Project 2025’s Plan To Gut Checks and Balances Harms Parents

Project 2025 is a plan to gut America’s system of checks and balances in order to enact an extreme, far-right agenda that would hurt all Americans. The plan proposes taking power away from everyday people to give politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives. Here are specific ways that Project 2025 would harm parents in America.

Increasing taxes on working families

• Project 2025 shifts the tax burden from the wealthy onto the middle class. Under the plan, the typical family of four would see a tax increase of $2,985 per year, while 45,000 households in America reporting more than $10 million in income would each see an average annual tax cut of $1.5 million.

Restricting reproductive freedom

• Project 2025 makes clear that life begins at conception, and the plan would make it all but impossible for families to determine whether, when, and how to have children by granting legal rights—otherwise known as personhood—to unborn fetuses and embryos. In so doing, the plan proposes to criminalize access to abortion and make fertility care such as in vitro fertilization practically impossible. Further, the plan calls for the Food and Drug Administration to restrict access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used to administer a medication abortion, and instructs the U.S. Department of Justice to misapply the Comstock Act, a pair of laws from 1873 and 1909, to criminalize the mailing of medication abortion.
• In addition to making it more difficult for Americans to get an abortion, the plan also makes it more difficult to prevent pregnancies by eliminating some emergency contraception medications from free preventive care requirements. Doing so would result in 47.8 million women in the United States losing guaranteed access to free emergency contraception.

Cutting health care coverage for children

• Project 2025 proposes capping Medicaid payments to states, making it harder for the more than 30 million low-income children—including those with disabilities—who have Medicaid coverage to get the health care they need. These caps would ignore states’ actual spending needs on health and long-term services and supports. They would give states the power and, in many instances, coerce them to deny coverage of particular services such as the home- and community-based care that children with disabilities often require. The Medicaid payment cap would also likely force many states to cut Medicaid provider reimbursement rates, which would reduce access and make it harder for children to keep their primary care doctors and specialists.

Eliminating child care options

• Project 2025 eliminates Head Start, which provides access to no-cost child care—among other services—for 783,571 low-income children in the United States. Eliminating Head Start would wipe out a critical supply of child care in rural and other underserved communities that already have a lack of child care slots.

Cutting public education

• Project 2025 eliminates the U.S. Department of Education, including Title I, which provides funds to ensure schools serving low-income students have additional resources to deliver a high-quality education beyond that which can be supported by local property tax revenue. Ending Title I would lead to the loss of more than 180,000 teaching positions that serve more than 2.8 million students in the United States.
• Project 2025 censors academic learning and makes book banning in schools a federal priority. It calls for the criminalization of librarians who allow students to choose banned books.

Eliminating free school meals

• Project 2025 proposes to end the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which allows all students who attend schools serving a student body wherein at least 25 percent of students are eligible for free- or reduced-price school meals to receive free school meals. Nearly 20 million students attending more than 40,000 schools in the United States are currently eligible to benefit from free school meals under the CEP.