Project 2025 Isn't Just a Scary List

Project 2025 has become a 900-page millstone around the neck of Donald Trump. Whether out of self-delusion or hubris, the plan’s architects made a colossal mistake: they said the quiet part out loud. A recent poll shows that 57% of voters view the agenda unfavorably, and only 4% had a favorable opinion. It’s the reason why Trump has tried desperately to distance himself from the plan, even as Project 2025’s former head boasts about its influence on Trump’s policy priorities.

There’s no question Project 2025 is scary. But if all we do is talk about Project 2025 as a list of “scary things,” we’re missing the bigger picture.

When we talk about needing a long-term answer to Project 2025, we’re not simply talking about a list of ideas, but instead a broad coalition of groups all rowing in the same direction.

Project 2025 represents the consolidation of the authoritarian right. The fact that it was backed not only by the Heritage Foundation, but literally hundreds of other right-wing groups, shows the deep well of support around the plan. The authors aren’t armchair experts either. They’re former Trump officials and GOP heavyweights who know exactly what they’re doing. It means that we should take them at their word when they say they want to expel career civil servants, scrap the Department of Education, and remake government agencies in their own image.

More than just a catalog of sinister proposals, Project 2025 represents the ultimate goal of the authoritarian right: to seize control of every aspect of government and our lives. They want to do what authoritarian governments have done all around the world by limiting our rights, attacking the free flow of information, and undermining the integrity of our democratic institutions.

It’s not a pipe dream either. The right has been successful at installing its draconian laws at the state-level for years. They’ve used Republican-controlled states as laboratories to test out their ideas. As Nashville Rep. Justin Jones put it, “If you want to know what Project 2025 is, look at Tennessee 2024,” or Louisiana and Florida for that matter.

They want to do what authoritarian governments have done all around the world by limiting our rights, attacking the free flow of information, and undermining the integrity of our democratic institutions.

We can defeat Donald Trump on November 5th, but the threat of Project 2025 will endure long after election day.

While we work to block Trump and his MAGA movement, we need our own plan to strengthen democracy and redistribute power from the ruling class to working people of all races. That should begin with breaking the iron grip of the filibuster and getting rid of the Electoral College, both of which have been used to enshrine minority rule in our government. We need to expand the Supreme Court and stop right-wing authoritarians from operating behind the smokescreen of the court system. (Many of Project 2025’s policy prescriptions rely on legal battles that have already been waged and won in conservative-controlled courts.) We need to push through election and voting reforms to prevent the “New Jim Crow” of states blocking citizens from exercising their fundamental rights. Finally, we need to pass the PRO Act and restore the power of working people to organize their workplaces.

Our movements have shown—in state after state, city after city—what’s possible when we win elections and organize our groups around a specific set of policy goals.

Look at Minnesota, where with a razor-thin majority the State Legislature passed one of the most ambitious agendas that we’ve seen in any state: paid family and medical leave, codifying abortion rights, expanding the child tax credit, making school meals free and universal. People have called it the “Minnesota Miracle”—but this result was anything but a miracle. In fact, it was the result of decades of methodical organizing by labor and grassroots groups.

In New York, the Working Families Party and its partners joined together to unseat six Democratic legislators who—with the blessing of then-Governor Andrew Cuomo—caucused with the Republicans, handing them control of the chamber. The following year, the new majority in the Legislature passed landmark policies to protect abortion rights, strengthen voter access, protect the climate, and keep tenants in their homes.

We can defeat Donald Trump on November 5th, but the threat of Project 2025 will endure long after election day.

When we talk about needing a long-term answer to Project 2025, we’re not simply talking about a list of ideas, but instead a broad coalition of groups all rowing in the same direction. We’re not starting from square one either. The Working Families Party has been doing this at a local and state level for years, bringing together diverse coalitions of people to take ideas once seen as impossible and pass them into law.

The task now is knitting together these victories into a coherent whole, a bigger vision of how the government can work for everyday people. Project 2025 and its architects want to steer us to shipwreck. If we’re going to stop them, we need our own governing agenda and—just as importantly—a roadmap for how to get there.