Since I last wrote about Project 2025, the topic has sprung up all over the news, at least here in the United States. I’m glad it’s getting more attention because we all need to know what could be at stake in the November 2024 election. Whenever you elect a leader, you’re not just getting that person–you’re getting their platform and all of their multitude of advisors and legal staff. And those people contribute to government decisions that affect all of our lives.

If you read Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, it lays out what this particular group of people (The Heritage Foundation) believes a “conservative” U.S. government should look like. Why this specific group of people gets to decide that I’m not sure… And why is this an issue? Well, many people consider Donald Trump a “conservative” (although I’m not clear on the exact definition of the word), and so on the face of it, Project 2025 looks like a mandate for him to follow if he is elected President in November.

Look at the table of contents, and you can click on any of topic to see what Project 2025 has to say about it. For example, under Section 2: The Common Defense, under “Media Agencies,” it lists the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) on page 246. Click on that topic to go to the section that discusses CPB:

“To stop public funding is good policy and good politics. The reason is simple: President Lyndon Johnson may have pledged in 1967 that public broadcasting would become ‘a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families and to provide assistance to our classrooms,’ but public broadcasting immediately became a liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.”

Whether or not you agree with that statement, what concerns me is that a group of people not elected by the citizens of the United States have taken upon themselves to dictate national policy. How influential is this group of people? Will Project 2025 actually have an effect on national laws?

Section 3 discusses “The General Welfare,” which includes so much that I have taken a screenshot:

You might ask, what’s the big deal about an organization making recommendations to a U.S. President? It depends where you stand. If you are a person who would gain from those recommendations, you might welcome Project 2025. But otherwise, you have a solid chance of being hurt by it. If taken at face value, Project 2025’s “mandate” would affect just about every person in the country. Here’s a section from page 139, discussing the Department of Homeland Security:

“The bloated DHS bureaucracy and budget, along with the wrong priorities, provide real opportunities for a conservative Administration to cut billions in spending and limit government’s role in Americans’ lives. These opportunities include privatizing TSA screening and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program, reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government, eliminating most of DHS’s grant programs, and removing all unions in the department for national security purposes.”

If you live in a state with many natural disasters, your state could face the burden of paying for the bulk of recovery efforts, rather than FEMA. If you work for TSA or a number of other government agencies to be cut or scrapped, you would likely need find a new job.

Looking at the following section on page 485, under “Department of Health and Human Services,” it is very hard to see who would benefit from this change to the “women’s preventative services mandate” that was issued under the Affordable Health Care Act:

“Ensure that training for medical professionals (doctors, nurses, etc.) and doulas is not being used for abortion training. HHS should ensure that training programs for medical professionals—including doctors, nurses, and doulas—are in full compliance with restrictions on abortion funding and conscience-protection laws.”

So called “abortion training” is vague — does this mean that doctors wouldn’t be able to perform a D&C (Dilation and curettage) for women who’ve had miscarriages? Without a D&C tissue can remain in the uterus and can become infected. And what are “conscience-protection” laws? Whose conscience are we talking about? And, in theory, could businesses who don’t want to pay for their employees’ healthcare use this as a way to get out of paying for it?

Under this same umbrella, Project 2025’s mandate would “eliminate men’s preventive services from the women’s preventive services mandate.” Huh? Which preventative services? Oh, yes, CONDOMS because they are used exclusively by men. But… aren’t condoms primarily used to prevent pregnancies in WOMEN? I don’t believe any men wear them just for the fun of it…?!!

I could literally go on for pages — Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership is 881 page long, not including cover pages, etc… So, take a look at it for yourself, peruse the table of contents, and click on a topic that affects you the most. If you are a veteran, you might want to check out the Department of Veterans Affairs on page 641. If you are a caregiver of school-aged children or an educator, check out page 319, which deals with the Department of Education.

Okay, here’s a spoiler from page 319: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” The idea seems to be that states regulate their public education institutions with no help from the federal government. How about states that don’t have a lot of money? And what if one state doesn’t want to include literature in their public curriculum? Or algebra? How would those students’ skills translate to the rest of the country?

Read the sections of the Mandate for Leadership for yourself and decide what it means for your and your community’s future. A lot is on the line in November 2024.