Eye Opening Look at What's coming: How Project 2025 Will Work

Project 2025 will be the guidebook for the next Administration, and it's what 55% of Americans voted for.  Read the summaries below and see how you will be affected. This includes Medicaid, Medicare, Healthcare, and Prescription Drug Prices. Outlawing and criminalizing abortions, monitoring pregnancies, and banning birth control. Removing LGBTQ rights.  Drastic effects on the Justice Dept, Education Dept, Dept of Commerce and eliminating the National Weather Service. (I'm a meteorologist, and that's just asinine).  Replacing government employees with political loyalists. 

Project 2025 Is Here - What it Means 

The 920-page document lays out a detailed far-right vision for Trump’s return to the White House. Here is what Project 2025 says about major policy issues — and what it could mean for the next four years.

Weather Forecasting 

• Gut  NOAA, the parent agency of the  National Weather Service & National Hurricane Center.
• Dismantle NOAA and eliminate climate change information 
• Eliminate federal forecasting which is critical to emergency response operations.

Health Care -  The 2025 Purpose: to reduce the federal government’s role in healthcare  

• MEDICARE - In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act gave the federal government power to negotiate directly with high-cost drug manufacturers for Medicare. Project 2025 will Remove that ability, so prices will rise.  
• MEDICAID (73 million low-income Americans rely on to pay medical expenses). Project 2025 would limit federal funding and ease rules for how states run their versions.
• LESS AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE - Adverse changes to the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Millions of low-income Americans would have a harder time paying for medical care, if they could get it at all.
• ABORTION NOT ALLOWED- Denying all abortions, including preventing abortion medications.

PROJECT 2025 to create a national backdoor abortion ban by invoking the Comstock Act — a 150-year-old law.  Trump could circumvent Congress and enact a ban on abortion pills in all 50 states using this archaic law.

• Banning abortion pills by revoking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone
• Allowing hospitals to deny emergency or life-saving abortion care
• Establishing an abortion surveillance system that monitors some pregnancies. Project 2025 would punish physicians
• women are criminalized for pregnancy outcomes like miscarriage and stillbirth.

NO SEX ED, CONTRACEPTION, BIRTH CONTROL, IVF - 

• Dismantle sex education, 
• ban emergency contraception, eliminate birth controls  
•  jeopardize access to fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization. 

REMOVAL OF LGBTQ+ RIGHTS

• Project 2025 undermines the rights of same-sex married couples, denies the existence of trans people, and makes it more difficult for LGBTQ+ Americans to access health care and other services. 
• Project 2025 says being transgender should be outlawed. 
• Under Project 2025, the newly named Department of Life would be required to take a “biblically based” stance that families consist of a married mother and father, and the agency would make it easier for religious adoption and foster care services to refuse to work with LGBTQ+ couples. 
• Project 2025 recommends reversing  LGBTQ+ workplace protections & discrimination. 

Executions 

• During the final six months of Trump’s presidency, his administration rushed to execute 13 people 
• Execute every prisoner on federal death row, currently 40 people.
• Expand use of the federal death penalty to non-homicide crimes, including violence and sexual abuse of children.  

Government Agencies 

• Purge the government of civil servants who aren’t loyal to him.
• In his first term, Trump signed executive order that would create a category called “Schedule F” in the federal workforce. The classification strips employment protections for civil servants  (It was repealed under Biden)
• Potentially leading to tens of thousands of federal workers losing their jobs — and being replaced by Trump loyalists 
• Censoring science 
• “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a 2023 speech reported by ProPublica  

The Justice Department 

•  Allows federal prosecutors to intervene in local prosecutors’ cases, sidestepping district attorneys  
• Gutting regulatory powers and oversight by administrative government.
• Use the Dept of Justice to go after people who have prosecuted Trump. 
• Commute or pardon Jan. 6 rioters  
• Jail his adversaries.

Education 

• Eliminate the Department of Education 
• End funding for low-income schools and programs for students with disabilities. 
• End protections of students from discrimination based on race, sex and gender identity.  
• No longer provide funding for education programs.  

Public Lands 

• Granting extractive industries near unfettered access to federally managed acres  
• Dismantles existing protected landscapes
• Eliminates protecting endangered species. 
• Repeals the Antiquities Act, the landmark 1906 law that 18 presidents have used to designate more than 160 national monuments. 

