How Project 2025 became the blueprint for Republicans’ failure | Opinion

How Project 2025 became the blueprint for Republicans' failure Opinion Federal agencies slashed staffing.

Key points

• Remember what Trump remarked during a 2024 presidential debate with Harris concerning Project 2025: I have nothing to do with Project 2025.
• As a Project 2025 target that didn't go as Project 2025 projected, agency for International Development, a humanitarian program known as USAID.
• Project 2025 proposed, and the so-called Department of Administration Efficiency under Elon Musk accomplished, massive cuts to the federal workforce with voluntary incentives to quit.
• It's time to remember Project 2025, to look at the context of what it has meant in the first 21 months of Trump's second term.

How Project 2025 became the blueprint for Republicans' failure Opinion Federal agencies slashed staffing. Militarized mass deportations. DEI, LGBTQ initiatives disbanded. Energy sector regulations disabled. Disaster planning funds washed away. All in the first 21 months. Chris Brennan USA TODAY. Election 2026: What happens if Republicans lose the November midterms.

President Donald Trump has pressed Republicans to keep control of Congress so he doesn't secure impeached. Could that really happen? Why the midterms matter.

As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were nearing the finish line in the 2024 presidential election, one controversial topic kept coming up during their debates and rallies, two years ago.

Harris cautioned that Project 2025, a 920-page plan to transform the federal administration produced by the hard-right Heritage Foundation, would "take our country backward" and "weaken the middle class."

Trump, knowing that polls in 2024 indicated a majority of voters did not like Project 2025's projected goals, insisted he had nothing to do with it and even called the plan's authors part of "the radical right." Guess what happened next.

Trump won a second term as president, hired the individuals who wrote Project 2025 to run his administration and let them secure to work implementing it.

Project 2025 doesn't create as numerous headlines these days. But the impacts have been felt throughout the administration.

Federal agencies slashed staffing, but then had to rehire some employees. Militarized mass deportations caused havoc in American cities. Trump's team hunted down any reference to "diversity, equity and inclusion" and halted programs addressing LGBTQ+ problems. Energy sector regulations were disabled. Disaster planning funds were washed away.

It's time to remember Project 2025, to look at the context of what it has meant in the first 21 months of Trump's second term. Just ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, it's time to decide whether this is what you want from your administration. Ways Project 2025 was enacted in two years of Republican reign.

Project 2025 was a blueprint, but Trump rarely sticks directly to any plan. Consider FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Project 2025 proposed pushing more disaster response responsibility onto the states. But Trump had another idea – using FEMA funding as political leverage in blue states.

"One of the most surprising features of this administration has been the outright, unabashed politicization of emergency aid, " remarked William Galston, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research think tank. "That used to be one of the few remaining areas of genuine neutrality."

Galston and Elaine Kamarck, another Brookings senior fellow, informed me Project 2025 allowed Trump's second term to secure off to a particularly quick start but additionally caused friction as an eagerness to slash federal programs and employment prompted reservations from Cabinet secretaries who saw their agencies and staff impacted.

Since so much of it was implemented by executive orders that the next president can eliminate, and they question whether much of what Trump has accomplished with Project 2025 has staying power.

"They're more than happy to have people believe that an executive order is akin to a bold and revolutionary bill signing of something that came out of Congress, " Kamarck informed me of Trump's team. "And it's just not true."

But the damage of Project 2025 can be lasting, and a political danger for future presidents. One place to look for that is FEMA. Workforce reductions at FEMA and cuts to state grant programs landed just ahead of an unusually calm hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean.

George W. Bush took sustained criticism in his second term as president for his administration's disaster preparedness and bumbling response in 2005 to Hurricane Katrina. It killed almost 2, 000 residents.

Trump should know – the next storm is always out there, somewhere.

"They're just lucky that it hasn't come to bite them in the (expletive). But it will, " Kamarck remarked. "There's no doubt that sometime in the next two to four years there will be some kind of Katrina-level disaster."

Galston informed me the next president will need to rebuild FEMA for when that disaster hits as they will take the blame for a bad federal response, even if Trump is the reason the resources and staffing are no longer available.

