As Rick Perlstein notes, many of the ideas in Project 2025 are not new. Previous iterations appeared in conservative plans in 1921, 1973, and 1981, not to mention Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” of 1994. But, “The fact that conservatives have been trying so hard for so long is what makes it more dangerous. It’s our good luck that each time, some accident of history stood in the way of the worst right-wing plans.”

For a long time, conservative Republicans have wanted to dismantle protections for the middle class in favor of protections for the wealthy. A previous article in this series (“Project 2025: A Plan for Economic Misery,”), discussed proposed changes to tax indexing and the Child Tax Credit that would cost a family of four earning $90,000 a year an extra $6,600, while leaving more than $730,000 in the pockets of a family of four earning over $3 million.

Democracy Forward has a great web resource for this (PDF), that covers other impacts of Project 2025. I summarize their findings below.

Project 2025, if implemented, would harm the middle class, working people, and the unemployed and underemployed by:

• Removing Protection for Overtime Wages. Project 2025 looks to get rid of overtime protections. This could effectively strip overtime earnings from 4.3 million people, without giving them their time back.
• Eliminating Food Assistance. Under the guise of a draconian understanding of “individual responsibility” that is actually a way of harming the least fortunate, as many as 40 million people could lose food assistance.
• Eliminating Head Start. One of the most successful educational programs in the country, Head Start serves 1 million children. Project 2025 would eliminate it.
• Eliminating the American Rescue Plan (ARP), which has “created or saved 220,000 jobs.”
• Ending Negotiation of Prescription Drug Prices. In a give away to the pharmaceutical industry, Project 2025 advocates the end to using the government’s purchasing power to negotiate lower prices, as we have already seen the Biden administration successfully do.
• Limiting Veterans Disability Qualifications. The authors of Project 2025 seem upset that the government covers disabled veterans exposed to Agent Orange and Burn Pits/Airborne Toxins. It’s right there on pages 649–650. They begrudge helping disabled soldiers, who have risked life and limb to protect our country.
• Pushing Medicare Recipients to Accept Medicare Advantage (Private) Plans. Our elders have paid their whole lives into Medicare. Now that they are eligible for the benefits they have paid for, the authors of Project 2025 plan to push Medicare Advantage plans as the thin edge of the wedge to privatize elder health care and eliminate Medicare entirely.

The Republican Party and the Ultra MAGA movement that has taken it over have no interest in helping your family and friends. They only want to help the richest Americans. Project 2025 is trickle up economics, Robin Hood in reverse, stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

We need to win in November, because we are not going back!

Sources

• Rick Perlstein. “Project 2025 … and 1921, and 1973, and 1981: Terrifying blueprints for the next Republican presidency are a quadrennial tradition.” The Infernal Triangle (a newsletter of The American Prospect : July 10, 2024).
• “The People’s Guide to Project 2025.” Democracy Forward. (undated, but published in June 2024). PDF version.