Federal News Radio: Project 2025 and your federal job: Better read up on this one

There's a LOT of frightening things in the "Project 2025" plan by right-wing conservatives should they win the white house. Not only does it say "national abortion bans," cuts to Medicare, cuts to social security and removal of countless rights, but it's also devastating to Federal Employees. They'll also come for Federal benefits and pension *and I just retired* - Federal News Radio outlined this frightening proposal.

Project 2025 and your federal job: Better read up on this one

Project 2025 is not some mysterious force from nowhere. Check out the project website to see who's behind it and their prescription for the federal workforce.

Tom Temin@tteminWFED  July 11, 2024 Federal News Radio

If you haven’t heard about Project 2025, you should check it out. The presidential candidates and their surrogates have been talking about it. For the Democrats, Project 2025 plan is evil incarnate. To Republicans, it’s a blueprint to make America great again.

The politics of it are a little complicated. Former President Trump has disassociated himself from Project 2025. Yet some of his peeps are part of it, such as former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff Paul Dans. Also former special assistant to Trump, Spencer Chretien.

In reality, Project 2025 is a production of the conservative Heritage Foundation. It presents a long-detailed set of policies and priorities for the next administration. Its full title: “2025 Presidential Transition Project.” It resulted from the convening of a few hundred conservative thinkers and a long list of similarly-minded think tanks. Love it or hate it, it’s out there for anyone to peruse. Oddly, when I asked for one of the federal workforce Project 2025 people to join me for an interview on The Federal Drive, they told me Project 2025 would not be “available.” I thought you might like to hear one of the Project 2025 thinkers in his own words.

Project 2025 also exists as a book, “Mandate for Leadership,” you can buy or read online. I was interested in Chapter 3, entitled, “Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy.”

You might have heard Project 2025’s plan for the federal workforce. Some have described it as a way to gut the merit-based civil service system and return to 19th century spoils. Without judging it on the merits, I will say that’s an overly simplified view.

I decided to look for myself. Trigger warning: The plan calls for the restoration of Schedule F. That civil service innovation came near the end of the Trump administration, and was rescinded on Day 3 of the Biden administration.

Schedule F would have moved certain career senior executives out from under Title 5 civil service protections. Namely, those whom Title 5 itself exempts from protection: People in positions to make or advocate policy. Such career people in effect would have been treated similarly to Schedule C appointees. An administration could dispatch them at will.

The Project 2025 authors see Schedule F as related to something they say every administration tries to do. In “burrowing” people down into the Senior Executive Service, the political types think they can embed their policy preferences into the permanent bureaucracy. They say Presidents Carter and Reagan tried to limit burrowing in the early days of the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA). Since then, “reserving accessible numbers of key policy positions as ‘career reserved’ … frustrate CSRA intent.” They cite “general domination by career staff on SES personnel evaluation boards” and “career-first policy and value viewpoints” as having frustrated the Trump administration, spurring Schedule F.

No one knows how many federal employees would have ended up in Schedule F. Agencies mostly didn’t finish the task of identifying them. The whole thing ran out of time. Project 2025 says, “It [Schedule F] should be reinstated, but SES responsibility should come first.”

Project 2025 also calls for reform of federal retirement benefits, but doesn’t specify how. But it states the Federal Employee Retirement System “remains much more generous” than what private sector employees receive on average.

It calls for moving from automatic, across-the-board pay increases and an end of what it calls (citing the Government Accountability Office) a fully successful or above evaluation for 99% of employees. It calls for reinstatement of Trump Executive Order 13839. Also rescinded by the Biden team, that EO shortened probation times and sped up the initiation of disciplinary actions.

EO 13839 “will need to be reintroduced in 2025,” the Project 2025 authors state.

There’s much more. A return to standard tests for federal employment, simplifying appeals through the Merit Systems Protection Board, and more rigorous performance appraisals coupled to pay raises. With respect to the MSPB, they state, “The real problem is the time and paperwork involved in the elaborate process that managers must undergo during appeals. This keeps even the best managers from bringing cases in all but the most egregious cases of poor performance or misconduct.”