So I've been reading Project 2025 so you don't have to, and I'm going to report on everything I find that is alarming, which is a lot. Part One can be found here. Part Two can be found here.
Section 11 - Department of Education
"Federal education policy should be limited and,
ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated."
That's the first sentence in this whole section. I think
that pretty much says it all.
All student loans and grants are to be moved to the private
sector. Move education for military families to the Defense Department and for
Washington D.C. to Congress. I imagine that also applies to protectorates like
Guam and Puerto Rico but the document actually doesn't say.
Put all education funding under State Control. You should
really ask a child living in Florida how that's working out. Reject Gender
Identity and Racial studies. Eliminate executive orders in education. I remind
you that integration was done by executive order.
Transfer all Native American education to the Bureau for
Indian Affairs. Transfer all adult education programs to the Department of
Labor. Privatize Student Aid.
Move all civil rights enforcement to the Department of
Justice. Transfer all civil service employees to other agencies. Eliminate the
understanding that Trans people even exist.
Eliminate any privacy regulations used to protect students
from any form of abuse. Rescind all regulations in Equity in IDEA.
Eliminate all food programs for students. All of them.
Phase out income-based student loan repayment
programs. Rescind all funding for the National Education Association.
Consider "Critical Race Theory" to be racism.
Here's a crazy one that takes paragraphs to unravel: Allow
parents of children over the age of 18 to sue to recover any monies spent on
their education. Also, allow families to "opt out" of the education
system entirely and for those that do give as a tax break the funding that
would have been used to educate that child directly to the parents.
Allow states to opt out of any and all federal education
programs. Eliminate Parent PLUS loans.
There is page after page of basically "end anything
Obama or Biden did", but eventually it all boils down to that first
sentence. Eliminate the Department of Education.
Section 12 - Department of Energy (and related commissions)
You would expect this whole document to be drill baby drill but in fact it starts with the repeal and elimination of the Biden Administration's Infrastructure Act - the single largest jobs creation bill in the last 75 years. That's followed with not only a dependence upon oil and natural gas but a declaration that the U.S. needs to be the best in the world in Science. Great for a country trying to eliminate the Department of Education.
Eliminate the office of Clean Energy, and the office of Grid
Deployment. Yep, they don't want the government looking at the power
grid.
Not only increase a reliance ("dominance") in oil
and gas but nuclear power as well.
Lots of paragraphs on focusing on science, which again - see
the section on the Department of Education. Lots of contradictions here.
Increase the level of private sector disposal of nuclear waste. What could
possibly go wrong?
Fund a rebuilding of the country's nuclear arsenal. New
warheads and testing. Eliminate Carbon Capture programs and Carbon offsets.
Pursue much more coal, including coal waste as fuel. Increase fossil
fuels.
End the government's focus on green energy and renewables.
Eliminate efficiency standards for appliances. In fact, they put this paragraph
in the document twice on consecutive pages.
"End Grid planning and focus instead on
reliability." I shit you not, that's a whole topic in here. Say goodbye to
grid upgrades and hello to more Texas-style outages. They then spend several
pages repeating everything I've already told you about.
Eliminate the Department of Energy's ability to make loans.
Eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Looks like that better battery
for your Tesla is going to have to wait.
Eliminate the Clean Energy Corps. Privatize the Energy
Information Administration. Stop all funding for "climate
reparations" - i.e. paying for the damage caused by oil production in
underdeveloped nations.
Drill in Alaska (of course). Claim the Arctic Circle for the
same purpose. Take an "America First" approach at the Office of
Technology.
Accelerate cleanup of all "Superfund" sites
(except for Hanford in Washington State - which is where the U.S. government
has stored Plutonium Waste for many years) with a goal of completing all work
by 2035. That sounds good on the surface but in most of these sites there is a
reason that it needs to go slow: fast work actually makes the contamination
WORSE and spreads it further. Eliminate some regulations specific to the
Hanford site.
Get all active Nuclear Waste stored at Yucca Mountain already.
As long as we're talking about nuclear stuff again, let's
make more nukes. Abandon the Test Ban Treaty. Divest certain programs at Los
Alamos and Lawrence Livermore to refocus on nuclear energy and weaponry.
Several pages are spent rehashing the need to get rid of renewables
Refocus transmission of electrical to the state level. I
mean, why can't we all be Texas? Eliminate all questions about oil and gas
pipelines to only consider the need for the fuels, not environmental or any
other concerns.
