By Karen Dolan
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
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.
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.
Karen Dolan directs the Criminalization of Race and Poverty Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
