Trump's protests aside, his agenda has plenty of overlap with Project 2025

[October 14, 2024]  By BILL BARROW

ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump insists that Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page blueprint for a hard-right turn in American government and society, does not reflect his priorities for a White House encore.

“I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it — purposefully,” the Republican presidential nominee said Sept. 10 on the debate stage.

Yet from economics, immigration and education policy to civil rights and foreign affairs, there are common ideas and shared ideology between Project 2025 and Trump's outline for another term — from his official “Agenda 47” slate, the Republican platform he personally approved and his other statements.

There are also differences: Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation and written by many conservatives who worked in or with Trump's administration, offers more particulars on some issues than the former president.

Here's a look at how Trump's 2024 campaign and Project 2025 align and deviate:

Key tax proposals could benefit the wealthy

TRUMP: His tax policies lean broadly toward corporations and wealthier Americans. That’s mostly due to his promise to extend his 2017 overhaul while lowering the corporate rate to 15% from the current 21%. He also would end Inflation Reduction Act levies that are financing energy measures intended to combat climate change. Those ideas aside, Trump has put more emphasis on his plans aimed at working- and middle-class Americans: exempting earned tips, Social Security payments and overtime wages from income taxes. His proposal on tips, however, could give a back-door tax break to top wage earners by allowing them to reclassify some pay as tip income — a prospect that, at its most extreme, could see hedge-fund managers or top attorneys taking advantage of a provision Trump frames as an aid to restaurant servers, bartenders and other service workers.

PROJECT 2025: The document goes further than Trump, calling for two federal income tax rates — 15% and 30% — while eliminating most deductions and credits. It envisions a “nearly flat tax on wage income beyond the standard deduction” by adjusting what income is subjected to the payroll taxes that pay for Social Security and Medicare. An effectively flat tax federally would increase the overall share of taxes paid by poorer and middle-class Americans. That’s because many state and local tax codes, anchored by transactional taxes and flatter income taxes, are more regressive than current federal income tax brackets. Project 2025 also calls for requiring a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise corporate or individual income taxes in the future.

Both want to reimpose Trump-era immigration limits

TRUMP: “Build the wall!” from 2016 has become creating “the largest mass deportation program in history.” Trump calls for enlisting National Guard and police, though he's not said how he'd ensure they target only people in the U.S. illegally. He has pitched “ideological screening” for would-be entrants and ending birthright citizenship (which likely would require a constitutional change). He has also said he’d reinstitute first-term policies such as “Remain in Mexico,” limiting migrants on public health grounds and severely limiting or banning entrants from certain majority-Muslim nations. In full, his approach would not just crack down on illegal migration but also limit immigration altogether.

PROJECT 2025: There is a litany of detailed proposals for various U.S. immigration statutes, executive branch rules and agreements with other countries — reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients and asylum seekers, for example. Perhaps the most instructive statement from Project 2025 is its call to reinstate “every rule related to immigration that was issued” during Trump’s 2017-2021 term.

Both would ramp up executive power and the authority to fire federal employees

TRUMP: He frames regulatory cuts as an economic cure-all. He pledges precipitous drops in U.S. households’ utility bills by removing speed bumps for fossil fuel production, including opening all federal lands for exploration. (U.S. energy production and exports are at record highs under President Joe Biden.) Trump promises to boost housing stock by cutting regulations, though most construction rules come from state and local governments.

Two broad proposals and ideas stand out: The first would make it easier to fire federal workers by classifying thousands more of them as being outside civil service protections. That almost certainly would weaken the government’s power to enforce statutes and rules by reducing the number of employees engaging in the work. The second is Trump’s assertion that the president has exclusive power to control federal spending despite Congress' appropriations power. Trump argues that lawmakers “set a ceiling” on spending but not a floor — meaning the president’s constitutional duty to “faithfully execute the laws” grants him discretion on whether to spend the money.

PROJECT 2025: The authors make scores of calls for the president, Cabinet and other political appointees to slash regulations, reclassify federal employees to make them easier to fire, reduce “unaccountable federal spending” and set a course from the West Wing. “The Administrative State is not going anywhere until Congress acts to retrieve its own power from bureaucrats and the White House,” they write. “In the meantime, there are many executive tools a courageous conservative president can use to handcuff the bureaucracy (and) bring the Administrative State to heel.”

