President Joe Biden’s election campaign calls the project proof that Donald Trump will introduce authoritarian, far-right policies if he wins the presidential election, writes the news agency Reuters.
Trump himself denies that he knows regarding the project. The document was written by the think tank Heritage Foundation in collaboration with a number of other organizations on the American right.
In practice, however, many of Trump’s closest advisers and people who are likely to get high places in a possible Trump administration are heavily involved in the project. Among other things, Russ Vought sits both on the Republicans’ program committee and high up in Project 2025.
Will let the president appoint far more
The think tank’s 922-page long book « Mandate for Leadership » was published in April. Central to the project is a dramatic restructuring of the federal civil service in the USA.
The office of the president will be given far more power, and up to 50,000 government employees might be fired – and replaced by Trump loyalists, writes the news agency AP.
It may sound dry, but both legal experts and former government employees call it a precursor to a far more authoritarian state, writes the fact-check website Snopes.
Already today, there are far more politically appointed positions in the USA than in Norway. Among other things, ambassadorships are often awarded to people who have donated money to the president’s election campaign.
However, the vast majority of federal employees get the job because of their professional qualifications, not their political ones.
Historical parallel
Historically, this has not always been the case. In the United States’ first hundred years, it was very common for large parts of the federal civil service to be replaced with the president – according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, 31,000 postmasters were replaced in one year.
This created unsurprising challenges, and the system was changed by a series of reforms towards the end of the 19th century.
The fear that civil servants will give greater priority to fulfilling the president’s wishes, rather than upholding the country’s laws, was among other things at the center of comedian John Oliver’s review of Project 2025 on his program Last Week Tonight a satire program that often contains serious messages.
Christian nationalism
However, Project 2025 is broad. Among other things, legislative changes are proposed that will make it illegal to send abortion pills to states where abortion is prohibited, criminalize pornography and abolish the federal Ministry of Education.
In addition, the project wants to remove a number of climate and environmental regulations and abolish a number of schemes that are supposed to promote diversity in working life – schemes that Project 2025 considers illegal.
Politico has linked the project to authoritarian, Christian nationalism, and newspapers Boston Globe points out that the proposed policy might severely affect Americans’ civil rights.
Proposals such as cuts in the funding of climate research and a wide range of health policy measures, severe tightening towards undocumented immigrants use by the military on American soil and other points have also been highlighted in the American media.
Exactly how many of the project’s proposals Trump himself supports is a little more unclear. Reuters writes that he seems to agree with some, but not all, of the proposals.
Among other things, he has supported that far more of the employees in the federal state should be able to be appointed by the president. At the same time, he has kept his cards close to his chest when it comes to proposals such as limiting access to abortion pills.
– Should scare all Americans
Project 2025 has been around for almost a year and a half, and the Heritage Foundation has published similar documents since the Reagan era in the 1980s – previous editions have, among other things, focused a lot on defense policy.
In recent months, however, the project has received a lot of attention from Joe Biden’s election campaign team. In their eyes, the Mandate for Leadership is a symbol of what will happen to the United States if Trump wins the presidential election.
– Project 2025 should frighten all Americans, Biden said in a statement on July 6.
A few days later, he went further and said “Project 2025 is going to destroy America.”
The Republicans and Trump’s election campaign team respond that only the Republican party program should be considered official in the election campaign.
“Team Biden and the Democrats are lying because they have nothing else to offer the American people,” said spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez.
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2024-07-20 00:47:35
