A Message From President Saunders
AFSCME Family:
While the news media has been focused on President Biden over the past two weeks, there has been increasing chatter on social media about Project 2025, the 900-plus page plan developed by former Trump administration officials that outlines exactly what a second Trump term will do. A summary of Project 2025 prepared by AFSCME’s Department of Research and Collective Bargaining Services is attached.
Project 2025 seeks to ban public employee unions like AFSCME, eliminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, and end the $35 cap on insulin and the government’s ability to negotiate drug prices for seniors. They are making it crystal clear: If Donald Trump and anti-worker politicians take the presidency, U.S. House and U.S. Senate, working people and American democracy will be under relentless attack.
We plan to highlight the very real threat Project 2025 represents for AFSCME members’ health and safety, union contracts, pay, health care, benefits and working conditions through a website, social media posts, convention programming and more. I strongly encourage you to make sure members understand what will happen if we stay home or vote third party in November.
Lee Saunders
President
AFSCME
Below is the Project 2025 Summary
Overview
Project 2025 is a Heritage Foundation initiative to create a governing agenda for Donald Trump should he win the presidential election in November. The leaders of the project state that its goal is to “go to work on Day One to deconstruct the administrative state.” The project also sets as its goals to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life, defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders and secure “God-given” individual rights to live freely. The project began in 2023. Twenty-seven of the 37 authors of its core agenda come from Trump’s first administration or close orbit. Far-right figure and former senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller is an advisor to the project. The project’s main publication is “Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise: Project 2025.”
Project 2025 also suggests legislation to make changes that are outside of executive control, such as banning public sector unions. Taken together with the recommended executive branch actions, these polices would significantly overhaul the whole of government. While Project 2025 is viewed as a blueprint for a Trump transition, it is far more extensive, underscoring why the fight for control of Congress is also critically important.
The Project 2025 name was given for the next administration, but the concept is not new. The Heritage Foundation produced a blueprint for the first Trump term, and 70 former Heritage employees worked within the Trump transition team or administration, implementing 64% of the report’s policies. The Mandate Project dates back to 1980, when Heritage published its first detailed guide to reforming the federal government on a department-by-department basis. Many of its conservative policy solutions were adopted by the Reagan administration, with the president referring to it as his governing “bible.” President Reagan distributed Heritage’s guide at his first cabinet meeting.
Policy Recommendations
Project 2025 includes hundreds of policy recommendations. These range from specific attacks on working people and unions to broad power grabs for the president. Proposals include:
• Attack on Labor: Project 2025 makes organizing unions more difficult by eliminating card check elections while accelerating the process to decertify unions by eliminating the contract bar rule.
The plan is especially hostile to public sector unions. It calls on the next administration to reverse President Biden’s executive office that improved federal labor relations, instead reverting back to Trump’s policies that severely limited federal unions. It suggests Congress consider banning public sector unions entirely, as is incompatible with constitutional government. The plan also suggests Congress authorize state and local government waivers from federal labor laws like the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act under certain conditions.
Private sector unions are also threatened as the agenda ends project labor agreements and repeals Davis-Bacon wage requirements.
• Health Care: Project 2025 calls for repealing the $35 per month cap on insulin costs for seniors on Medicare, as well as ending Medicare’s $2,000 per year cap on out-of-pocket drug costs that begins in 2025 and the federal government’s ability to negotiate drug prices.
The agenda advocates a lifetime cap on Medicaid coverage. Some proponents have suggested imposing a limit of 36 months. This would impact health care facilities and providers serving Medicaid patients including nurses, home care providers, emergency medical personnel and physicians as well as millions of beneficiaries. The report also encourages the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to clarify that states can adopt work incentives for able-bodied individuals receiving Medicaid.
The blueprint recommends eliminating merit staffing requirements for the Wagner-Peyser Employment Service and unemployment insurance workers, which would allow those merit staff to more easily be replaced by contractors.
• Head Start: Project 2025 proposes the complete elimination of the Head Start program, which serves more than 833,000 children living in poverty. Eliminating Head Start would drive up costs for all child care, since it would take away child care services when the demand for spots already far outpaces availability.
• Education: The document calls for dismantling the Department of Education to facilitate school choice and increase parental control over schools.
• Student Debt: Project 2025 would eliminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program enacted during the George W. Bush administration, phase out the income driven repayment program and end the Biden-Harris SAVE initiative.
• Immigration Reform: Project 2025 calls for dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and consolidating other immigration agencies, increasing fees for immigrants and allowing a fast-track option for higher fees. The project advocates an end to the prohibition against apprehending migrants in sensitive places like schools, playgrounds and churches and suggests using active-duty military personnel and the National Guard to help with arrest operations on the border. The project unsurprisingly calls for building a wall on the Mexican border.
• Economy: Project 2025 proposes massive cuts to both corporate and personal income taxes. The authors suggest the next administration should consider abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to gold-backed currency.
• Climate: The authors call for cutting federal money for renewable energy and increasing energy production and security. They also suggest that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a part of the Department of Commerce, be downsized due to their efforts to raise the alarm on climate change.
• Reproductive Rights: The word “abortion” appears 199 times in some form in the report, reflecting its extreme focus on this issue. Project 2025 proposes that the abortion drug Mifepristone be removed from the market entirely or limited to the first seven weeks of pregnancy. The agenda calls on the Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act, which, some argue, bans the mailing of abortion drugs.
The authors call for the federal government to penalize states that require abortion coverage in private insurance by reducing their Medicaid funding by up to 10%. They also call on CMS to disqualify any provider of elective abortions from Medicaid.
The plan recommends that the next president replace the Biden administration’s Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force with a “pro-life task force.”
• Gender Identity: The report calls on the Department of Health and Human Services to declare that “men and women are biological realities and married men and women are the ideal, natural family.”
• Unitary Executive: Project 2025 calls for Trump to place the entire federal bureaucracy under the direct control of the president, including agencies that historically acted with considerable independence such as the Department of Justice. The blueprint proposes the elimination of civil service protections for thousands of government employees who could then be replaced by political appointees who are beholden to the executive. Heritage claims this policy, known as the unitary executive theory, would streamline decision-making, ensuring a more efficient government.
