but Project 2025 argues against that.

Arguably, the crown jewel of Project 2025's mandate is its plan to use Trump's executive order to completely reshape the federal government. The mandate calls the leader of the OPM to "prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions," robbing them of their protections and subjecting them to replacement. The protections for career employees exist to preserve those workers who have developed critical knowledge and skills, and firing as many as 50,000 experienced long-term workers could have deleterious effects on the functioning of the federal government. Project 2025 doesn't hide its intent, claiming Democrat administrations typically see more success because careerists "generally lean heavily to the Left."

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Higher Education Act (HEA) into law, creating a framework that would allow a wider swath of the population to attend advanced courses. The HEA also covered federal grants that provided the necessary funds to improve colleges. Title VI of the HEA actually predates the law by a few years, providing several grants to numerous institutions to improve their education on foreign languages and area studies, granting Americans a fighting chance in the increasingly globalized world of the late 20th century. Area studies courses include multidisciplinary explorations of a specific region's culture, sociology, and history, but Project 2025 sees little use for that knowledge.

Project 2025's mandate suggests doing away with area studies courses, arguing that they "sometimes fund programs that run counter to [American] interests." The text celebrates the presumed original intent of Title VI, granting U.S. citizens a bit of knowledge they could use in the international business market, but the knock-on effects of Americans learning the ins and outs of other cultures are seen as unhelpful. Project 2025 suggests allocating at least 40% of the programs' funding to "international business programs that teach about free markets." It also insists that all involved in teaching those capitalism courses must swear to serve American interests.

According to the American Public Transport Association, Americans took 9.9 billion trips on public transit in 2019, despite around 45% of American citizens lacking meaningful access to those services. U.S. public transportation is a $79 billion industry that employs 430,000 people, and every dollar spent on its development yields a five-dollar return. In March 2024, the Biden administration called for $4 billion of investment in bus and rail transit projects, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to construction work in 11 states, all of which Project 2025 prescribes slowing or stopping.

In its Federal Transit Policy section, Project 2025's mandate calls for the Department of Transportation to redefine the term "public transportation" as "transit provided for the public rather than transit provided by a public municipality." The mandate urges the next president to reign in spending on mass transit, arguing that Americans favor personal vehicles without ever mentioning those who cannot afford them. Project 2025's biggest concern in public transportation is labor spending, claiming transit workers earn exorbitant benefits that are protected by federal regulations. Cutting those benefits, as well as reducing requirements on crew size on railroads, might reduce costs, but at the expense of increased safety concerns and an economically weakened workforce.

According to the VA's official website, 2024 was a banner year for the organization. By July, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs handed out over $137 billion in benefits to over 1.1 million veterans and their surviving family members, processing more than 2 million claims with an approval rate of 64.6%. The payouts veterans receive are tied to their calculated level of disability, with an average level of 70% among surveyed veterans for the fiscal year of 2024. Also in 2024, Pew Research Center data reported that American veterans continued their long trend of favoring the Republican party by a considerable margin, but Project 2025 includes plans that may leave some of them behind.

The "Mandate for Leadership" section on the Veterans Benefits Association (VBA) suggests reforms to the ways America repays its servicemembers. It recommends automation and privatization in the disability claims process, relieving many government employees of their jobs and hiring non-governmental services and machines. The same section claims $500 million in spending on fraudulent claims, though the VA's Office of the Inspector General's highest estimation is around $390 million. The most alarming note in the mandate suggests reexamining the ratings for disabilities "to target significant cost savings" for future applicants while "preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants." This could be an issue for any upcoming soldiers seeking benefits, as well as many current beneficiaries.

It would be reasonable to assume Americans are motivated to vote by the way they see their taxes, but in many cases, they perceive their taxes differently based on who they voted for. In 2024, Gallup polls revealed considerable gaps between Democrats and Republicans on almost all tax issues, but the most compelling revelation is that many die-hard conservatives feel their taxes are more unfair under a Democrat, even if the rate hasn't changed. Supporters of Project 2025 might be surprised to learn that it pitches a two-tiered tax system as part of a reinvention of the tax code. 

Project 2025's proposal is for all those who earn under the Social Security wage base limit, currently $168,800, to pay 15% annually, while all those who earn more would pay 30%. Given the current tax rate, that would be an increase of 3-5% for anyone currently making $44,725 or less and a decrease of 2-7% for anyone taking home $182,100 or more. The mandate hopes that this change will "act as a nearly flat tax" on wages while massively cutting the corporate tax rate. The Center for American Progress contends that this system will cost the median American family thousands and save the richest citizens millions, greatly shifting the tax burden onto the middle class.