by Chatham County Line Staff

The outcome of the 2024 election will have very serious implications for North Carolina, America, and the world in 2025 and beyond.

If Donald Trump wins North Carolina and the presidency it is very likely that the 920-page document known as Project 2025 (“the Project”) will be the blueprint that shapes his second term in office.

This document, also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, is a political initiative published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation which is a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.

The Project had the involvement of over 140 former advisors from the Trump administration as well as contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations for its policy vision for the next Republican presidency.

These organizations include as coalition partners the Center for Immigration Studies, Moms for Liberty, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Tea Party Patriots, Turning Point USA and America First Legal Foundation, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser.

As more and more citizens have become aware of Project 2025 and the implications of its proposed policy initiatives, the Trump campaign has attempted to distance itself from the blueprint for an extreme makeover of America that its former White House advisors helped create and publish.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote on Truth Social “I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

The pivot by the Trump campaign has occurred despite the fact that Trump spoke at the Heritage Foundation’s annual leadership conference a year before the release of Project 2025 on April 21, 2022, and appeared to refer to the project in his comments, saying, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has said that former President Trump’s campaign “might not recover from” Project 2025.

“I think it’s incredible that actually the biggest scandal of the year is a policy scandal…is Project 2025,” Buttigieg said on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” “Most people say elections aren’t really about policy anymore, but if you think about it, the biggest scandal, the one that actually has the Republicans the most afraid, the one that has the president doing damage control, it’s not a criminal cover up, although they had one of those too.”

“It’s not a sex tape,” Buttigieg continued. “It’s the simple fact that they wrote down their own policies. That is the thing that they might not recover from.”

The Project is a blueprint aimed to promote conservative and right-wing policies to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power, under the premise that Donald Trump will win the 2024 presidential election.

Project 2025 asserts a controversial interpretation of the unitary executive theory, according to which the entire executive branch is under the complete control of the president. It proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees in order to replace the federal civil service workers with political appointees loyal to the president. Proponents of the project argue it would dismantle what they view as a vast, unaccountable, and mostly liberal government bureaucracy.

The Project also seeks to infuse the government and society with conservative Christian values. Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to steer the U.S. toward autocracy. Legal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law, separation of powers, separation of church and state, and civil liberties.

Regardless of political affiliation, these ideas such as the unitary executive theory are particularly vexing in light of the recent 6-3 landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court majority that presidents — including former President Donald Trump — have immunity from prosecution when carrying out “official acts.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling has yet to be tested, but with Project 2025 in effect there could be an unaccountable Presidency and an executive branch on steroids more akin to a monarch and his court than a democratically elected public official and his administration serving the people.

Project 2025 envisions widespread changes to economic and social policies and the federal government and its agencies.

The Project proposes taking partisan control of the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Commerce Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), dismantling the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuels. It recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be transferred or terminated.

Funding for climate research would be cut, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be made less independent, stopped from funding research with embryonic stem cells or using quotas to promote
equal participation by women.

The Project seeks to cut Medicare and Medicaid, and urges the government to explicitly reject
abortion as health care. Project 2025 seeks to eliminate coverage of emergency contraception and use the Comstock Act to prosecute those who send and receive contraceptives and abortion pills.

Project 2025 proposes criminalizing pornography, removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and affirmative action by having the DOJ prosecute “anti-white racism”.

The Project recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants living in the country. It proposes deploying the military for domestic law enforcement. It promotes capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of those sentences. It hopes to undo “[al]most everything implemented” by the Biden Administration.

Here are some key points on how Trump’s Project 2025 agenda would affect North Carolina residents:

CHILDCARE

• Project 2025 eliminates Head Start, which provides access to no-cost childcare—among other services—for 19,641 low-income children in North Carolina.

• Eliminating Head Start would wipe out a critical supply of child care in rural and other underserved communities that already face a lack of child care slots.

HEALTHCARE

• Project 2025 proposes imposing “limits or lifetime caps on [Medicaid] benefits.” In North Carolina, 911,500 Medicaid enrollees would be at risk of losing coverage because they are low income and lack access to alternative, affordable coverage.

• The plan would raise the cost of prescription drugs for up to 662,600 people in North Carolina by eliminating out-of-pocket Medicare drug cost limits. It also blocks the government from negotiating for lower drug prices.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

• Project 2025 eliminates the U.S. Department of Education, including Title I, which provides funds to ensure schools serving low-income students have additional resources to deliver a high-quality education beyond that which can be supported by local property tax revenue. Ending Title I would lead to the loss of 6,417 teaching positions, which serve 98,823 students, in North Carolina.  (In the 2022–2023 fiscal year in Chatham County funding per pupil was $4,559.94 local; $7,573.10 state; and $1,376.69 federal.)

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

• Project 2025 eliminates some emergency contraception medications from free preventive care requirements, meaning 1,560,000 women in North Carolina would lose guaranteed access to free emergency contraception.
• The Project instructs the U.S. Department of Justice to misapply the anti-vice Comstock Act, which is a pair of laws from 1873 and 1909, to criminalize the mailing of medication abortion. Doing so would result in an effective abortion ban nationwide, even in states where abortion is legal.
• Project 2025 instructs the Department of Justice to take legal action against local officials who refuse to bring cases against women and doctors who violate state abortion bans,
  such as North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban.

SOCIAL SECURITY

• Project 2025 authors have endorsed and supported plans to cut Social Security by raising the retirement age for roughly 73 percent of North Carolina residents—7,847,980 people. Their ideas are reflected in the two most recent Republican Study Committee budget proposals, which propose increasing the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 69*. Doing so would cut benefits by $4,100 to $8,900 after just one year, depending on when one claims Social Security. A median-wage retiree would lose $46,000 to $100,000 over 10 years.

STUDENT LOANS

• Project 2025 replaces income-driven repayment (IDR) plans with a one-size-fits-all program that would increase payments for all borrowers enrolled in existing IDR plans, including the Biden-Harris administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan. Under Project 2025, 237,800 borrowers in North Carolina enrolled in SAVE would pay $2,700 to $4,100 more each year.

TAXES

Project 2025 shifts the tax burden from the wealthy onto the middle class. Under the plan, the typical family of four in North Carolina would see a tax increase of $2,713 per year, while 45,000 households in America reporting more than $10 million in income would each see an average annual tax cut of $1.5 million.

WORKER RIGHTS AND PROTECTIONS

Project 2025 represents a comprehensive effort to roll back labor protections and diminish the power of unions, which could lead to reduced wages, fewer benefits, and less safe working conditions for many workers across North Carolina.

Below are some of the key points of the plan:

• Allow North Carolina to ban labor unions in the private sector.
• Make it easier for corporations to fire workers who engage in collective action or organizing.
• Allow corporations to get rid of unions even when the workers are protected by a signed union contract.
• Force workers to hold secret ballot elections to form a union even when their employer has agreed to voluntarily recognize it.
• Eliminate overtime protections for workers.
• Ignore the federal minimum wage.
• Eliminate federal rules that protect children from working in mines, meatpacking plants, and other dangerous workplaces.

The bottom line is that Project 2025 is a roadmap to gut America’s system of checks and balances in order to enact a far-right agenda that would negatively affect nearly every American. The plan proposes taking power away from the people and dividing it up amongst politicians, judges, and corporations which will result in even more control over our lives. 

Sources: Center for American Progress, Chatham County School System, Heritage Foundation, PBS, FactCheck.org, The Hill, US Census, USA Facts