Let's Read Project 2025 Together

JOYCE VANCE JUN 26

“Project 2025 will not be ‘stopped,’” Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation said. Of the Democrats fighting Project 2025, he said they are “more than welcome to try. We will not give up and we will win.” The context was the launch of a task force by House Democrats, designed to push back against the Republican agenda.

Congressman Jared Huffman (D-CA), a member of that task force, told the AP that the Project 2025 agenda will hit “like a Blitzkrieg” and lawmakers need to be ready. Even a casual glance suggests that we all need to be ready, and better yet, to take steps now, like having candid discussions about what this approach to governing would mean for our country, with all of the people around us in advance of the election. American voters are so tired of hearing that every election is the most important one of their lives, but in the era of Trump, it has been true.

Here’s the problem:

If you’ve heard of Project 2025, you’re in a distinct minority. The statistics in the Semafor chart above are from May. Since then, there has been more reporting on the plan, but it’s still very surface level—it’s hard to cover a 900+ page, complex plan in a single segment. That’s why we’re going to do more here to really get our arms around it.

We’ve been talking about it here at Civil Discourse since news of it first surfaced last fall. The first time I wrote about it was after the Washington Post reported on it in a story that garnered little attention in the news cycle but seemed ominous to me. It’s worth rereading that post, Frogs Boiled: What Trump is Planning for a Second Term because in hindsight, it exposes one of the worst problems we face. Trump always says the quiet part out loud, or at least some of it. He tells people what he intends to do, but it gets ignored or lost in the shuffle and suddenly there you are on January 6 with a mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” It’s important that doesn’t happen this time.

Project 2025 has a lot of different moving parts, which means that one way to begin understanding it is to scroll down through the table of contents and pick the chapter that interests you the most, starting there. There’s an entire chapter on plans for the Justice Department, a section on the military, and one, that has been discussed a lot, about the plan to cheapen the independence of federal civil servants. That move is more significant than you might think at first glance. Last November, I wrote about that plan:

“In October of 2020, before the last election, Trump was already taking steps in this direction. Trump signed an executive order making a change in civil service rules that made it possible to fire employees in policy positions ‘at will’—for no reason at all. Civil Service regulations are full of ‘schedules’ for different types of personnel and classifications like ‘exempted service’ that don’t mean much unless you’ve lived in the arcane world of federal employment. That made it difficult to understand what the executive order was about. More importantly, it was just too far in the weeds to resonate with folks at that time, when everyone was focused on more important matters like the upcoming election. But the order was characterized by people in the knows as a ‘stunning attempt to politicize the civil service and undermine more than a century of laws aimed at preventing corruption and cronyism in the federal government.’ It was the logical outcome of Trump’s obsession with a ‘deep state’ that he believed was out to get him.

The point of having a protected cadre of career civil service employees is to preserve expertise within government. But Trump’s executive order meant that any government employee involved in policymaking could be placed into a new Schedule F classification, a classification which left them vulnerable to evaluation based on their politics not their performance, and to dismissal for any reason. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but coming this late in the administration, the order could only be read as an effort to make sure Trump, in his next term (which thankfully didn’t materialize), could swiftly dispose of career employees he believed weren’t loyal to him. The order undid the pesky civil service protections that made it impossible to fire FBI agents who were investigating him or government lawyers who insisted he play by the rules. It was a harbinger of what Trump’s plans for 2025 would look like.

One of the first steps Joe Biden took after being sworn in was to rescind Trump’s executive order.”

This gives you a good sense of what Project 2025 is about. It doesn’t go off with a bang. It’s written in the banal language of federal agencies and the bureaucracy. You have to pay attention to understand it. It’s not a summer beach read, but this may be the most important book club selection you ever take up.

Our guest for last Friday’s “Five Questions” column, Joanna Lydgate, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “Trump has made clear that he’ll disregard the law and test the limits of our system.” Joanna is the chief executive of the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties. Her bottom line assessment: “What we’re staring down is extremely dark.”

How to make the people understand how urgent that oncoming darkness is, so that it’s not just something theoretical to push aside? After I wrote about our need to take up the study of Project 2025, many of you left insightful comments. Rhiannon Hutchinson wrote to me from Keene, New Hampshire, to make the point that people need to understand how they would be impacted, personally, not just in a theoretical sense. One of her examples: If immigrants were deported—Trump is proposing massive deportations—what would it mean for her grocery bill and access to food. That’s such a good place to start. When Alabama passed its anti-immigrant Bill, people fearing arrest and detention as a prelude to expulsion fled the state. A preliminary assessment in 2011 while the bill was being challenged in court suggested it would cost the state $40 million, shrinking the workforce and the taxpayer base. Alabama’s Agriculture Commissioner said at the time that “the economic hardship to farmers and agribusiness will reverberate throughout Alabama’s economy, as one-fifth of all jobs in our state come from farming.”

By February of 2012, when there was hard data to pull from, the assessment had increased dramatically, suggesting the Bill reduced the state’s GDP by $2.3 to $10.8 billion annually. That’s just one state. Imagine it played out across the country.

One data point that has always stayed with me is how hard it hit our family budget. We eat a lot of tomatoes and other fresh produce in the summer. That year, produce skyrocketed in price. Farmers saw crops rot in the field because they couldn’t hire workers to bring them in. That impacted all of us for a time—ultimately, significant parts of the law were rejected by the courts. Imagine the country, or large swaths of it, impacted by labor shortages across multiple sectors: food is more expensive, wait times for fixing storm damage to homes gets longer and longer, population numbers that drive funding for school contracts decrease, and so forth. Mass deportations may sound good to conservatives, especially as a campaign tactic, but understanding what that really looks like for all of us is a bleak prospect. Project 2025 would affect us across the board—education, the economy, small businesses, the Federal Election Commission. It would radically alter how we live, and the changes would come at lightening speed because above all else, Project 2025 is a battle order; it’s ready to go on day one.

I don’t want to write so much that I leave you too exhausted to venture over to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 website, so I’ll stop there. Take a look, even if it’s just through the table of contents to decide what you might want to read first. Or look around the website itself, to understand what the project is and who is behind it.

A programming note here: Bob and I are taking a few days away (but don’t worry, we’re leaving our sons at home to look after dogs, cats, and chickens), but I’ll be taking the Chapter on DOJ with me to study thoroughly. Reading this material and talking about it with those around us is going to be essential in the weeks ahead. The chart above, the one that says 76% of Americans and 81% of Republicans know “nothing” about Project 2025, should be all the motivation we need to get to work.

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse, and special thanks to those of you who support my work with your paid subscriptions. I couldn’t do this without you.

We’re in this together,

Joyce