Washington, D.C. — Today, lawmakers and experts gathered at the Center for American Progress to expose the draconian ways in which the Project 2025 authoritarian playbook would destroy the country’s system of checks and balances and give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.
The radical road map for an extremist presidential administration would target abortion rights, labor, and civil rights, as well as concentrate federal power in the presidency.
“I see this as basically a continuation of the work of January 6th,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “They’re basically picking up where the insurrectionists left off.”
Raskin laid out some of the most radical goals of the plan: cut federal funds for public schools, abolish the U.S. Department of Education, restrict voting rights, politicize federal employees, and wipe out all the progress made in addressing climate change.
The plan would essentially fire 50,000 career federal workers and replace them with right-wing ideologues who would take over the government. It’s all part of the goal to destroy valuable programs such as Social Security and Medicare, weaponize the U.S. Department of Justice, and make it harder to organize unions, Raskin said.
“We’ve got to be moving democracy forward, not regressing to some kind of semimonarchical, fascistic form of government,” Raskin said.
State lawmakers spoke about how the Project 2025 goal to consolidate executive power is already being implemented in states such as Florida, Iowa, and Texas. New laws in these states have shifted more power to the executive branch, erasing checks and balances and overriding local control.
“In Project 2025, they are already planning to ban abortion nationwide, ban IVF [in vitro fertilization], ban contraception, ban gay marriage,” said state Rep. James Talarico (D-TX). “Some of them are even talking about banning what they call recreational sex. This is the Christian Taliban. They are perverting my Christian faith and subverting our democracy. I know what’s coming because I see it every day at the Texas Capitol. They are testing these ideas in states like Texas before they take them nationwide.”
Mary McCord, former U.S. assistant attorney general for national security, discussed how Project 2025 will be fueled by the U.S. Supreme Court’s alarming decision earlier this month granting presidents presumptive immunity for official acts, and absolute immunity when exercising core constitutional powers. She said that opens the door for presidents to basically influence and direct investigations by the Department of Justice without fear of reprisal.
“That means launching sham investigations into probably some of us in this room, for example, launching sham investigations into political opponents, directing the FBI to engage in various types of surveillance, etc.,” McCord said.
Panelists also discussed the goal of Project 2025 to undermine civil rights and attack efforts aimed at diversity. It calls for terms such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion”; “reproductive health”; and “gender” to be deleted from every agency rule and regulation. It calls for all ongoing Title IX investigations to be stopped and states that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and transgender status should be legal.
Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Project 2025 “calls us to a second civil war.”
“Either we’re going to stand on the victory of ending slavery, of freeing people’s ability to have their own identity, and of understanding the role of a federal government in ensuring that we all have civil rights, [or] we will not have a democracy, and this is a blueprint for ending it,” Wiley said.
Video of the event is available online here.
For more information or to speak with an expert, please contact Sam Hananel at [email protected].