Project 2025 is a 925-page manifesto that was published by the Heritage Foundation in 2022, anticipating the next president to be a republican. It details plans to massively empower the president, destroy bureaucracy, wipe out “woke propaganda,” appoint far-right figures to every level of government, and have it prepared to implement the moment the next conservative president is inaugurated.
While the 925 pages worth of policy proposals are the meat of the project, it also includes a “personnel database,” where the Heritage Foundation lists which of their members they believe should attain positions. It contains online training videos fleshing out their extremist platform, and a “180-day playbook,” a step-by-step guide for the next conservative president to implement their plans.
Much of the proposals in the project focus on combatting and destroying what they call “the administrative state.” What this seems to be based on their descriptions are things like the FDA, FED, FEMA, HUD, EPA, and other government agencies. These organizations, unlike congress and the supreme court, directly involve themselves in the day-to-day lives of American citizens. They are pivotal in ensuring that food is safe for consumption, pollution and contamination are limited, fair housing laws are enforced, diseases don’t spread through the population, hurricane damage is repaired, etc. Any interference with the duties of these organizations, like mass firings or appointment of loyalists to leadership rather than experts is guaranteed to hurt a lot of people throughout the United States and accomplish nothing but vain sociopolitical ambition.
For the Heritage Foundation, it’s apparently not enough that the president can already select the heads of these organizations, like when Donald Trump appointed the CEO of a fossil fuel company to head the EPA (environmental protection agency). They want either total supervision and control of their activities, or for them to be disbanded all together, like they have planned to do to the DOE (department of education) and DHS (department of homeland security).
Despite the fact that it argues that the prevalence of government agencies is unconstitutional and an example of government overreach, it also centers much more of its proposals on “Unitary executive theory.” UET is an unpopular interpretation of the constitution that views the president of the United States as having total control over the executive branch and decision making, without being able to be hindered by congress or the supreme court.
While UET has debatably been present in American politics since 1787, it has only gained prominence in more recent years after it was repopularized by the Heritage Foundation during the Reagen administration. Since then, presidents from both parties have made abnormal decisions to expand their power, with Reagen’s mass privatization of the economy, Bush’s Patriot Act, Obama’s mass deployments of troops overseas, Trump’s Muslim ban, etc.
Along with these radical political initiatives, project 2025 also includes various draconian social reforms. Project 2025 includes plans to remove any mention of gender identity and sexuality, not just from public schools, but from any broader social platform. This would be a campaign of media suppression unprecedented in American history and would accomplish absolutely nothing but momentarily quench the paranoia of right-wing fearmongering demagogues. Disregarding the blatant discrimination and harm this would cause to thousands of people, I think we can all agree that our government has much more important things to spend its time on.
However, since Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, many of the authors of project 2025 and other key figures in the Heritage Foundation quickly made it onto his list of appointments, and it’s likely that they’ll move forward with their plans immediately. So, besides the fact that we may never see another election in the United States, those graduating from CMW and moving onto college will have to face the fact that we’ll likely be heading into a much more corporate, much less safe world. And for students who are not straight or cisgender, the world will certainly be a lot less safe and a lot less accepting than it was before. The only way that we can help each other against any of this is unity. If you are scared, talk about it with your friends and family. If you’re upset about the way things are becoming, join a group and fight for change. Every high schooler knows that adult life will be harder, and that you’ll need to be stronger to make it through, all this has done for us is make that fact so much more abundantly clear.
