Part 4: what happens now?
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.
In parts one and two, I discussed the people behind the project and its fundamental ideas. In part three, I compared the policy proposals in the Mandate for Leadership to President Donald Trump’s executive actions during his first week in office. If you missed those, check them out on iusbpreface.net.
Even though decisions coming from the White House have seemed endless since inauguration day, the amount of new policies still hasn’t come close to the sheer volume of proposals in the Project 2025 Mandate. With a high level of congruence between the ideas in the project and the policies we’ve seen so far, here are some more proposals from the book that we may or may not see reflected in the new administration soon. (This list is by far non-exhaustive – read the rest of the series to fill in more blanks.)
Economically, Project 2025 is primarily about deregulation. It proposes lowering corporate taxes by 3%, reducing the estate and gift tax by half, requiring a supermajority vote to raise taxes (but not to lower them), deregulating financial firms and nearly doubling the business loss limitation.
Those looking to start a small business may struggle to obtain loans if the Mandate is realized, as it proposes stopping direct lending programs by the Small Business Administration and “explor[ing] private-sector channels” for existing loans.
Agriculture and food may also see changes. Project 2025 advocates to prioritize food production over “ancillary issues like climate change”; withdraw from international efforts toward sustainable food production; repeal the federal labeling mandate for GMOs; reduce crop insurance subsidies for farmers by up to 20%; and eliminate the federal inspection requirement for interstate meat and poultry sales.
Under the Mandate for Leadership, federal assistance programs would be significantly attenuated.
It advocates ending Housing First, tightening restrictions on housing assistance and prohibiting all non-citizens from living in federally assisted housing. Similarly, it proposes drastically reducing the scope of SNAP (food stamps) and increasing work requirements for nutrition assistance.
In the medical sphere, Project 2025 blames Medicare and Medicaid for the national deficit and favors privatizing healthcare almost entirely, leaving regulation to the states. It encourages direct competition between Medicare Advantage and private insurance, increased eligibility requirements and asset test determinations for Medicaid and time limits or lifetime caps on Medicaid.
While the Mandate takes a hands-off approach to healthcare in general, it provides a laundry list of strict abortion regulations, including but not limited to:
Detailed data collection on all abortions;
Removing Medicaid funds from states requiring abortion insurance;
Excluding abortion from the definition of emergency care;
Reversing FDA approval of abortion drugs;
Criminalizing mailing of abortion drugs;
Cutting funds to liberal states attracting “abortion tourism”;
Eliminating Plan B; and
Prohibiting medical schools from requiring abortion training.
Project 2025’s drastic education policies have circulated in some media channels; you may be familiar with their proposal to eliminate the Department of Education and “return control of education to the states,” calling the DOE a “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.” Additionally, it suggests phasing out federal funding for public schools over a 10-year period and letting states decide to opt in or out of funding.
It advocates opening more faith-based colleges, career schools and military academies and expresses an eventual goal of ending student loan programs, making current loans ineligible for income-driven repayment in the meantime. At the K-12 level, the Mandate favors school choice (allowing parents to use taxpayer education dollars to pay for private or charter school). Programs like GEAR-UP and Head Start would be eliminated. Written parental permission would be required for teachers to use a name other than that listed on a student’s birth certificate.
Labor protections would also roll back under Project 2025: teenagers could work in hazard-order jobs with parental consent, disparate-impact liability for employers would be eliminated and regulations prohibiting discrimination based on protected class status would be rescinded.
The project proposes that all new federal contracts require 70% of employees to be U.S. citizens, with that number reaching 95% within 10 years. It would also cap and phase out H-2A and H-2B visas (those used by seasonal migrant workers).
Foreign aid is also on the chopping block, with proposed “deep cuts” in the International Disaster Assistance budget and distancing from international aid organizations, instead privatizing aid spending.
Finally, while Project 2025 calls for dramatic reductions in climate spending, it supports significant military expansion. It would reduce the Environmental Protection Agency budget, eliminate the Office of Emergency Management, privatize the Safer Choice program, privatize and deregulate nuclear energy ventures, eliminate carbon capture programs, encourage more natural gas pipelines, downsize NOAA and eliminate all offices related to clean energy.
Research at the EPA, as well as most other scientific organizations, would be halted, restricted or discontinued.
Conversely, defense budget restrictions would loosen. The project supports increasing military enlistment by instituting greater presence in high schools, opening a Defense Acquisition University and reinstating unvaccinated military members, with the goal of increasing the ranks by at least 50,000 troops. The Mandate strongly favors nuclear expansion and modernization, including resuming production of plutonium pits and withdrawing from “counterproductive nonproliferation activities” like the Iran nuclear deal.
When the Heritage Foundation gave Ronald Reagan the first Mandate for Leadership in 1981, approximately 60% of its 2,000 policy proposals had been instituted by the end of Reagan’s first year in office. If history repeats, we may see much of this new mandate reflected in our lives.
I did my homework on Project 2025, and now that exam season is in full swing, I feel more prepared to handle whatever comes next – I hope this series helped you feel a little less in the dark, too.
Knowledge is power. Pass it on.