Friends,

You must be hearing the alarm bells by now on Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise, that conservatives want Donald Trump to implement should he become president. These include reforming the FBI, aligning the DOJ’s litigation strategy with the president’s agenda, and significantly reducing the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which enforces federal voting laws such as the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Voting Rights Act (VRA). 

Good-by free and fair elections and any smidgen of voting rights that remain. As Rachel Maddow recently said, paraphrasing, it's a political agenda to end all politics. 

This is a very anti-freedom, pro-corporate agenda that folks really need to learn about. I provide some resources in an earlier blog for the college classroom and any other place where it might be discussed (see Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise—PowerPoint for Discussion Groups and the College Classroom). 

There's a litany of other atrocious things. I'll get to these later. Don't want to ruin this morning's breakfast.

-Angela Valenzuela

Unmasking the Anti-Democracy Agenda of Project 2025 By Matt Cohen | July 12, 2024

It’s no secret that Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s detailed, sprawling right-wing plan to remake the federal government when the next conservative administration takes over — would fundamentally alter just about every aspect of American life. 

Various civil rights advocacy organizations and policy experts are rightfully ringing the alarm bells about Project 2025, which would — among many other radical proposed changes — ban abortion nationwide, eradicate civil rights protections for millions of people and completely eliminate the Department of Education.

Some of the proposals in the massive plan are so radical even former President Donald Trump is trying to distance himself from it, posting on his TruthSocial platform that he claims to “know nothing” about the details of the conservative mandate, nor has any “idea who is behind it.” 

Clocking in at over 900 pages, there are a lot of ideas in Project 2025. A good portion of it focuses on the actions the next Republican president should take in their first 180 days of office to facilitate the myriad proposals falling into place. Scattered throughout Project 2025 are a number of highly concerning ideas and policy proposals for specific departments and agencies that, should they come to fruition, could seriously alter the state of elections, voting rights and democracy in America. 

The alarming reforms to the Department of Justice

One of the most concerning chapters in Project 2025 focuses on the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The chapter was written by Gene Hamilton, a lawyer who served in the DOJ and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Trump and is best known as the chief architect of ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. 

“The DOJ has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies,” Hamilton writes in Project 2025, before outlining a long list of “essential” reforms that the next conservative president should make a priority. 

Among them: reforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), asserting that the DOJ’s litigation strategy must be totally aligned with the next president’s agenda and completely stripping the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which is responsible for enforcing civil provisions of the federal laws that protect the right to vote, like the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). In essence, what Hamilton proposes is a DOJ completely stripped of its independent authority, instead to be used as a tool of the president “as an enforcer of an anti-democracy, anti-freedom, anti-people agenda,” according to Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan legal and public policy research nonprofit Democracy Forward.

Under Project 2025, the FBI would be completely reformed — including a mandate to prohibit the agency from “engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity.” It’s a frightening mandate, especially at a time when the heightened threat of election-related violence and harassment of election workers is on the rise, thanks to the proliferation of disinformation.

“What the FBI does is investigate and expose corruption, look at political interference and think about holding the wealthy accountable when they break the law,” Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, told Democracy Docket. “And so if this happened, people with enough money or political influence could be placed above the law at the whim of the President.”

Project 2025’s other proposed changes to the DOJ will have “broad, sweeping implications for all kinds of things, including civil rights, but specifically for voting rights and the role the Department of Justice should play and has an obligation to play to defend Americans’ access to the ballot,” Perryman told Democracy Docket. 

She points out that, given what’s known about the legal strategies that dozens of the groups involved with Project 2025 have employed, there’s serious concern that the DOJ “would start fronting fringe and baseless legal theories” like the controversial independent state legislature (ISL) theory. “There is a real risk that you would have the nation’s litigating institution actually seeking to perpetuate and front those theories in courts across the country,” she said. 

Cumulatively, what the DOJ amounts to in Project 2025 is nothing more than a personal litigation and prosecution weapon for Trump, or whoever the next conservative president is. 

“We’ve heard a ton from Trump about his willingness to use the presidency to punish whoever he wants, including political opponents,” Gilbert said. “And so certainly a MAGA-controlled DOJ would be hugely problematic. Coupled with what just happened in the immunity decision, I can’t think of a bigger place where democracy will be undermined if Project 2025 is in place.”

An end to the agency leading the fight against disinformation

Within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), there’s an agency that plays a crucial role in protecting federal and state elections from a host of existential threats like foreign-backed disinformation and AI threats. Over the past few election cycles, states across the country have come to depend on — and praised — the resources and guidance the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) devotes to securing elections. Under proposed changes described in Project 2025, not only would CISA immediately cease its “counter-mis/disinformation efforts,” but the agency would be completely dismantled, with its core functions moved entirely from DHS to the Department of Transportation. 

