Part 2: the fundamentals
By: Mira Costello
Editor-in-Chief
I read Project 2025, and I’m writing a series of articles to demystify it and help you cut through the jargon to understand the policies that could affect your life as we enter the transition of power. If you missed part one – “Who’s behind it?” – check it out on iusbpreface.net.
Last time, we talked about who created Project 2025. Now, we’ll dive into the content of the Mandate for Leadership.
With dozens of chapters that each extensively explore specific policy issues, it’s difficult to distill the gist of Project 2025 into a few sentences. A good place to start, though, is its “four promises”. The Mandate pledges that, if enacted, it will:
“Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”;
“Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”;
“Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and
“Secure our God-given individual right to enjoy ‘the blessings of liberty’”.
What do these really mean? The first piece, centered on children and family, focuses heavily on schools. The Mandate promises to eliminate any perceived mention of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in classrooms. It does not provide examples of these phenomena or plans to combat them. It also references school choice (allowing parents to use public tax dollars to send their children to private schools).
According to the authors, “restoring the family” also includes restricting abortion as much as possible; its ultimate goal is a nationwide ban, and until then it proposes cutting funds to states with “abortion tourism,” defunding abortion providers, eliminating Plan B, illegalizing the mailing of abortion drugs and disallowing abortion as emergency healthcare. It also advocates that medical schools should be prohibited from mandating abortion education and should teach abortion on an opt-in, rather than an opt-out, basis.
The Mandate also expresses a goal to disincentivize “fatherlessness”; while the meaning of this is not entirely clear, it seems to rest on culling welfare and social programs often used by single mothers. It also advocates for legislation allowing adoption organizations to discriminate against same-sex couples.
The administrative state, as we learned in part one, is an important enemy of Project 2025. It characterizes bureaucracy and “wokeism” like a dog, describing “bringing [it] to heel,” “defang[ing]” so-called woke individuals in power, “muzzling woke propaganda” and “handcuff[ing] the bureaucracy.”
Practically, this involves dramatically shrinking the government by closing federal agencies like the Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security and most agencies within the Environmental Protection Agency. It also includes repealing dietary guidelines by the USDA.
In general, the Mandate’s approach to most federal functions is to shrink, eliminate and privatize them, returning control to the states while repealing federal guidelines.
The defense promise is rather straightforward; it presents a staunch protectionist, isolationist position. The Mandate proposes withdrawing from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and it reprehends the United Nations and the European Union, advocating U.S. withdrawal from or noncooperation with climate and other treaties.
A substantial part of the Mandate’s defense policy involves “disciplin[ing] China,” including restricting trade with the country (“Chinese economic warfare”) and “defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party,” which it says should be the military’s highest priority. It advocates divesting all telecommunications from China, including outlawing TikTok and “any other arm of Chinese propaganda and espionage.”
The last promise is perhaps the most vague, but it gives us an idea of what underpins the Mandate’s ideology. The author of the “blessings of liberty” section speaks generally about how socialism, communism, Marxism, progressivism and fascism – which the author explicitly claims mean the same thing – are threats to freedom and will lead to surveillance, terrorism and economic collapse.
While these promises inform the Mandate generally, it is chock full of other specific policy proposals that are worth discussing in its five sections: Taking the Reins of Government, The Common Defense, The General Welfare, The Economy and Independent Regulatory Agencies. We’ll have to save those for part three.
If you’d like to follow along with the series, keep up with us on Instagram @iusbpreface to get notified when new articles are posted to our website, iusbpreface.net.