“Trump's 2025 project will eliminate the civil service”.
It's the conservative plan United States President Joe Biden and the Democrats want every American to know about.
“Project 2025 will destroy America. Look it up.”
“It's dangerous, it's dastardly, and it's diabolical.”
“To see this happen in America is bone-chilling.”
Project 2025 is led by the Heritage Foundation, one of the US's most influential conservative policy groups.
The think-tank has released what it calls a 'mandate for leadership'.
Senior Researcher from the Australia Institute Dr Emma Shortis says it sets out a roadmap for Donald Trump's second term as president.
“The mandate for leadership runs to 900-plus pages and has chapters on every federal government agency, every policy area you could possibly think of, down to the most granular detail of low-level appointments, low-level budget lines. So, it is extraordinary to have it all laid out - this incredibly radical agenda to reshape American life and the way America operates in the world.”
A few of the items on that agenda:
- removing the terms 'gender equality and 'sexual orientations' from all federal laws and regulations;
- criminalising pornography, and shutting down telecommunications companies that facilitate it;
- deporting all illegal immigrants, including Dreamers, who were brought to the country as children;
and
- undoing environmental protections by dismantling federal agencies such as NOAA, which monitors the oceans, weather and climate.
The mandate also proposes eliminating the entire Department of Education, and allowing parents to make decisions about how and what their children are taught.
It describes the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, which gave Americans the constitutional right to abortion, as quote 'just the beginning', and proposes banning the most widely-used abortion drugs.
Put together, Emma Shortis says it presents a vision for radical social reform.
“It envisions a radical reformation of social values in the United States into a conservative agenda. There is, I think, implicit acknowledgement amongst the authors and the architects of this plan that, for example, their prescriptions for reproductive rights are not popular in the United States. The vast majority of Americans want legal abortion, for example. And so part of the plan for this project is to be able to, I suppose, subvert democratic institutions in order to implement that radical social reform.”
At the heart of the plan is a proposal to overhaul the entire federal bureaucracy to make those radical reforms possible.
That would be done by firing thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with political appointees.
Emma Shortis says those appointees would inevitably be Trump loyalists.
“One of the pillars, in fact, of Project 2025 is a recruitment arm for those loyalists. So, they are put through a kind of rigorous loyalty test that doesn't really ask them about their particular skills, but asks them about their loyalty to Trump and Trumpism in particular. And so, this vision is for a government staffed by idealogues and loyalists who are loyal to the President and to the President only and to his agenda. Which would mean, again, really a dismantling of the institutions of American democracy through those appointments.”
One of the project's biggest targets is the Department of Justice.
It envisions the Department falling under the President's direct control.
Senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre Bruce Wolpe [[woll-pee]] says that would give the President the power to choose who to prosecute.
“A reading of Project 2025 is he wants to populate the Justice Department with completely loyal people, and then take out retribution against his enemies: his political enemies, members of the press, people who oppose his economic policies, businesses that he sees poses threat if not to him to the United States. And to just dominate the Justice Department so it can place restrictions, and if necessary, prosecute people who are opposed to Trump.”
This plan wasn't written by Donald Trump, and the former President has publicly distanced himself from the mandate.
Last week, he said he knows nothing about Project 2025 and he has no idea who is behind it.
But they appear to know him well.
More than half of the people listed as authors or contributors on the mandate held formal roles in President Trump's government, including its co-editors Paul Dans and Steven Groves.
A CNN investigation found, all up, at least 140 people who worked in the first Trump Administration were involved in Project 2025.
SBS asked Bruce Wolpe if there is any chance Trump doesn't know about it.
“No. Of course the former president knows about it, and I think he can't wait to get his hands on it. This is a blueprint for how Trump should act once he becomes President. Trump wrote the Republican platform. There's nothing in Project 2025 that conflicts with it at all. It's just a way to implement it.”
The Republican Party's official platform is nowhere near as detailed.
So far, it totals just 16 pages, compared to Project 2025's 922.
