“I’ve nothing to do with Undertaking 2025,” Donald Trump mentioned throughout final September’s presidential debate. “I haven’t learn it. I don’t need to learn it purposely. I’m not going to learn it.”
Such disavowals have been widespread on the marketing campaign path. However simply 100 days into his second time period, Trump has enacted lots of the key insurance policies specified by the Heritage Basis’s 922-page blueprint for a far proper takeover of the federal authorities. Of the 53 govt orders and actions Trump issued throughout his first week in workplace, greater than two-thirds aligned with proposals in Undertaking 2025’s “Mandate for Management,” a CNN analysis discovered. The parallels have solely continued from there. As we take inventory of the previous 100 days and brace for Trump’s remaining time in workplace, Undertaking 2025 will assist us not solely perceive the place we’ve been — but in addition provide a chilling roadmap of what should lie forward.
Increasing Government Energy
Central to Undertaking 2025’s agenda is the enlargement of presidential energy, the appointment of Trump loyalists to federal workplace, and the downsizing of the federal workforce and privatization of presidency capabilities.
In “Mandate for Management,” Russell Vought — who Trump has since tapped to steer the Workplace of Administration and Price range (OMB) — characterizes the aggressive use of govt energy as an “existential want” and argues {that a} profitable conservative president might want to evince a “boldness to bend or break the forms to the presidential will.” This strategy, Vought notes, will probably run into some authorized challenges, so the OMB’s director ought to appoint a normal counsel who’s “inventive and fearless in his or her capability to problem authorized precedents.”
Trump has definitely taken this directive to coronary heart — and then some. Elon Musk’s so-called “Division of Authorities Effectivity” (DOGE) has launched into a chaotic and illegal campaign to put off tons of of 1000’s of federal employees and get rid of businesses wholesale. A few of these efforts pulled straight from Undertaking 2025’s playbook, resembling freezing federal hiring — which Trump did on day one — and reclassifying authorities personnel as “at-will” staff to make them simpler to fireplace — one thing he ordered this month. However DOGE and Trump have gone even additional; as an illustration, whereas Undertaking 2025 really useful scaling again and “deradicalizing” the U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement (USAID), the administration moved to close the company down completely and freeze all federal overseas help.
Trump’s aggressive strategy to consolidating energy is instructive: Whereas he’s embraced the ethos of Undertaking 2025, we will count on to see actions that can proceed pushing past the doc’s bounds.
Enacting Mass Deportations
Trump promised mass deportations on the marketing campaign path, and Undertaking 2025 maps out varied methods for the administration to satisfy that pledge: increasing expedited removing applications, growing detention middle capacities, militarizing the border, sanctioning nations that don’t settle for deported immigrants, penalizing U.S. sanctuary cities, suspending the nation’s refugee help program and enlisting native legislation enforcement businesses for immigration enforcement. All of those techniques have appeared throughout Trump’s first 100 days. Nonetheless, a few of the president’s immigration actions, resembling declaring a nationwide emergency on the southern border and utilizing a 1798 legislation referred to as the Alien Enemies Act to hurry up deportations, transcend Undertaking 2025’s pages. His blatant disregard of federal judicial orders to halt deportation flights and facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia have thrust the nation right into a constitutional crisis. On April 28, Trump signed a brand new govt order to bolster the police state, offering elevated assets for the authorized protection of officers accused of wrongdoing and furnishing native legislation enforcement businesses with army tools.
Undertaking 2025 laid the groundwork for Trump’s immigration crackdown. Now, he’s utilizing the pretext of safe borders to broaden his authoritarian assault on civil liberties.
Anti-LGBTQ+ Insurance policies and Attacking Variety, Fairness and Inclusion (DEI) Packages
Trump’s assaults on DEI applications and LGBTQ+ individuals have intently mirrored Undertaking 2025’s suggestions. The playbook calls on the president to start out his time period by “deleting” phrases like sexual orientation, gender identification, variety, fairness, inclusion, gender equality, gender consciousness, and even simply “gender” from “each federal rule, company regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of laws that exists.” Then, it calls for that the federal authorities stop accumulating information on gender identification, prohibit funding for gender-affirming look after army members and expel transgender troops, rescind Biden-era Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ college students, reverse laws that prohibit LGBTQ+ discrimination in well being care, ban “important race principle” and “gender ideology” from public college curricula and formally acknowledge solely two organic sexes underneath federal legislation. Trump has both enacted or taken steps towards implementing all of those insurance policies throughout his first 100 days.
