Editor's Note: This series examines the MAGA effort to transform the government through a process called Project 2025. Lean to the Left writers CJ Waldron and V. Susan Hutchinson explore how allies of Donald Trump hope to increase the power of the presidency, eliminate career government positions, and cede regulatory responsibility to the individual states, ignoring the failed Articles of Confederation. It is critical for voters to understand key parts of this manifesto, in context with current and future GOP proposals, before voting in November. The statements in Project 25 are, at best, misleading with outright lies, twisted interpretations of the Constitution, and personal opinions sprinkled throughout.
Project 2025: A White Christian Nation
PROMISE #2: DISMANTLE THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE AND RETURN SELF-GOVERNANCE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
The mythical Deep State is the boogeyman of the Right. As a result, they fault this shadowy bureaucratic apparatus for limiting the ability of Donald Trump to enact many of his MAGA policies during his first term. Their solution is to create a government that is filled with MAGA loyalists and create an Executive branch that has no Congressional oversight, known as the Unitary Executive Theory.
The foreword to the Project 2025 was written by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Dr. Kevin Roberts. He proposes that we “put the federal government back to work for the American people” by reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy and eliminating career federal workers to be replaced by those who adhere to the principles of the Conservative Promise. He claims that a smaller government would be more effective and efficient while allowing the goals of the Right to be more easily enacted.
In an attack on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Roberts states “Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon” could no longer “force troops to attend “training” seminars about “white privilege”. With the Supreme Court rolling back the impacts of Affirmative Action, Project 2025 is proposing to further segregate the government, particularly the military, by stripping away many of the protections in the name of restoring the military into the hands of “highly skilled servicemen and women who can protect the homeland and our interests overseas”.
His implication is that America is weaker with a more diverse military, and therefore more vulnerable. The net effect would be to have a military that was more aligned to the White Christian Nationalist agenda which would also be more loyal to the Conservative Promise.
Like Donald Trump’s Agenda 47, Project 2025 wants to eliminate the Department of Education. Roberts states “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms”. Therefore, by eliminating this department, it would free the states to adopt a more Conservative Christian Nationalist curriculum.
Louisiana and Oklahoma have already begun this process. Louisiana has ordered that every classroom must post a copy of the Ten Commandments while the State School Superintendent of Oklahoma is mandating that every classroom have a Bible and include the Bible in their curriculum.
Another proposal is to reign in the pesky Environmental Protection Agency whose annoying rules and regulations have stifled the growth of Big Business by instituting choking restrictions on their ability to increase production. Since many of these rules are the result of what the Right calls the “Climate Change Hoax”, this department would be curtailed, or even eliminated under the new Conservative administration.
Like abortion and Affirmative Action, the ultra-Conservative majority of the Supreme Court has already set this into motion by limiting the power of the EPA and making the courts the arbiters of any rules a business seeks to oppose, overturning the Chevron decision.
Despite the fact we learned in elementary school that there are three equal branches of the federal government, Project 2025 claims that the true intent of the Founding Fathers was to create a hierarchical system, with the Executive branch having the lion’s share of power. It is what is known as the Unitary Executive Theory.
This form of government removes any form of Congressional oversight of the president. So, the president would no longer be subject to impeachment for any alleged illegal actions. This has been further bolstered by the recent Supreme Court decision that declared that the president enjoys immunity from prosecution when such actions are in the performance of “official acts” of the president.
Project 2025 claims that a more powerful Executive branch would be able to reign in government spending and put Federal tax dollars to better use by funneling them to areas that are more supportive of the Conservative Promise, such as securing the Southern Border, while cutting funding for foreign aid and reckless spending on groups like NATO. All of it is part of the Republicans' effort to create a White Christian nation, to the detriment of anyone who does not fit that description.
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