Democrats, some GOP, take aim at Project 2025
Democrats are zeroing in on Project 2025, hoping it will corral voters as polls show former President Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden.
The sweeping, 900-page plan drummed up by a conservative think tank targets the executive branch and lays out right-wing priorities for everything from America’s education system to the border and abortion restrictions.
“Project 2025 will destroy America,” Biden said in a social media video released Wednesday morning, paired with a website created by the Biden campaign breaking down the detailed proposal. The plan would “give Trump more power over your daily life, gut democratic checks and balances, and consolidate power in the Oval Office if he wins,” the website reads.
What would Project 2025 specifically do?
The Heritage Foundation created the plan, also known as the “2025 Presidential Transition Project,” in April 2023 for the country’s next conservative president to follow. It includes a list of personnel and a 180-day playbook.
Within the initiative are ideas to gut federal agencies, including the FBI; eliminate the Department of Education; ban abortion drugs and overhaul progressive policies such as the Affordable Care Act. The project’s website says it aims to “pave the way for an effective conservative administration” by putting forth an agenda and getting “the right people in place.”
On the campaign trail, Biden isn’t the only Democrat railing against Project 2025 as Democrats try to win over pivotal voters.
“It’s not just radical policy changes. It’s not just regime change that we might never recover from,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said Tuesday at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “It also is a kind of civilizational death wish.”
Rep. Jasmine
Crockett,
D-Texas, called Project 2025 a “playbook for authoritarianism” at a congressional hearing in May. Along with spreading awareness of the plan, progressives want to tie it back to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
The Center for American Progress and the left-leaning advocacy group Accountable.US released polling this week that they say shows public opinion is against the conservative plan, especially proposals to stop overtime pay and ban abortion nationally.
In a briefing Tuesday, the organizations say they are strategizing on how to inform more voters ahead of Nov. 5.
Many conservatives haven’t publicly embraced Project 2025. The Lincoln Project, a political action committee formed by anti-Trump Republicans, released a video Monday depicting what it calls a “terrible future” under a second Trump administration and the Project 2025 blueprint.
Trump himself has sought distance from Project 2025, writing on Truth Social Friday he knows “nothing” about the plan. But Democrats are pushing back, pointing out that several authors of the initiative worked in the Trump administration.