Eliminate the guidance of "as low as reasonably
possible" for nuclear exposure when considering renewing the licensing for
existing nuclear power plants or building new ones.
Fuck, this was a nightmare to get through. but guess what's
next?
Section 13 - Environmental Protection Agency
This whole section was written by Mandy M. Gunasekara, a former Chief of Staff at the EPA under the Trump Administration who in 2023 was kicked off the ballot in Mississippi when she ran for Public Service Commissioner - because she didn't live there.
Let's start that in the mission statement that it blames the lead poisoning crisis in Flint Michigan on The Obama Administration, which is so obviously incorrect that it boggle belief. It also states that every expansion of the EPA since 1972 is unnecessary.
Eliminate the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. Eliminate the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance. Eliminate the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education. "Relocate" the Office of Children’s Health Protection and the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization - although the document does say where to relocate these agencies to.
Review the grants program to ensure that taxpayer funds go to organizations focused on tangible environmental improvements free from political affiliation (there are no such groups).
This document goes on for more than 30 pages and makes the same faulty assumptions and rewrites historical data so often that it should be considered a work of fiction. But the key thing is unchanged: That everything that the EPA has done in terms of rulings and regulations since 1972 should be repealed.
Where I grew up you could see the air in 1972. It was grey. That's what they want to go back to.
Section 14 - Department of Heath and Human Services
This whole section was written by The Heritage Foundation. In
the first two sentences it proclaims the COVID-19 Pandemic as over (which it
isn't) and that life expectancy has decreased since the end of the Pandemic -
which we do not yet know as the timing is too recent for statistical analysis.
It's a lie.
No more abortions. Ever.
Prioritize families over everyone else. By the way, that's "traditional" families. Mother, father, children, church.
Remove the ability to declare emergencies and provide guidelines
for outbreaks of diseases that contradict the political agenda of the
administration. Move the recommendations of the CDC on how to treat
anything into a separate political agency. The entire document assumes
that the CDC is faulty and corrupt, and not that the people using the CDC to
make policy are. This is also a lie.
Remove Generic drugs from Medicaid. Make Abortion pills a
controlled substance, with the ultimate goal of making them illegal at the same
degree as Meth and Cocaine.
Eliminate chickenpox, Hepatitis, and MMR vaccines that
originate from studies and science from fetal tissue. That's all of them, by
the way. Also, eliminate vaccine mandates of any kind - you know, the type that
for a while eliminated chicken pox, small pox, the mumps, measles and so on and
could have been used to eliminate COVID. I notice that all of these are on the
rise in the US. Even motherfucking POLIO is back.
Eliminate all research that uses science from Fetal Tissue.
Eliminate all science funding and research that involves the fluidity of human
sexuality. There are men and there are women and they are born that way.
Period.
Several paragraphs are about "Woke" policies, and
they encourage an end to diversity in conferences and studies.
When it gets to the Medicare section there is paragraph
after paragraph about the bureaucracy of Medicare and how much time doctors
have to spend on paperwork. This is a common fallacy that has been around for
decades - yes, there is paperwork and there is a lot of it, but it's still LESS
PAPERWORK THAN REQUIRED BY PRIVATE INSURERS.
The truth is that bureaucratic waste in Medicaid is about
2%, where in the private industry it varies from 5% to 10%.
Eliminate the ability to negotiate drug prices under
Medicare.
As for Medicaid, paragraph after paragraph is dedicated to
the elimination of problems that don't actually exist, plus adding work
requirements to eligibility and actually taking away from states the ability to
make programs flexible - which seems like an oxymoron until you realize that
most waivers for various programs under Medicaid are for Democratic Party
controlled states that are allowed to use these funds to treat the LGBTAI+ community and
allow for abortion access.
Under the Affordable Care Act there is an awful lot of focus
on redesigning medical care into a Concierge Medicine approach, which most
people would not be able to afford. The document calls this stronger health
care (true) and more affordable (patently false). It would also eliminate all
of the cost controls in the system. There is no language saying that they want
to eliminate the ACA, but they certainly would render it useless.
Prohibit travel for Abortion care.
Defund Planned Parenthood, which as I like to tell people is
NOT a chain of abortion clinics but is a chain of Doctor's Offices with an
emphasis on women's care. Withdraw Medicaid funds from any state where abortion
is legal.
