Project 2025 — I Read It So You Don’t Have To.

Once I realized that “Project 2025” was going to be the Democrats’ latest boogeyman, a vague title to which they can ascribe any number of fever-dream warnings about a second Trump presidency because no one has read the damned thing, I decided to read the damned thing.

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The whole document. All 900+ pages.

The background: The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, has been producing a document like this for every presidential election since Reagan was in office: a series of exhaustive recommendations, covering every department in the executive branch. These documents have never, to my knowledge, been adopted in whole or in part as any campaign’s official platform; I would guess that the specific recommendations are looked over by the transition team member assigned to that department, in concert with other recommendations by other interest parties, and said transition team member makes a recommendation to the President-elect as they decide the direction the administration will go once the inauguration happens.

Using subject-matter experts (often people who had served in prior Republican administrations in the department in question) as the lead writer for each chapter, Project 2025 documents what are seen as the failure of each department, office, agency or commission and recommendations for reform, centering on several reiterated comments.

The biggest “extreme” bugaboo to the left (or it would be, if Democrats weren’t busy ascribing wholly fictitious policy recommendations to Project 2025, secure in the knowledge that no one in the press will actually call them out) is simply this:

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution states that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Therefore, the departments and agencies of the executive branch should follow the agenda of the President.  That’s not at all controversial when a Democrat is in the White House, as most of the bureaucratic machinery of the executive branch is populated by regulation-happy Democrat staff.  But when a Republican gets into office, suddenly the idea of the executive branch actually following the lead of the President in accomplishing the agenda thereof is “a threat to democracy.”

In chapter after chapter, Project 2025 examines operational flaws in each department and agency (and I had no idea there WERE this many agencies in the metastasized federal government), both simply administrative (inefficiency, duplication of function, mission creep, waste of taxpayer dollars) as well as positional (how embedded employees have circumvented or slow-walked lawful and legitimate policy directives of prior conservative administrations).  The specific recommendations for each office generally fall into these several categories:

• Trim down the departmental flowchart to purge inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
• Cut out all mission creep which takes the effort and attentions of that department away from its core responsibilities (for instance, any focus on D.E.I. or climate change in the I.R.S.).
• Cede to private industry any endeavor in which the federal government is in competition with free-market alternatives.
• As necessary, insert political appointees where necessary to make sure that the administration’s agenda isn’t suffocated by the inertia of longtime career employees.

All through, great care is taken to delineate which policy changes could be made simply by the instruction of a new Secretary or other department head, which should be made via the established rule-making process, which should be announced by Executive Order, and which would require the input of Congress to modify the legislatively established parameters and authority of that department or agency.  For instance, the chapter on the Department of Education acknowledges upfront that the abolition of that Department would be seen by many conservatives as the best-case scenario; however, as that is unlikely to happen unless there is a clear majority of conservative Republicans in both houses of Congress, the remainder of the chapter focuses on non-Congressional actions lying wholly under the executive branch which could mitigate departmental overreach and opposing agendas. (The dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security is also floated, with justification well-documented in its duplication of efforts and general inability to achieve the goals for which it was established.)

The other things the Left would have problems with are obvious to a plurality of the country, not “extremist”:

• Prevent those with gender dysphoria from military enlistment.
• Return federal definitions of “gender” to biological sex.
• Curtail the unequal application of law based on characteristics of sec, race, gender identity, religion… You know, that whole “equality before the law” idea.
• Stop using trade agreements as a Trojan horse to introduce left-leaning policies into foreign countries.

Especially heartening was the chapters that demonstrate that sometimes there isn’t “A” conservative position.  There are pro and con chapters for the Export-Import Bank (which I had not known was a thing), and “Fair Trade” vs. “Free Trade.” The chapter on the FCC has a lot of “on the one hand but on the other” because there’s definitely some tension between letting the market decide vs. treating social media as a public utility and virtual town square.

For most of the granular recommendations, I’m scarcely competent to judge specific policy recommendations for offices that I didn’t even know existed until I read this. One of my only solid disagreements with the proposals is, oddly enough, from the chapter on the Department of Justice:

ABSOLUTELY NOT. The idea that federal law enforcement is justified in “correcting” local legal matters is one of the areas in which Democratic administrations have overstepped their bounds most egregiously (see, for instance, all of the DOJ prosecutions for “violation of civil rights” in any case in which the courts with appropriate local jurisdiction didn’t give back the verdict the DOJ wanted.) If it’s bad when they do it, it’s bad when we do it.  The rectification of bad application of the law in local jurisdictions is in the hands of the citizens of that state, county or municipality; federal overreach will ALWAYS come back to bite the well-meaning busybody on the ass, even if it’s only in terms of the precedent they set for when the other party is in power.

(My other big objection is to the whole chapter on the Department of Labor. I know I’m in the minority on this, but I believe that the existence of the DOL is at least as violative of the 10th Amendment as the Department of Education is, and yet there’s not even a hint of abolishing or even curtailing the DOL’s overreach in the text.)

Bottom line: Dude, it’s mostly just what conservatives would recommend for the President. It’s not “extremist,” unless half of the country is extremist.  Democrats would, of course, disagree with most of the proposals put forth, which is — duh — why they wouldn’t vote for a conservative Presidential candidate.  But there’s nothing in here to justify the HANDMAID’S TALE WITH EXTRA RACISM claims that Leftists make for their useful idiots to lap up.