There are at the least two regarding Undertaking 2025 suggestions that we have now but to see play out. The playbook recommends rescinding Medicare protection for gender-affirming surgical procedure, claiming there may be “inadequate scientific proof to assist such protection in state plans.” Trump has banned using federal funds for gender-affirming care for individuals underneath the age of 19, slowly increasing the boundaries to outline 18-year-olds as youngsters for the needs of this order; the proposed language in Undertaking 2025 seems to use extra broadly to all adults as properly. The doc additionally outrageously characterizes “transgender ideology” as pornography and suggests classifying trans-affirming educators as “intercourse offenders.”
Abortion
Trump’s administration has adopted a lot of Undertaking 2025’s steerage on reproductive rights, together with banning federal help to worldwide teams that present abortion training and dropping Division of Justice lawsuits that goal to guard emergency abortion care at hospitals. Trump has frozen tens of hundreds of thousands in funding for Deliberate Parenthood and withdrawn Biden-era privateness protections for abortion care underneath HIPAA.
He has not, nonetheless, moved to reverse FDA approval of mifepristone, an abortion treatment, or ban its prescription by way of telehealth, a few of Undertaking 2025’s key proposals. Final 12 months, the Supreme Courtroom unanimously determined to throw out a lawsuit difficult the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Undertaking 2025 additionally endorses a federal invoice that requires states receiving Medicaid funding to implement abortion surveillance necessities — a harmful proposal that would bolster the nationwide criminalization of reproductive well being care.
Local weather and Surroundings
If the Inflation Discount Act was the crowning achievement of Biden’s presidency, it has rapidly been decimated by Trump’s first 100 days in workplace. Most of the president’s assaults on local weather and the atmosphere have been foretold as coverage suggestions in Undertaking 2025. The administration has paused the disbursement of Inflation Discount Act funds, expanded offshore drilling and oil drilling in Alaska, eradicated vitality effectivity requirements for home equipment, withdrawn from the Paris local weather settlement (once more), and moved to restart federal coal leasing. However Trump has as soon as once more taken up the mantle of Undertaking 2025 and pushed it even additional: He declared a nationwide vitality emergency to spice up home fossil gasoline manufacturing and circumvent laws, moved to roll back greater than 100 environmental guidelines and signed an govt order blocking states from passing their very own local weather change legal guidelines. And whereas Undertaking 2025 referred to as for “significant reform” of the Endangered Species Act, the Trump administration just lately proposed rescinding the act’s present definition of “hurt,” which might basically gut the rule’s enforcement.
The parallels proceed: Trump’s push to overtake the Federal Emergency Administration Company and offload its prices to the states was proposed by Undertaking 2025. So was his latest memo instructing Congress to defund public media, together with NPR and PBS.
However whereas a lot of Trump’s first 100 days adopted the script specified by the Undertaking 2025 playbook, it’s additionally clear that his purpose isn’t simply to empower the conservative motion — it’s to consolidate energy for himself. Undertaking 2025 already supplied a chilling imaginative and prescient of a far proper takeover of the federal authorities. The agenda Trump is implementing is much more disturbing: blatant disregard for court docket rulings, direct assaults on increased training and the press, strikes towards altering constitutional protections for birthright citizenship, and state-backed disappearances with out due course of. And it’s solely the primary 100 days.
Indignant, shocked, overwhelmed? Take motion: Assist impartial media.
We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the past months, every govt order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core a part of a method to make the right-wing flip really feel inevitable and overwhelming. However, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to recollect in Truthout final November, “Collectively, we’re extra highly effective than Trump.”
Certainly, the Trump administration is pushing by means of govt orders, however — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in authorized limbo and face court docket challenges from unions and civil rights teams. Efforts to quash anti-racist educating and DEI applications are stalled by training school, employees, and college students refusing to conform. And communities throughout the nation are coming collectively to lift the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and defend one another in shifting exhibits of solidarity.
It is going to be an extended struggle forward. And as nonprofit motion media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
As we undertake this life-sustaining work, we attraction in your assist. Please, for those who discover worth in what we do, be a part of our neighborhood of sustainers by making a month-to-month or one-time present.
Source link