Project 2025’s National Nightmare for “The General Welfare”

If you want a cheat sheet of right wing domestic priorities about human beings, these three pages in the 2025 workbook are all you need.

Be forewarned; much of the policy or enforcement throughout is based on “everybody knows” thinking that is partially or completely false. Straw man problems with fear attached are a central MAGA organizing principle. 

The basic premise here is that the agencies overseeing domestic spending are wasting taxpayer money and are at the heart of the administrative state (aka Deep State). They all need to be purged of Biden-favoring employees and policies, particularly those related to gender, discrimination, and racial bias.

They are most offended by the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically the Medicare/Medicaid part, which the authors hold responsible for the entire national debt. 

Medicare/Medicaid has cost $17.8 trillion since showing up in the budget in 1967 and the deficits since that time total out to $17.9 trillion. What more evidence do you need? Eh, let’s look anyway.

In a world where the government is supposedly best when it is run like a business (or even a patriarchal household), owing money is sinful. The deficit has been transformed into a moral issue, one that threatens people’s every existence. 

The best way to measure the deficit is to compare it to the gross national product (GNP). In fiscal 1967, the national debt totaled 33% of the GNP. Today it stands at 123% –it’s actually declined since 2020–, which doesn’t mean all that much unless (going back to the family budget concept) the bank calls in the mortgage. Fortunately, the U.S. has excellent credit, a track record of increasing productivity, and our debt is beloved by investors.

This ratio actually declined in the 1970s (for a variety of reasons). Then came Ronald Reagan.  Over the next 26 years, the ratio more than doubled. It fell during the last years of the Clinton administration.

Then September 11, 2001 happened. We went to war against an enemy driven by ideology and not beholden to any land mass. It took a while to figure out (and there are still holdouts) and cost unbelievable sums of money. It’s possible that the country would have saved money if we’d just offered health care to the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Then 2008 happened. The economy collapsed. Greed and lack of supervision created a system based on false promises. Millions of people were unemployed, lost their jobs, or had their homes repossessed.

Then COVID happened. Once again the economy collapsed as a pandemic killed more than a million people. Another house of cards  –based on externalizing industrial production to countries with cheaper labor– fell, as supply chains failed. These were the days when grocery stores were stripped bare.

The people behind this economic failure needed an excuse, and blaming the government at all levels provided a twofold opportunity; it distracted attention from the overall economy and facilitated anti-government sentiment.

This is why government measures taken during the pandemic gets number two billing in Project 2025’s hit list. Oh, and all those measures taken to prop up people’s personal economic situations and businesses decimated by the health crisis ran up the national debt.

The Center for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health were made into targets, accused of “the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people”  and paying for research in aborted baby body parts,  experiments where the genes of humans and animals were mixed, “and “gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.”

Now the country awaits a resurgence of childhood diseases like whooping cough and polio. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the elimination of the Head Start program because it’s “fraught with scandal and abuse” and provides “little or no long-term academic value for children.” 

The misery theoretically averted with all this domestic spending is, according to the theocrats, actually bliss for the little people, who must keep their heads down as they await the rapture. The faithful will ascend to heaven. Democrats will stay in hell. MAGA.

Project 2025 also takes aim at the Justice Department, which stands accused of being involved in legal warfare against upstanding American citizens like Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, along with the peaceful tourists who overran the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Crime, according to these folks, is committed by career criminals, criminal organizations, and those involved in interstate drug activity.  The FBI is to be stripped down as punishment for disloyalty. The Trump Administration’s “China Initiative” will be revived, even as Asian students and researchers are racially targeted.

The Department of Education is accused of being a “woke cartel.” The words Parents Rights are slung around to provide cover for anti-LBTGQ+ and racial bigotry. The goal of Project 2025’s envisioned next agency head will be to dismantle the agency.

The Secretary of Energy will be tasked with ending the “unprovoked war on fossil fuels, restore America’s energy independence, oppose eyesore windmills built at taxpayer expense, and respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own choosing.

Transformation of the food system as we know it will not be a priority of The Project’s vision for the  Department of Agriculture. Nope, the same old, same old, will be just fine to “respect American farmers, truckers, and families.  Furthermore, it claims that free school lunch programs have gone beyond their original purpose of serving meals to low-income students and now resemble “entitlement programs” which need to be cut. 

Maybe we can ask the Black Panthers to get back into feeding hungry kids.

It’s no surprise that the playbook calls for reducing the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s deemed a coercive agency that’s overstaffed and runs bloated programs. 

Yay, air pollution! People will say we have the very best smog. 

