Politics

With the Republican and Democratic tickets now set for this November’s presidential election and voters ready to examine the candidates’ respective platforms, a new national University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll has found that the policies associated with the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” are deeply unpopular among Americans.

"You don’t have to be a pollster to know that many policies in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are unpopular among most Americans,” remarks Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at Unversity of Massachsetts Amherst and co-director of the poll. “Our findings simply put an exclamation point on it. You can see why the Trump campaign is running away from it during the election.”

Meanwhile, another analysis of Project 2025 by Media Matters shows that the prohect's poposals would severely inhibit the federal government’s protections for reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, labor and civil rights, and immigrants, as well as its climate change efforts. They would allow Trump to weaponize the justice system as his own personal retribution machine, gut the American system of checks and balances and purge the federal bureaucracy of experienced civil servants who haven’t pledged fealty to Trump. On their own platforms, Project 2025 partners frequently speak in even more draconian terms.

Here’s a sampling of the agenda that the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 are pushing to implement on day one of a second Trump administration:

• Reimplementing “Schedule F,” a Trump-era executive order that removes civil service protection for career bureaucrats so they can be fired and replaced with far-right loyalists.

• Adopting an extreme anti-choice agenda that would restrict legal abortion drugs and emergency contraception, and that could also impact fertility-related health care like IVF and surrogacy services.

• Undermining checks and balances in the federal government and consolidating the president’s power to weaponize the Department of Justice and law enforcement against his political enemies.

• Institutionalizing the right-wing movement’s war on LGBTQ communities by promoting conversion therapy and stripping queer people of federal protections.

• Eviscerating labor rights, including union negotiating rights and protections for overtime pay.

• Allowing high-income earners to more easily cheat the IRS.

• Rejecting climate science in favor of Big Oil’s preferred policies by gutting federal agencies that protect the environment and dismantling regulations allowing polluting industries to extract even more oil and gas from federal lands with less protections.

• Potentially conducting mass deportations of millions of immigrants or those suspected to be immigrants, in part by revoking all Temporary Protected Status designations, which would put more than 863,000 people at risk.

• Overhauling the American education system by eliminating the Department of Education and making student loans more expensive.

• Purging the federal government of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

• Expelling transgender service members from the military and eliminating DEI initiatives from the military to “restore standards of lethality and excellence.”