Be Very Afraid: Project 2025 Is Here

Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, I and many others warned of the danger that Project 2025 posed to civil liberties and democracy.   We were greeted by comments that we were over reacting and/or insane assurances that the Felon had said he knew nothing about it, as if his lie erased all the evidence to the contrary.  Now, not even three weeks into the Felon's second regime and it is becoming very clear how the Felon's assurances should not have been believed.  I suspect things will only get worse as the Felon's far right and Christofascist minions push to wipe away civil rights for nonwhites and non-heterosexuals not to mention to ban abortion nationwide and perhaps even outlaw contraception.  Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are either onboard with the onslaught against those disliked by white Christian nationalists or are sitting on their hands out of fear of having a primary challenge or offending their orange overlord. One can only hope a backlash will build as the extreme agenda impacts more and more citizens who do not want a return to the society of the 1950's.  A piece n Vanity Fair looks at where America finds itself.  Here are highlights:

It turns out that the bogeyman of the last presidential election cycle, Project 2025, was no figment of our imagination, but an all-too-real plan for governing. We all remember Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the right-wing blueprint on the campaign trail and on the debate stage. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025—I haven’t read it,” he said during his one and only face-off with Kamala Harris. “ . . . . And yet CNN found that out of the 53 Trump executive actions and orders it analyzed, 36 “evoke proposals outlined” in Project 2025, on issues such as immigration, energy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

Let’s recap how we got here. In the summer of 2024, Democrats seized upon Project 2025, a plan spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. . . . . The plan wasn’t a secret; the 922-page “Mandate for Leadership” had been published in April 2023 on Heritage’s site and boasted supporters across the right-wing spectrum.

Project 2025 looked very much like the agenda for a second Trump term, as I wrote at the time, even if then candidate Trump was keeping it at arm’s length. That’s understandable given how unpopular this right-wing road map was during the presidential race—even among Republicans. . . . . The Project 2025 wish list included rolling back LGBTQ+ protections, curbing abortion rights, and banning pornography, as well as greatly increasing presidential power.

The secret sauce in this very unsecret plan is money, like taking control of the federal budget and doling the money out, completely circumventing Congress’s power of the purse. In July of 2023, The New York Times reported how Trump was looking to “revive the practice of ‘impounding’ funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like—a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.”

Last week Trump’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum calling on government agencies to “temporarily pause, to the extent permitted by law, grant, loan or federal financial assistance programs that are implicated by the President’s Executive Orders.” The move was unprecedented and, according to legal experts, unconstitutional . . .

Trump’s federal spending freeze—which was “previewed” in Project 2025, according to the Associated Press—went over like a lead balloon. A judge temporarily blocked part of the Trump plan, and the administration rescinded the OMB memo. But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained on X that the move was “NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” adding that Trump’s executive orders “on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”

The whole mess smacked of Trump 1.0—hugely disruptive and confusing, while accomplishing little beyond rattling people in government (and reinvigorating Democrats). A second judge, on Friday, issued an order temporarily requiring the federal government to not “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” funding promised to a number of states.

Meanwhile, Trumpworld continues to have the federal workforce in its sights. . . . . This all fits in with the Project 2025 goal of shrinking the nonpartisan federal workforce and replacing those employees with political supporters, the types of people who will bend the federal government to Trump’s will.

Trump may have gotten ahead of himself with such a radical funding freeze out of the gate, especially as his leadership isn’t yet in place. Vought, a Project 2025 architect and the author of the second chapter of the “Mandate for Leadership,” has yet to be confirmed by the Senate; same with Trump’s FBI director pick, Kash Patel, who has mused about making the agency’s headquarters “a museum of the deep state.” Sure, an OMB memo was pulled back, but that looks like a tactical retreat in a war on federal employees that’s only just begun.