Episode 2617
Project 2025
Tue, 2024-Jul-02 03:05 UTC
Length - 5:08
Direct Link
Welcome to Popular Wiki of the Day, spotlighting Wikipedia's most visited pages, giving you a peek into what the world is curious about today.
With 238,994 views on Monday, 1 July 2024 our article of the day is Project 2025.
Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, is a collection of conservative policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government in the event of a Republican Party victory in the 2024 presidential election. It proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of merit-based federal civil service workers as political appointees in order to replace them with loyal conservatives to further the objectives of the next Republican president. It also adopts a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory, a disputed interpretation of Article II of the Constitution of the United States, which asserts that the president has absolute power over the executive branch upon inauguration. Critics of Project 2025 have described this as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to turn the United States into an autocracy. Several experts in law and conservatives have indicated that it would undermine the rule of law, the separation of powers, and civil liberties.
Project 2025 envisions widespread changes across the government, particularly economic and social policies and the role of the federal government and its agencies. The plan proposes taking partisan control of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Commerce, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), dismantling the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and sharply reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production. The blueprint seeks to institute tax cuts, though its writers disagree on the wisdom of protectionism. Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be either transferred to other agencies, or terminated. Funding for climate research would be cut while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be reformed along conservative principles. The Project urges government to explicitly reject abortion as health care and eliminate the Affordable Care Act's coverage of emergency contraception. The Project seeks to infuse the government with elements of Christianity. It proposes criminalizing pornography, removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, as well as affirmative action. Some conservatives and Republicans also criticized the plan for its stance on climate change and foreign trade. Other critics believe Project 2025 is rhetorical window dressing for what would be four years of personal vengeance at any cost. The project's authors also acknowledged that most of the proposals would require controlling both chambers of congress. Other aspects of the plan have recently been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and would face court challenges, while others still are norm-breaking proposals that might survive court challenges.
The Washington Post reported that Jeffrey Clark, a contributor to the project and a former official within the DOJ, would advise the future president to immediately deploy the military for domestic law enforcement by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. The Project recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. It promotes capital punishment and the speedy "finality" of those sentences. Paul Dans, the project's director, explained that Project 2025 is "systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state." Dans acknowledged it was "counterintuitive" to recruit so many to join the government to shrink it, but pointed out the need for a future president to "regain control" of the government.
Although the project cannot by law promote a specific presidential candidate, many contributors have close ties to Donald Trump and his 2024 campaign. The Washington Post called the project the most detailed articulation of what Trump might do in a second term. While initially the Trump campaign said the project aligned well with their Agenda 47 proposals, the Project has increasingly caused friction with the Trump campaign which has generally avoided specific policy proposals that can be used to criticize him.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 03:05 UTC on Tuesday, 2 July 2024.
For the full current version of the article, see Project 2025 on Wikipedia.
This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
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Until next time, I'm neural Justin.
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