Kristen Eichamer holds a Project 2025 fan in the group's tent at the Iowa State Fair, Aug. 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)

Both would roll back DEI and LGBTQ programs

TRUMP: The former president wants to end government diversity programs, using federal funding as leverage, and he would target existing protections for LGBTQ individuals. On transgender rights, he promises to end “boys in girls’ sports,” a practice he insists, without evidence, is rampant. Trump would reverse Biden’s extension of Title IX civil rights protections to transgender students and ask Congress to allow only two gender choices at birth.

PROJECT 2025: Government should “affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.” That philosophy permeates Project 2025, which defines the ideal family — and individual — in narrow, traditionalist terms. Authors envision consolidating federal civil rights efforts within the Justice Department’s civil rights division, with enforcement coming only through litigation. That effectively would concentrate the choice of how and when to enforce civil rights law with the attorney general — and, by extension, the White House.

Both would abolish the Department of Education

TRUMP: The Department of Education would be targeted for elimination. That does not mean Trump wants Washington out of classrooms. Among other maneuvers, he would use federal appropriations as leverage to scrap diversity programs at all levels of education and compel K-12 schools to abolish tenure and adopt merit pay for teachers. He calls for pulling money from “any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”

Trump calls for redirecting universities' endowment money into an online “ American Academy” offering college credentials to all Americans without charging tuition. “It will be strictly non-political, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed,” Trump said on Nov. 1, 2023.

PROJECT 2025: Congress should “shutter” the Department of Education and “return control of education to the states,” Project 2025 argues, echoing Trump’s argument that U.S. educational infrastructure imposes progressive indoctrination. The authors propose, among other things, eliminating the Head Start program, turning the Title I program into block grants and eventually phasing out that federal financing, and using the tax code to incentivize at-home child care, something GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance advocates.

Both blast climate policy

TRUMP: Trump claims falsely that climate change is a “hoax” as he disparages Biden spending on cleaner energy designed to reduce U.S. reliance on fossil fuels. Trump would anchor energy and transportation policy to fossil fuels: roads, bridges and combustion-engine vehicles. Trump says he does not oppose electric vehicles but promises to end incentives that encourage EV-market development. And he would lower fuel efficiency standards.

PROJECT 2025: The document criticizes the Biden administration’s "climate fanaticism.” It proposes closing or limiting many programs for environmental protection and regulation, including those many Americans take for granted. Among them: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Project 2025 would eliminate, and the National Weather Service, which the document would steer toward exclusively selling weather data to private forecasters. It would leave the National Hurricane Center in place — though NHC depends on the National Weather Service to make forecasts. The plan would not repeal laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, but its regulatory and bureaucracy cuts would reduce their reach.

Project 2025 backs Ukraine's defense, while Trump has questioned US support

TRUMP: His strategy is more isolationist diplomatically, noninterventionist militarily and protectionist economically than the U.S. has been since World War II. But the details are more complicated. Trump pledges military expansion, promises robust Pentagon spending and proposes a missile defense shield — an idea from the Reagan era. He insists he can end Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel-Hamas fighting, though he has not explained how. He remains openly critical of NATO and top U.S. military brass. “I don’t consider them leaders,” he says. And he repeatedly praises authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

PROJECT 2025: Echoing Trump’s vibe, the document calls for “tough love” in international relations — but with distinctions from Trump. On military preparedness, Project 2025 would curtail the number of generals but expand the number of enlisted personnel, though the authors do not call for reinstituting a draft, as critics have alleged. Project 2025 is perhaps even more aggressive than Trump in its China rhetoric: “Economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought,” the foreword states.

On NATO, the blueprint echoes Trump’s emphasis on other member nations paying more for their own defense, but it does not carry the inherent skepticism of NATO alliances that Trump has projected for years. And while Trump steadfastly refuses to criticize Putin for invading Ukraine, Project 2025 states: “Regardless of viewpoints, all sides agree that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjust and that the Ukrainian people have a right to defend their homeland.”

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