What if there was a blueprint for a future presidential administration to unilaterally lay waste to our constitutional order and turn America from a democracy into an autocracy in one fell swoop?
That is what one far-right think tank and its contributors created. And more than 100 other far-right organizations have now signed on to support that blueprint. What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe you have heard about Project 2025. It was cooked up by the far-right Heritage Foundation. That organization’s leader says we are in a “second American Revolution” that he suggests could turn violent if those who oppose their disastrous plan to kill our democracy do not get in line behind it.
For its 51-year history, the Heritage Foundation has always been an instrument of the far right. Around 2016, it started to become dangerously extreme. Project 2025, and its 900-page guidebook for ending the American experiment, is perhaps its most extreme — and dangerous — initiative yet.
The premise behind Project 2025 is that our constitutional system of checks and balances somehow is skewed against the American people based on their politics. It is an argument that itself exposes the extremity of those making it.
Our Constitution provides a framework, as do our democratic institutions, for political debate and disagreement within the natural parameters of our system of government. Although our country has too often bucked the very principles of our founding, we used to be able to agree that, generally, America is a Republic that elects its leaders through representative democracy. And that for our government to serve the best interests of all its people, we must protect debate and a free exchange of ideas, as well as the mechanisms of democracy itself and the separation of powers among the three branches of government.
Project 2025 wants to throw all that out the window. It attacks democratic institutions that separate nonpolitical civil service from loyalty to any particular party or leader. It prescribes purging the federal government of anyone who might be considered disloyal to the ruling party. It allows the president to usurp power from other branches of government, like Congress’s power of the purse. Project 2025 endorses presidential powers that include ignoring how Congress appropriates spending, where the president has the unquestioned authority to redirect congressionally passed spending at will.
Democracy Forward, a pro-democracy legal organization, refers to Project 2025 as “among the most profound threats to the American people.” That is due to the plan’s clear harm to the lives, livelihoods, and well-being of countless millions of Americans — “from attacking overtime pay, student loans, and reproductive rights, to allowing more discrimination, pollution, and price gouging,” according to Democracy Forward.
It is no wonder that when Americans learn about the Project 2025 roadmap, they reject its policy prescriptions overwhelmingly.
A recent survey by Navigator Polling found strong opposition to Project 2025’s possible impacts on healthcare: “83 percent oppose removing protections for people with pre-existing conditions, 81 percent oppose putting a new tax on health insurance for people who get coverage through their employer, and 80 percent oppose banning Medicare from negotiating lower prices and eliminating the $35 monthly insulin cap.”
Project 2025 also calls for defunding public education and eliminating Head Start, the early education program that serves a million primarily low-income children. It lights the path for actions that could reduce food assistance for 40 million people and cost hundreds of thousands of people their jobs.
Project 2025 also supports the defunding or dismantling of key federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is vital in tracking hurricanes and the impacts of climate change. Rather than acknowledging the urgent need for climate action, Project 2025 accuses NOAA of being “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” That is a level of climate denialism not even seen among fossil fuel companies and petrostate governments these days.
How could anyone in their right mind think eliminating agencies on the frontlines of climate science is a good idea at a time like this?? Our cities are cooking under extreme heat. Forests are burning. And experts say Hurricane Beryl, which just slammed Texas — the strongest tropical storm ever recorded this early in the season — indicates we could be facing one of the most devastating hurricane seasons ever. In Texas alone, Beryl killed at least eight people and caused power outages for more than 2.5 million in this summer’s extreme heat. And, again, the season is just getting started.
We have big problems to solve. An authoritarian power grab that guts checks and balances is no way to solve them. A strong democracy that is responsive to its people is the only way we will create a rising tide of opportunity that lifts all boats. It is the only way we will protect people’s fundamental rights and survive the climate crisis. We have seen enough examples of dictatorships around the world to know it is a road to failure and misery. Project 2025 emphasizes consolidating power, punishing political opponents, and making the government work for the powerful few over the many. That is not the country Americans want or deserve.
Ben Jealous is the executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.