Project 2025’s Plan To Gut Checks and Balances Harms the American People

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 harms Americans.

Taxes

• 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.

Social Security

• Project 2025 authors have endorsed and supported plans to cut Social Security by raising the retirement age for roughly 74 percent of Americans—more than 245 million people. Their ideas are reflected in the two most recent Republican Study Committee budget proposals, which propose increasing the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 69. Doing so would cut benefits by $4,100 to $8,900 after just one year, depending on when one claims Social Security. A median-wage retiree would lose $46,000 to $100,000 over 10 years.

Health care

• Project 2025 proposes imposing “limits or lifetime caps on [Medicaid] benefits.” 18.5 million Medicaid enrollees would be at risk of losing coverage because they are low income and lack access to alternative, affordable coverage.
• The plan would raise the cost of prescription drugs for up to 18.7 million people by eliminating out-of-pocket Medicare drug cost limits. It also blocks the government from negotiating for lower drug prices.

Abortion rights and contraception

• Project 2025 eliminates some emergency contraception medications from free preventive care requirements, meaning 47.8 million women in the United States would lose guaranteed access to free emergency contraception.
• The plan 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. Doing so would result in an effective abortion ban nationwide, even in states where abortion is legal.
• The plan instructs the Department of Justice to take legal action against local officials who refuse to bring cases against women and doctors who violate state abortion bans.

Child care

• 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 face a lack of child care slots.

Student loans

• Project 2025 replaces income-driven repayment (IDR) plans with a one-size-fits-all program that would increase payments for all borrowers enrolled in existing IDR plans, including the Biden-Harris administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan. Under Project 2025, more than 8 million borrowers enrolled in SAVE would pay $2,700 to $4,100 more each year.

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 180,300 teaching positions, which serve more than 2.8 million students, in the United States.