How would Project 2025 change my life? – an OP/ED

OP/ED

Written by L. M. Land

Having heard so much about Project 2025, I wondered what it really said, are people exaggerating? They are not.

This article reflects my personal reading and research about Project 2025, which is backed up by many other agencies whose links are also included in the Sources section below. I am not a political scholar, and there were sections I did not understand, like the economic sections. It is tricky reading, because it sounds good in the beginning, but upon reading the whole section you see how limiting and harmful their policies will be.

Project 2025 is a sweeping change of almost every facet of government, education, and your personal rights that go way beyond abortion. It affects men, women and children, especially if you are a minority. A link to the actual document is below.

The full agenda of Project 2025 is the product of The Heritage Foundation, which is over 900 pages long. It will change our federal government to represent conservative Heritage Foundation philosophies.

The key to the enforcement of Project 2025 depends on Schedule F, an executive order already issued and made law by Trump in October 2020. The plan was to enforce it in his second presidential term. Schedule F was issued by executive order rather than through legislation and enables a president to make policies without Congress, and to hire and fire the government civil service employees on a whim.

This tells us the Project 2025 plan was already set up and ready to implement in 2021!

When Biden was elected instead of Trump in 2020, one of Biden’s first actions as president was to rescind it, removing Schedule F from law.

A ‘day one’ priority for the Trump administration is to make Schedule F legal again if Trump is reelected in November. This will allow the firing of government employees not aligned with the Trump philosophy, who will be replaced by an estimated 50,000 loyalists. This is considered to be a step toward an authoritarian regime.

This sweeping change will also replace employees inside the agencies that currently protect civil rights with loyalists.

In 2022, there were 2.9 million federal employees; most employees were in Defense-Military Programs (772,300), the Department of Veterans Affairs (411,600), and the Department of Homeland Security (202,800). The Federal Trade Commission, National Credit Union Administration and the Civil Defense Programs had about 1,000 employees each.

There will no longer be a balance of power or values in these important government agencies.

Civil employees have been protected by law for the last 141 years.

The first act to protect civil employees was the Civil Service Act of 1883, or the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which required the federal government to hire public servants based on their skills, not based on their political party or a new president’s whim.

Civil employees jobs became further protected in 1964 when Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241) to stop discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Civil rights as a concept and a reality will change under Project 2025 along with other rights that will disappear as well. There is a lot of language that makes it sound like they support anti-racism, yet when you read further you learn that Project 2025 will “Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Trainings.” (Page 582).

This is where the Jim Crow concept comes back from the past to bite you. Without classification statistics, there will no way to prove, disprove or report racism. The racism problem simply goes away because there will be no more reporting about racism or race in the United States.

We all remember that the concept of ‘separate but equal’ did not work the first time around.

There is much more, a summary of a few major points follows:

Department of Justice (DOJ) will enforce civil rights laws only in the courts.
Project 2025 calls the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) a “managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology” that must be erased, and it would ban funding for critical race theory education or practice.
It would stop civil rights data collection — including data that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) uses — because it includes racial classiﬁcations.
Federal DEIA oﬃces will close. It would even prosecute private employers that support DEIA in their workplaces.
Project 2025 would reassign prosecution of election-related oﬀences from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division.
The Census Bureau will replace statistical experts with political appointees. It will be impossible to fully understand our society, enforce civil rights, promote equity or engage in evidence-based policymaking.
Project 2025 has called for the “largest deportation program in American history” which includes a drastic increase in “detention” resources.
Reproductive Rights disappear for women only. Abortion of any type, even a medical abortion to save lives will be illegal. In contrast, Project 2025 believes in killing death row criminals, which in my opinion, illustrates that this is a policy against women, not that the authors are ‘pro-life’.
The Federal Insurrection Act will allow the president to deploy the military at any time, even for peaceful public gatherings.
Head Start will be eliminated. Project 2025, page 482.
“The Federal Department of Education should be eliminated…Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of [Project 2025] laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory – Project 2025, pages 319 and 322.

Other major policy shifts are in energy, with an entire section about Alaska. Medicare and Medicaid receive drastic overhauls. Regarding Medicaid: “Add targeted time limits or lifetime caps on benefits to disincentivize permanent dependence.” Project 2025, page 468.

Planned Parenthood will no longer receive Medicaid or taxpayer money, Project 2025, page 471. The Endangered Species Act will be altered, and drilling for oil will take precedence over environmental concerns. There is so much more.

These policies will affect you and me and our loved ones.

We each have the power to add one more vote.

To understand Schedule F:

https://kettering.org/the-schedule-f-threat-to-democracy-a-project-2025-explainer/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/25/project-2025-trump-plan-fire-civil-service-employees

https://thefulcrum.us/governance-legislation/schedule-f

https://protectdemocracy.org/work/trumps-schedule-f-plan-explained/

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-creating-schedule-f-excepted-service/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schedule_F_appointment

Project 2025:

https://civilrights.org/project2025/#

https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf