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election 2025
Project 2025 Wants to Put a Dagger in the Heart of the American Dream
This dangerous, sweeping takeover of a society that’s made huge strides toward equality over many decades threatens to take us back to a “Gilded Age,” where only the very wealthiest white families and corporations benefit from government policy.
Sep 13, 2024
Maybe you’ve heard some of the buzz about “Project 2025.” What is it — and what would it mean for you and your family?
Project 2025 is a proposed “transition plan for a new Republican administration” put together by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. It’s an in-depth list of what conservative groups will push for in the event of a Trump victory in the fall.
And it poses serious dangers to families and the middle class. It would drastically defund social programs that millions rely on, including Medicaid, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It would defund public schools, roll back housing assistance, and cut regulations that protect consumers and the environment.
It’s a dense document, but here are six key takeaways on this pending catastrophe for working people.
1. Millions of Americans will lose health care.
Project 2025 not only slashes Medicaid but would entirely eliminate the Affordable Care Act, the popular healthcare program that helps Americans afford care and guarantees coverage to customers with pre-existing medical conditions. This would cause millions to lose their coverage.
Though we have yet to fully realize the dream of equality and justice for all, we can only achieve it by expanding the hard-won, effective social progress we’ve achieved so far.
The plan also rolls back the Inflation Reduction Act provision allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. Currently, the law caps life-saving insulin at $35 per month and caps out-of-pocket Medicare costs at $2,000 annually. Care for seniors will get a lot more expensive if those protections are taken away.
2. Children will be sicker, poorer, and hungrier.
Children, especially those in low-income households, would be harmed the most. Their reduced access to health care could lead to higher rates of illnesses, developmental delays, long-term inequities in opportunities, and even preventable deaths.
Proposed cuts to food assistance programs, such as free school meals and SNAP, would increase food insecurity for millions of Americans — especially children. And children who experience hunger and malnutrition are at a greater risk of long-term cognitive and physical developmental challenges, which can poorly affect their life outcomes.
3. Public schools will suffer.
Project 2025 calls to eliminate the Department of Education, which funds programs for students with disabilities and meals for hungry kids, helps parents get before care and after care, enforces civil rights protections, and helps people pursue postsecondary education.
This extremist agenda would also eliminate Head Start. The subsidized preschool program, which has served over 40 million kids, promotes early childhood development and provides childcare to parents who are working or studying to escape poverty.
Instead, public funding would be funneled into wasteful private school vouchers and charter schools.
4. Millions of families will be criminalized.
Mixed-status families, which include both citizens and undocumented immigrants, face the unthinkable reality of a loved one being deported under Project 2025. And families that include LGBTQ+ members face the dystopian reality of discrimination and criminalization.
5. Food, water, and air will be poisoned.
Project 2025 also drastically reduces or eliminates regulations that protect our communities, workplaces, and environment. This is especially dangerous for people in low-income areas and communities of color, which are more often located near industrial areas and exposed to pollution and environmental hazards.
6. Only the wealthy win.
Project 2025’s other main goal is yet more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, which would starve public investments and codify inequality by only helping those who need it the least.
This dangerous, sweeping takeover of a society that’s made huge strides toward equality over many decades threatens to take us back to a “Gilded Age,” where only the very wealthiest white families and corporations benefit from government policy.
Though we have yet to fully realize the dream of equality and justice for all, we can only achieve it by expanding the hard-won, effective social progress we’ve achieved so far. Project 2025 is a blueprint to end that American Dream.
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The Giant Difference a Teeny-Tiny Robinhood Tax on the Rich Would Make
Why a financial transaction tax deserves to be center stage for the upcoming 2025 tax policy fight.
Aug 16, 2024
This year’s presidential race has unfolded like a made-for-TV drama, with twists and turns aplenty. But no matter who wins the White House or Congress, a giant tax fight awaits them next year — when a number of the 2017 tax cuts for the rich and businesses expire.
Part of that fight will be about closing loopholes the very wealthy use to pay lower tax rates than teachers or custodians. But let’s not forget the Wall Street high rollers who gamble in our markets, putting everyone’s investments at risk.
One proposal that could make waves is a Wall Street tax — also called financial transaction tax, or FTT — on stock, bond, and derivative trades. Think of it as a small sales tax for Wall Street trades, like the taxes the rest of us pay when we buy shampoo or shoes.
My organization, Public Citizen, was one of over a hundred that signed a recent letter to Congress calling for meaningful tax reform that fairly generates more revenue and creates more inclusive economic growth.
And I’m here to say an FTT would check all of those boxes and more.
Just a 0.1 percent tax — that’s 10 cents on every $100 of stocks, bonds, and derivatives trades — would generate an estimated $752 billion over 10 years. That would be more than enough to cover free universal preschool, free community college, and national paid family and medical leave — combined.
In addition to a boon for revenue, an FTT would also be a win for tax fairness, since the bulk of it would be paid by the very wealthy, who own and trade the vast majority of stocks.