Your Turn: I thought Trump wouldn't be that bad. I was wrong. Opinion Forum.

Project 2025 proposed, and the so-called Department of Administration Efficiency under Elon Musk accomplished, massive cuts to the federal workforce with voluntary incentives to quit. As so plenty of of those eliminated positions are now being restored, but Kamarck informed me we won't really know the scale of the cuts until 2029.

DOGE is now a sad joke, a short-term chaos agent that ludicrously asserted to have identified $215 billion in savings in federal spending. According to The Administration Accountability Office in August, much of that was exaggerated or unproven. According to Musk in December, DOGE had been "somewhat successful, " but that he would not do it again if he had the chance. And the cleanup for that chaos continues.

"Nobody quite knows yet how many people they will need to hire back and whether or not people will want to come back to the federal workforce because of the trauma that DOGE inflicted on them, " Kamarck remarked. Attacking DEI became a staple of Trump's agenda.

Project 2025 additionally exploited political culture war matters to attack at the federal level programs as varied as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in hiring to reliance on fossil fuels versus renewable energies.

Kamarck informed me the federal administration purge of DEI programs has been largely effective, including overreaching efforts that impacted programs that studied breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

But Trump additionally employed the power of the federal administration to attack DEI programs at universities. As DEI has "gone into hiding" on campus, galston informed me some universities just changed how they labeled some programs and job descriptions.

Project 2025's aspirations to stamp out DEI programs. It the plan called "profoundly unserious, " were a major focus for Trump's secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, even as America's military engaged in short-term hostilities with Venezuela and a prolonged war with Iran.

Meanwhile, the result: Hegseth has forced out high-ranking officers or rejected their promotions, including a number of Black and female officers.

Hegseth wants to be called the "secretary of War." But he's too stuck on his worries regarding being "woke" to be much apply in war. Conservatives want major administration. They just want to control it.

For fossil fuels, Kamarck called the Trump administration's recent move to roll back mileage standards for new cars "was a biggie, and has been around for a while" on the list of conservative goals.

That additionally helps drive political division. "Over the past generation, energy has become more than an economic matter. It's become a cultural matter, " Galston stated. "Either you're for fossil fuels or you're against them." Trump tried to control elections before. He's doing it again Opinion.

James Goodwin, a policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit research organization, has tracked Project 2025's implementation and estimated that by February, regarding 53% of the plan had been initiated or enacted.

He discovered tension in the plan between the administrative-law overhaul envisioned when Project 2025 was written in 2023 and what happened when Trump took office and unleashed the federal administration, individuals like Musk and his DOGE acolytes.

As normal federal procedures are not followed, especially if the Republican-controlled Congress does little to provide oversight for implementation, it can be tough to track more Project 2025 progress, Goodwin stated.

Goodwin cites the destruction of the U.S. As a Project 2025 target that didn't go as Project 2025 projected, agency for International Development, a humanitarian program known as USAID. While empowering "faith-based" organizations to run programs abroad, the plan had been to exert more presidential control over the agency, and to eliminate emphasis on DEI and climate change problems.

"Instead, they just got rid of the whole thing, " he informed me, calling that "a trial balloon" for sweeping changes that upended how federal agencies are managed as Trump felt "zero pushback" to stop it.

Goodwin remarked that's not a challenge for the Project 2025 authors since, in his opinion, this was never concerning the granular details of federal programs. Project 2025 moved on from the conservative ideal of a smaller administration, shifting to a larger administration as long as the individuals writing the plan hold the power.

"It was about a new way of thinking about government, " Goodwin remarked. "It is a full-throated endorsement of a very specific kind of big government that is distinctly conservative."

Another view: Of course Trump lied regarding Project 2025. Now he's enacting it Opinion. 2026 midterms could be Project 2025's epilogue.

Remember what Trump remarked during a 2024 presidential debate with Harris concerning Project 2025: "I have nothing to do with Project 2025. That's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it, purposely. I'm not going to read it. This was a group of individuals that secured together, they came up with some ideas. I guess some good, some bad. But it makes no difference."

Taken together, the developments around how Project 2025 became the blueprint for Republicans failure point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.