It’s only fitting that Project 2025’s section on Housing and Urban Development was written by Ben Carson, whose scandals and nepotism helped draw attention away from his reshaping of the agency’s purpose. Anti-discrimination policies were replaced with promises to encourage “self-sufficiency.”

Ben wants the agency to work on keeping noncitizens from living in federally assisted housing and “restore the family-supporting job as the centerpiece of the American economy.” Well, we certainly know he did his best to keep his family at the center of HUD’s operations.

The future Department of Transportation would be tasked with rolling back fuel economy standards for autos which currently are “reducing Americans’ freedom while increasing costs.”

Finally, the Veterans Administration needs to be de-Bidenized by eliminating support for abortion, gender reassignment surgery, diversity initiatives, and aligning all policies with conservative pro-life values. Private sector delivery of VA health services, and administration of benefits would help reduce ‘bias’ found in the unionized federal employee workforce.

Not included in this Project 2025 overview of domestic agencies are the Departments of Interior, Labor, Commerce, Treasury, Export/Import Bank, Small Business Administration, Federal Reserve, Financial Regulatory agencies, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Electoral Commission,  and the Federal Trade Commission. I’ll get to those chapters in the playbook and more in the coming days.

There are policies not included in Project 2025 (to keep people ignorant so they won’t oppose) and policies that cut across the federal government, particularly with regard to women’s health care, LGBTQ+ humans, and racism. I’ve got a hundred plus days to write about the 2024 elections and think approaching the Heritage Foundation’s nightmare from those angles is important.

Tomorrow:
Junk Food and Parents Rights - Project 2025

Previously:
(Intro) Digging Deep into Project 2025 - (a multi-part Series)
Going Deep into Project 2025 - Partisan Priorities for Civil Servants
Project 2025: Christian Soldiers Marching Off to Land Wars
Homeland Security’s Authoritarian Role in Project 2025
What Can You Do For Trump Today? Project 2025’s Diplomats, Spies and Spokespersons
No Soup For You: Project 2025’s Foreign Aid Program

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Monday News You Should Read

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The 2016 Republican convention let extremists in. In 2024, they took the stage via Jason Wilson at The Guardian

• Charlie Kirk spoke on Monday night. His Turning Point Action Pac’s event last month hosted the likes of Candace Owens, the rightwing commentator with a lengthening history of antisemitic remarks; the Pizzagate conspiracy theory peddler Jack Posobiec, who has extensive links to extremists; and Alex Jones.

• Away from the main stage, extremism is just as evident in the party’s grassroots.

• The chair of the convention’s Arizona delegation, Shelby Busch, said in March of a Maricopa county election official, also a Republican, that if he “walked in this room, I would lynch him”. The remarks, reported last month, were recorded at a public meeting.

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We need to change the way we think about outdoor temperatures via Joseph G Allen at the Washington Post

• Policymakers have strategies to protect against extreme heat. New York City, for example, recently mandated air conditioning in new building construction by next year, and Portland, Ore., has begun distributing free air conditioners. Simple infrastructure enhancements such as white roofs can reflect the sun’s heat and reflect incoming solar radiation. And planting more trees adjacent to buildings helps create a canopy for the building and adjacent paved areas, reducing temperatures and heat deaths. There are also strategies focused on individual actions, such as finding shade, using fans, wearing loose clothing and reducing physical exertion.

• But these and other personal measures matter only if people and companies are aware there’s an issue, which means using the right data. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for instance, recently proposed requiring shade, water breaks and acclimatization periods for workers, but the rule relies on heat index, not wet-bulb temperature, even though the agency has explicitly said elsewhere that wet-bulb temp should be used.

• The goal should be to help people experiencing extreme heat to protect themselves. We have the tools to measure this correctly; we just need to use them.

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Sara Jacobs Could Be the Next Nancy Pelosi by Will Huntsberry at Voice of San Diego

• Pelosi told me that most people come into Congress wanting the spotlight, but that Jacobs entered in an “inquisitive mode.” For Pelosi, that was an immediate good sign. Having power in Congress requires coalition building, which requires knowing what other people want and a willingness to help them get it.

• “People [in Congress] want opportunities for themselves… [They] like to amass titles,” Pelosi said. “Sara has been discerning enough to prioritize opportunities for others, while also knowing what is important to herself.”  

• Jacobs, who is currently the youngest member of the House Democratic leadership team, is on a path to rise. She sits in a safe Democratic seat and could hold it for the rest of her life. If she can fuse alliances between the Democratic Party’s left wing and its center, while also working with Republicans, Jacobs may become San Diego’s most powerful politician in generations.