Project 2025, a sweeping proposal to increase the power of the presidency while dismantling other aspects of the federal government, has become a contentious issue in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
The conservative blueprint was written under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation working with other groups. It has become a controversial campaign issue, sharply criticized by Democrats and government watchdogs. The sprawling document, written as a playbook for a future Donald Trump administration, has ties to dozens of people who worked in the former Trump administration or his campaigns. Though Trump and his allies often rail against a supposed “deep state,” Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 in recent days.
Lost in the arguments is the question of what Project 2025 would mean for the economy.
Heritage itself says it speaks for no campaign or candidate. Still, the links to Trump are clear.
Project 2025 was primarily authored by his allies and former appointees — many of whom would likely help staff a second Trump term — who have said it is a game plan for his return to the White House. Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, called it a framework for “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
“This is a game for pretty high stakes,” said William Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “This would be a major change in the way that the bureaucracy does business. It does not mean eliminating the bureaucracy, it’s bringing it to heel.”
The focus of the debate about Project 2025 has been its vision for further limiting abortion, beefing up White House control of the Justice Department, nurturing religion, abolishing the Department of Education and reducing attempts to curb climate change.
The plan also calls for a national abortion database, a ban on abortion pills, the elimination of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and a rollback in regulations to make it harder for companies to claim workers are independent contractors, not employees.
Contrary to some claims, there is no reference in Project 2025 to slashing Social Security. But the plan does call for more restrictive rules on a number of social programs aimed at lower-income Americans. Project 2025 recommends adding more stringent work requirements to the SNAP program, often called food stamps, while cutting back on free school lunches, arguing that too many children are receiving benefits.
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
In less heralded ways, the plans will shake the economy.
A spokeswoman for the Heritage Foundation declined to comment on the possible economic impacts of Project 2025. She also declined to recommend any economists who might have reviewed it favorably.
The plan calls for the president, by executive order, to reclassify tens of thousands of Civil Service employees as political appointees. That would allow them to be fired and replaced with people committed to the president and anxious to help carry out the new policies.
And embedded in the plan’s 900-plus pages are policies that could change arrangements in the nation’s 160 million-person labor market, the banking system that underpins the $25 trillion economy and the wages and costs that are borne by America’s consumers.
The Federal Reserve
The authors of Project 2025 argue that much of the current bureaucracy is “woke,” that is, sensitive to race and other diversity concerns, while they burden American companies with expensive and complicated requirements.
Among the targets of their harsh criticism is the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve.
Condemned at times by both left and right, the Fed was created in 1913 to stabilize the banking industry and act as a kind of manager for the economy’s excesses. The Fed sets the benchmark interest rate, which ripples through to many others through mortgages, car loans and credit cards. The Fed also backstops banks when things go bad.
But Project 2025 sees the Fed as the cause for the boom-and-bust cycles it was meant to control.
The next conservative president should think about legislation that would “effectively abolish” the Fed and replace it with “free banking,” where interest rates would not be government-controlled, writes Paul Winfree, a former Trump White House official, in Project 2025. He argues for curbing its “last resort” support for troubled banks.
Emily Gee, senior vice president at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said gutting the Fed would court disaster. The Fed kept the many bank failures of the Great Recession from causing a greater collapse, she said, by buying up a bank’s assets and arranging their sale to a healthier bank.
“At some point, you could have a run on a bank where people had loaned money and they don’t get their money back,” she said. “The Fed loans to a bank on an emergency basis to prevent a run.”
The failure of several banks last year, especially Silicon Valley Bank, was contained so that everyday Americans did not lose their savings, Gee said. “That is potentially financial ruin for ordinary middle-class families. It would lead to fear that there are insolvencies at other institutions. That’s why it’s critical to have that kind of backstop to the financial system. It’s to prevent a larger meltdown of the financial system.”
Other financial regulators would also come in for reshaping under the Project 2025 plan for being “ineffective, costly, opaque, and largely impervious to reform.”
The plan calls for abolishing several regulatory agencies, melding their functions into the Securities and Exchange Commission, while changing rules to make it easier for entrepreneurs to raise money. And as with other parts of the bureaucracy, Project 2025 calls for an end to “racist policies,” meaning anything “in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
While very critical of the Heritage plan, economist Caroline Fohlin of Emory University said changes to financial regulations may not be a bad idea.
It depends how far conservatives want to go, she said. “It can get onerous, it can be excessive, and it can hurt smaller companies. But if we make it more difficult for investors to have important information about what a company is doing, that would be bad.”
“It took the SEC a long time — too long — to uncover what Bernie Madoff was doing. Under this kind of plan, that would have gone on longer.”
Immigration
Immigration, a hot-button issue politically, is also an economic question.
Millions of people are in the United States without appropriate documents, although many of them came here legally and then stayed when their visa expired. There has also been an ongoing — if erratic — stream of people arriving at the southern border, some applying for asylum at the more than 100 checkpoints, some trying to slip into the country between the federal presence.
Project 2025 describes immigration as a border crisis: “Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized.”
That call dovetails with Trump’s vow to set up camps to detain and deport immigrants who do not have legal status.
“Prioritizing border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation, is critical,” the Project says. Immigration agencies should be more efficient at “the civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate.”
Economists warn that an emphasis on preventing — or undoing — immigration could deprive employers of needed workers.
“You go find undocumented people — guess what? They are not unemployed,” said Emory economist Fohlin. “They are in agriculture, poultry plants, food production. They are doing low-wage jobs, jobs that citizens don’t want to do.”
Immigrants add to the labor pool, often taking hard-to-fill jobs, while also adding to demand for goods and services.
Foreign-born workers account for 17.3% of the workforce, up from 16.5% in 2010, 12.4% in 2000 and only 9.2% in 1990, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Immigrants have been a crucial reason that the economy rebounded so strongly after the Covid shutdowns of 2020, Fohlin said. “We had a labor shortage — women exiting the labor force, becoming caretakers, we had a lot of people dying. Do you want to crack down on immigration and deport immigrants? There’s going to be a major hit to the work force.”
Tariffs
On tariffs, the right is split, and so is Project 2025.
The free trade faction, once a dominant force in Republican politics, believes in few obstacles to investment across borders. In Project 2025, Kent Lassman, the chief executive of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that eliminating “the destructive Trump–Biden tariffs” would make goods cheaper. He rejects the idea of any deals aimed at protecting organized labor or environmental groups.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
In sharp contrast, Trump has called himself “a tariff man.” Former Trump appointee Peter Navarro argues in Project 2025 for aggressively using tariffs to protect manufacturing and the defense industry. The U.S. should “decouple” its economy from China’s, he writes.
Either position will have economic fallout, but in the short-term, tariffs raise prices of imported goods.
“It’s a retreat from globalization,” said Galston of Brookings. “It’s going to be pushing against the efforts of the Federal Reserve Board to restrain inflation. It might force the Fed to reverse any rate decreases they make. And that would be bad for the consumer.”
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