FTTs are a tried and true solution that many other nations have used to generate significant revenues from the very wealthy and put them into public programs for all — which is why the FTT is often called the “Robin Hood tax.” It could do the same thing in the United States, reinvesting those revenues into creating a more level playing field.
Another benefit? An FTT would tame high-frequency trading, where computer programs ping-pong trades in the blink of an eye, which allows them to get in front of slower moving traders and eke out a miniscule profit on each trade. Because of the volume of trading these firms engage in, all of those tiny profits stack up to huge paydays.
These high-frequency trading algorithms tend to follow each other, somewhat like lemmings throwing themselves off a cliff. That can wreak havoc in the market, as it did during the 2010 Flash Crash when $1 trillion was lost in the U.S. markets in a matter of minutes.
Even a tiny tax on all those trades would make that computer-driven, high-frequency trading less desirable — which would make our markets safer.
Given that it’s a win-win idea, many prominent voices favor taxing Wall Street trades. Former Treasury Department officials like Robert Rubin, Antonio Weiss, Kim Clausing, and Natasha Sarin support taxing financial transactions. Jared Bernstein, who chairs the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, also supports FTTs.
With these financial all-stars backing the proposal — and even some conservative voices weighing in in favor of taxing Wall Street trades — FTTs deserve their time in center stage during the upcoming 2025 tax fight.
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Conservative Philanthropy's Plan for a Corporate Coup
What if every federal department was run by Betsy DeVos?
Apr 25, 2024
Imagine it’s Monday, January 20, 2025, and by the end of the day, somewhere between 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of the 2 million federal government employees are summarily out of a job. A skeleton crew made up of a list of far-right, free-market conservatives excited to carry out an unpopular anti-democratic agenda has replaced them. Their marching orders are to cater to big business and rot every institution established to protect our lives, from education to transportation, from housing to labor to environmental protections to healthcare and more.
This is not a far-fetched dystopian nightmare.
It’s a plan outlined in a more than 800-page document from the conservative Heritage Foundation called Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership.
The Heritage Foundation is compiling and vetting a list of thousands of extremist operatives like DeVos who have little to no experience running programs for the American people, but are eager to wreak similar havoc across our entire government
This supposed “Mandate for Leadership” was drafted in collaboration with more than 50 organizations and 360 so-called “experts” from the conservative movement to promote policies based on free enterprise and limited government. If implemented, the plan would gut the governmental agencies that should be working for the people and replace anyone left standing with corporate shills.
What’s In Store If Heritage DeVos-ifies America
What would the unraveling of these democratic cornerstones look like? Imagine if every department in the U.S. was run by a Betsy DeVos. As a reminder, former President Donald Trump appointed DeVos as the secretary of education despite her having no experience with public education as a student, teacher, or leader. Her sole qualification was loyalty to a free-market agenda and a vision to privatize public schools.
Among the disastrous policies she advanced, DeVos:
- Proposed a $7B cut to public education with a significant portion of that defunding aid for students with disabilities;
- Advocated for a voucher program to siphon money out of public schools into private hands; and
- Proposed increasing guns in schools by using funding intended for student enrichment to purchase weapons for teachers.
The Heritage Foundation is compiling and vetting a list of thousands of extremist operatives like DeVos who have little to no experience running programs for the American people, but are eager to wreak similar havoc across our entire government from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice and more.
Anti-Democratic Philanthropy
Philanthropy isn’t neutral. Organizations like Heritage exemplify how the philanthropic sector is weaponized to rig systems in favor of their donors' quest for political and economic power. Heritage donors receive huge tax breaks on the millions of dollars they give to fund this work. Not only do the American people lose out on those tax dollars that should be funding our schools—among other things—but Heritage is more than happy to conceal those donor identities. I couldn't find their donors online and they don't seem to be in their 990s. Their donors may not want to be publically linked to this anti-democratic plan, but Project 2025 is their path to roll back the remaining safeguards protecting our communities from corporate greed. If they have their way, we can thank the Heritage Foundation’s nameless donors for more toxins in our water, fewer teachers in our schools, and fewer protections for workers.
Public Harms vs. Public Goods
Conservative initiatives like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are the antithesis of the vision the Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF) and our grant partners have for the future. In response to their authoritarian agenda, nonprofits and donors alike should collectively double down to use our resources to resist pressure from those groups that are clearly at odds with the work needed to build a just society.
At MCF, we use our endowment to advance a vision of a government that digs deeper to serve everyday people and prioritizes safeguarding the natural resources, educational institutions, and infrastructure we rely on to live lives of dignity, health, and well-being.
Instead of slashing government jobs or “slitting throats” on day one as one of our government officials so plainly phrased it, the future we’re fighting for is one where well-paid, dignified public jobs help people economically obtain what they need and deserve to live good lives. We know that advancing the unfinished business of racial and economic justice is generations in the making. We’re committed to funding the grassroots organizations building community power to make it possible.
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