Trump’s protests aside, his agenda has plenty of overlap with Project 2025
ATLANTA– ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump insists that Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page blueprint for a hard rightward turn in American government and society, does not reflect his priorities for an encore in the White House.
‘I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it on purpose,” the Republican presidential candidate said in the newspaper on September 10 debate phase.
But in areas from economics, immigration and education policy to civil rights and foreign affairs, common ideas and shared ideologies exist Project 2025 and Trump’s proposal for another term – from his official “Agenda 47” slate, the Republican platform he personally endorsed, and his other statements.
There are differences, too: Project 2025, led by the Heritage Foundation and written by many conservatives who worked in or with Trump’s administration, offers more detail on some issues than the former president.
Here’s a look at how Trump’s 2024 campaign and Project 2025 align and diverge:
TRUMP: His tax policies broadly target corporations and wealthier Americans. That’s mainly due to his promise to extend his 2017 overhaul while lowering the corporate rate from the current 21% to 15%. He would also end Inflation Reduction Act fees that fund energy measures aimed at combating climate change. Beyond these ideas, Trump has placed more emphasis on his plans aimed at working- and middle-class Americans: exempting earned tips, Social Security benefits and overtime from income taxes. However, his proposal on tips could create a backdoor tax benefit for top earners by allowing them to reclassify a portion of wages as tipped income — a prospect that, in the most extreme case, could lead hedge fund managers or top lawyers would benefit from this. of a provision that Trump is setting up to help restaurant servers, bartenders and other service workers.
PROJECT 2025: The document goes further than Trump and calls for two federal income tax rates – 15% and 30% – while eliminating most deductions and credits. It provides a “nearly flat tax on wage income outside the standard deduction” by adjusting what income is subject to the payroll taxes that pay for Social Security and Medicare. A de facto federal flat tax would increase the overall share of taxes paid by poorer, middle-class Americans. That’s because many state and local tax laws, 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 majority in Congress to raise corporate or individual income taxes in the future.
TRUMP: “Build the wall!” from 2016 has gone on to create “the largest mass deportation program in history.” Trump calls for the National Guard and police to be called in, although he is not told how he would ensure they only target people in the US illegally. He has instituted an “ideological screening” for potential newcomers and ended birthright citizenship (which would likely require constitutional change). He has also said he would reintroduce first-term policies such as “Remain in Mexico,” which would restrict migrants on public health grounds and severely restrict or ban newcomers from certain predominantly Muslim countries. Overall, his approach would not only crack down on illegal migration, but also limit immigration entirely.
PROJECT 2025: There is a litany of detailed proposals for various U.S. immigration statutes, executive branch rules, and agreements with other countries – for example, reducing the number of refugees, work visa recipients, and asylum seekers. Perhaps Project 2025’s most instructive statement is its call to reinstate “every rule regarding immigration that was issued” during Trump’s 2017-2021 term.
TRUMP: He sees regulatory cuts as an economic panacea. He promises a sharp drop in American households’ energy bills by removing speed bumps to fossil fuel production, including opening all federal lands to exploration. (U.S. energy production and exports are at record highs under President Joe Biden.) Trump promises to increase housing stock by cutting regulations, though most building regulations 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 people outside the protections of the civil service. That would almost certainly weaken the government’s power to enforce laws and regulations by reducing the number of workers involved in the work. The second is Trump’s claim that the president has exclusive power to control federal spending, despite Congress’s appropriations power. Trump argues that lawmakers are “setting a ceiling” on spending, but not a floor — meaning the president’s constitutional duty to “faithfully execute the laws” gives him the freedom to spend the money or not.
PROJECT 2025: The authors make numerous calls for the President, Cabinet, and other political appointees to eliminate regulations, reclassify federal workers so they can be fired more easily, reduce “unexplained federal spending” and chart a course from the West Wing. “The administrative state is not going anywhere until Congress takes action to reclaim its own power from the bureaucrats and the White House,” they write. “In the meantime, there are many executive tools that a courageous conservative president can use to clamp down on the bureaucracy (and) take control of the administrative state.”
TRUMP: The former president wants to end government diversity programs using federal funding as leverage and would target existing protections for LGBTQ individuals. On transgender rights, he promises to end “boys in girls’ sports,” a practice he says, without evidence, is widespread. Trump would reverse Biden’s expansion of Title IX civil rights protections to transgender students and ask Congress to allow only two gender choices at birth.
PROJECT 2025: The government must “affirm that children need and deserve both the love and care of a mother and the play and protection of a father.” That philosophy is reflected in Project 2025, which defines the ideal family – and the individual – in narrow, traditionalist terms. The authors foresee a consolidation of federal civil rights efforts within the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, with enforcement only through litigation. That would essentially concentrate the choice of how and when to enforce civil rights law on the attorney general — and, by extension, on the White House.
TRUMP: The Department of Education would be targeted for elimination. That doesn’t mean Trump wants Washington out of the classrooms. Among other maneuvers, he would use federal appropriations as leverage to eliminate diversity programs at all levels of education and force K-12 schools to eliminate tenure and implement merit pay for teachers. He calls for defunding “any school or program that pushes critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
Trump calls for redirecting university endowment money to an online “ American Academy” offering college credentials to all Americans without charging tuition. “It will be strictly apolitical, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed,” Trump said on November 1, 2023.
PROJECT 2025: Congress should “close” the Department of Education and “return control of education to the states,” Project 2025 argues, echoing Trump’s argument that America’s education infrastructure imposes progressive indoctrination. The authors propose, among other things, eliminating the Head Start program, converting the Title I program to block grants and ultimately phasing out that federal funding, and using the tax code to incentivize in-home child care, something that vice GOP presidential candidate JD Vance. advocates.
TRUMP: Trump falsely claims climate change is a “hoax” while discrediting Biden’s spending on cleaner energy aimed at reducing America’s dependence on fossil fuels. Trump would anchor energy and transportation policy in fossil fuels: roads, bridges and vehicles with combustion engines. Trump says he is not against electric vehicles, but promises to end incentives that promote the development of the EV market. And he would lower fuel efficiency standards.
PROJECT 2025: The document criticizes the Biden administration’s ‘climate fanaticism’. It proposes closing or limiting many environmental protection and regulation programs, including those that many Americans take for granted: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which would eliminate Project 2025, and the National Weather Service, where the document exclusively would send. selling weather data to private forecasters would leave the National Hurricane Center in place — even though NHC relies on the National Weather Service to make forecasts — cuts would reduce their reach.
TRUMP: His strategy is more diplomatically isolationist, more militarily non-interventionist and more economically protectionist than the US has been since World War II. But the details are more complicated. Trump promises military expansionpromises robust Pentagon spending and proposes a missile shield – a Reagan-era idea. He insists he can end Russia’s war in Ukraine and the struggle between Israel and Hamas, though he has not explained how. He remains openly critical of NATO and the top brass of the US military. “I don’t consider them leaders,” he says. And he repeatedly praises authoritarians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
PROJECT 2025: Echoing Trump’s vibe, the document calls for ‘tough love’ in international relations – but with differences from Trump. In terms of military readiness, Project 2025 would limit the number of generals but expand the number of enlisted personnel, although the authors do not call for a redesign as critics claim. Project 2025 may be even more aggressive than Trump in its China rhetoric: “Economic engagement with China must be ended, not reconsidered,” according to the foreword.
On NATO, the blueprint reflects Trump’s emphasis on requiring other member states to pay 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 staunchly refuses to criticize Putin for invading Ukraine, Project 2025 states: “Regardless of their positions, all parties agree that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjust and that the Ukrainian people have the right to defend their homeland.”