Deny gender affirming care for anyone with Medicaid or
Medicare. Again, men and women are the only two genders and they are determined
at birth.
Rescind all COVID-19 Mask and Vaccination guidelines, and
pay damages to anyone displaced (i.e. fired) for not following those
guidelines.
Institute work requirements for all recipients
of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Most of the verbiage about the
prevention of teenage pregnancies is to deter things that aren't happening.
Adoptions should be funneled through religious organizations. Crazily enough,
the document in the same paragraph also acknowledges that there are 4 times
more children awaiting adoption than people who want them, although I believe
the actual ratio is closer to 7 to 1.
Move the office of Refugee Settlement to the Department of
Homeland Security. Looking back at that document, there is no indication that
DHS actually wants this.
Allows for parents who do not have custody of their children
to receive a child-tax credit anyway. It actually specifically calls out that
it wants the ability to allow deadbeat dads to take the tax credit.
Encourage bad marriages to stay together as a requirement of
government assistance. Allow faith-based organizations who distribute this aid
to discriminate as they see fit. Implement a national campaign that is
pro-father propaganda. You know, to keep marriages together. Think of the poor
men.
Eliminate Head Start.
Criminalized Physician assisted suicide, which is legal in
10 states according to this document. Remove requirements that telemedicine be
local to the patient. I should point out that this would eliminate the ability
to recommend hospitalizations, as these doctors wouldn't have admitting privileges
where the patients actually are.
Allow hospitals, doctors and physicians to not provide
abortion related care of any kind because of religious beliefs, even in states
where it is legal and protected.
No more funding for condoms. No more funding for
"Morning-after" pills (which they call "the week after
pills" in this section). Withdraw all support for gender
affirming/transitioning guidance.
Stop teaching the medical procedures used in abortion
care. I repeat, hinder the educational skills of every doctor in
America.
The entire section on Indian Health Care (and why can't they
ever use the phrase "Native Americans"?) is full of lies and I won't
dignify them.
Sunset all HHS regulations, which Trump tried last time
around.
More bullshit about violations of human rights that never
happened (mostly involving twitter and Facebook). They don't want the department to push back against lies on social media.
More verbiage that the administration needs to be Pro-Life
and anti-Trans care. This is like the fifth or sixth time in this document so
far, making it one of the longer ones I've gone through. This is followed by a
series of paragraphs that are mostly lies about the COVID Pandemic, complaining
about things that never happened.
It's full of lies.
Restrict and/or rescind funding to any country that supports
abortion care. Prohibit overseas personnel from providing care that is in
contradiction with administration policy. That's right, overseas care is now a
political decision.
The entire rest of the document - several pages - is about
how the only civil rights violation in health care is that providers of care of certain
religions are not allowed to discriminate in their health care decisions, and
that such discrimination should be allowed.
To summarize: No abortions, no gender affirming care, no contraceptives, stay in abusive marriages, no good health care for poor people, let churches discriminate, and lie every third sentence (or more often).
Section 15 - Department Housing and Urban Development
Woohoo! This section was written by Dr. Ben Carson! This of course means it's the shortest section in the whole damn thing, clocking in at all of 14 pages, 4 of which are footnotes.
Also, unlike previous chapters, the first 4 pages are only about what the department does who what the department posts and responsibilities are, and has no policy directives save for the basic concept that the department needs an overhaul.
Replace all career officers with political appointees. Issue an executive order making the HUD Secretary a member of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S, to counter the Chinese threat that they are buying to much real estate in the U.S. Seems highly reminiscent of the same language used against Japan in the 1980's.
Reverse all protections for LGBTQIA+ persons implemented under the Biden Administration. Reverse all property appraisals done under the Biden Administration, because you know they did them all wrong. Eliminate any programs that have any mention of Climate Change. Eliminate the use of special-purpose credit authorities. Eliminate the new Housing Supply Fund.
Non-citizens, even those households who are comprised of both citizens and non-citizens, are to be denied housing assistance. Anyone with mental issues or drug assistance issues need to be treated before considered for housing.
"Statutorily restricting eligibility for first-time homebuyers." That's the EXACT wording.
Finally, create an office of CFO for the department, who will do most of the work. Not bad for the laziest cabinet secretary in all history.
14 pages, only 6 of which are policy, all of which is designed to not actually do anything.
Next posting will cover the Department of the Interior, the Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, and the Department of Veteran Affairs.
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