Source: The Associated Press
With the stated objective of fighting against the extreme right-wing Project 2025 agenda for a second Donald Trump presidency, a group of U.S. House Democrats has come together to launch a task force to stop the plan from taking hold should the twice-impeached convicted felon win November’s election.
Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California unveiled The Stop Project 2025 Task Force on June 11, The Associated Press reported. The move shows how seriously congressional Democrats and outside organizations treat the threat posed by a potential second Trump term.
“The stakes just couldn’t be higher,” Huffman told The AP. He said the Project 2025 agenda will hit “like a Blitzkrieg” and lawmakers need to be ready.
“If we’re trying to react to it and understand it in real-time, it’s too late,” he said. “We need to see it coming well in advance and prepare ourselves accordingly.”
Project 2025, also called the “Mandate for Leadership,” is the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s 850+ page “Presidential Transition Project” that was created as a plan of action to quickly help staff a new Republican administration with a blueprint for demolishing important parts of the federal government and installing MAGA Republican loyalists in key positions for another Trump term.
The goal of Project 2025, The Associated Press reported in 2023, is “to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to [Trump’s] own.”
The Trump team has repeatedly told reporters that outside organizations don’t speak for the campaign or the recently convicted ex-president himself, but Project 2025 was drafted with contributions “from a long list of former Trump administration officials who are poised to fill the top ranks of a potential new administration,” according to The Associated Press.
The AP reports that central to Project 2025 is the firing of thousands of civil servants who will then be replaced “with personnel from a database of applicants” that was put together to ensure that there will not be a repeat of Trump’s first term, when some of his more extreme ideas were stymied or blocked by employees who refused to break norms or overextend presidential powers. Under Project 2025, these positions would be staffed by people who will do as they’re told and not ask questions.
Huffman’s task force is just the latest group to fight back against the Project 2025 agenda. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced in early June that they were preparing potential legal action to stop Trump’s campaign promise to begin mass deportations of immigrants on the first day of his presidency if elected. The ACLU said they will be releasing multiple memos that detail how the organization plans to respond to a second term by either Trump or Biden.
Organizations are also making plans to take on threats to democracy should Trump’s plans to pardon those convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol, his attacks on the judicial system and his threats of vengeance on political enemies take hold, The AP reported.
While Project 2025 calls for extreme changes in the way the federal government operates in nearly every area, some of the plan’s most damaging and extreme changes would be made in the field of public education.
As Rob Schofield, editor of NC Newsline, wrote in a May editorial, Project 2025 would end the nation’s oldest and largest federal program for the support of public education – Title I, plus gut the country’s free school meals program and eliminate the Head Start program.
Title I aids schools with large populations of low-income students and in the current fiscal year, has allocated $20.5 billion to districts across the country. Every one of North Carolina’s 115 districts – and 90% of all the country’s school districts – benefit from Title I funding.
Project 2025’s take on public education is to put the onus on individual states to figure out how to run their schools and education programs without any assistance from the federal government, which would spell disaster for states like North Carolina where Republican leadership consistently ignores the needs of the state’s public schools, educators and students.
Back in Washington, Huffman’s group is currently made up of around a half-dozen House Democratic lawmakers and there are plans to begin briefing fellow lawmakers about Project 2025, hold a forum about it on Capitol Hill as well as inform voters about the ideas within the agenda.
The hope is that the group will be able to provide a hub of information for lawmakers, voters and organizations about the plan’s various policy proposals, including reproductive rights, immigration and others.