“For election security, CISA should help states and localities assess whether they have good cyber hygiene in their hardware and software in preparation for an election—but nothing more,” writes Ken Cucinelli, Trump’s former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, who authored the DHS chapter. 

Adav Noti, the executive director of the nonpartisan voting rights advocacy organization Campaign Legal Center, told Democracy Docket the proposal is “absolutely bonkers” and would have a devastating impact on election security. “It’s located at Homeland Security because the whole premise of the Department of Homeland Security is that it’s supposed to be the central resource for the protection of the nation. And that the important functions shouldn’t be living out in siloed agencies,” he said. “CISA is DHS’s bread and butter, pulling together different strands of these things.”

The idea to remove CISA from DHS is part of the broader trend in Project 2025 to essentially separate the functions of various agencies whose work intersects with one another — especially as they relate to elections. But it’s not a new idea. For years, the GOP has criticized CISA and sought to deprioritize its efforts in election security. 

Should Project 2025’s vision for CISA become reality, “it would be harmful to the efforts to protect elections, to withdraw any significant resources from that effort, because it’s a very difficult struggle,” Noti added. “And it requires significant resources. It’s a troubling idea, but it’s not a new one.”

Money will buy even more elections 

To fully understand the insidious agenda of Project 2025’s proposals for the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Public Citizen’s Gilbert said “it’s worth starting with the understanding that the FEC is currently broken” and that the agency is in dire need of “intense reform for it to function as it was intended.”

Reforming the FEC has long been a priority for Democrats and voting rights advocates — and a key tenet of the comprehensive For the People Act and Freedom to Vote Act that Republicans repeatedly blocked from passing Congress. But the reforms outlined in Project 2025 could make the agency worse than it is now. 

One such way is a proposal to raise campaign contribution limits. “Contribution limits should generally be much higher, as they hamstring candidates and parties while serving no practical anticorruption purpose,” writes Hans von Spakovsky, a right-wing lawyer and former FEC commissioner who authored the Project 2025 chapter. Gilbert noted that von Spakovsky’s argument that there’s no anti-corruption rationale for keeping campaign contribution limits where they are is “absurd on its face,” especially given how much fiscal influence Super PACs wield. “If [candidates] could directly raise as much as they want, it would have immediate ramifications for who can influence and how the campaigns are run,” she said.

The FEC is one of the few federal agencies that has its own independent litigating authority, rather than relying on the DOJ to defend its work in court. But not under Project 2025, which advises the next conservative president to “direct the attorney general to defend the FEC in all litigation.” There’s a caveat to this, though, which is that the DOJ should only prosecute campaign finance violations if the FEC signs off on it — a proposal that’s of grave concern to Noti. 

“The whole structure of campaign finance prosecutions is the FEC has civil authority, the Department of Justice has criminal authority. And the bifurcation of those has, in a lot of ways, proven to be valuable,” Noti explained. “So the idea that they would get conflated and you give the three FEC commissioners veto power over criminal enforcement of the law is a troubling suggestion.”

Reviving the right-wing push to add a citizenship question to the census

One of the Trump administration’s biggest legal defeats was a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that blocked the implementation of a citizenship question on the 2020 census. But Project 2025 renews the right-wing fervor that the next census requires that every person answer if they’re a U.S. citizen or not. 

Project 2025 simply states that “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census,” without mentioning the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling. It’s not clear how a citizenship question could end up on the next census but the mere mention of it in Project 2025 could have a devastating effect for voting rights and immigrant communities.

“It would really depress the population counts in those areas, which in turn has a pretty dramatic impact,” said Sophia Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. That impact wouldn’t just affect representation — Congress is apportioned based on the census and a lower response rate could result in redistricting in which some communities lose seats — but it depresses the relative size of areas with a high population of noncitizens, people of color and vulnerable communities. “Not just on representation, but on funding and resource allocation,” Lakin says. “We’re talking about how people live their daily lives.”

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Democracy Docket there’s a “two-fold purpose” of Project 2025’s citizenship question proposal of “demonizing immigrants and undermining the legitimacy of elections.” The effort, Beirich said, is “part and parcel of a bunch of lies about the security of our election that have been going on in the far-right forever.”

Lakin also expressed a deep concern of how a citizenship question on the census could flame anti-immigrant sentiments, which Trump and the GOP have made a priority of their platform. “That has reverberations beyond representation too, in terms of the whole anti-immigrant stances,” Lakin said. “The damage that it will do to our democracy, to our founding principles as a country that welcomes all, it’s really quite damaging in that regard, as well.”

The anti-voting policies of Project 2025 are really just the tip of the iceberg regarding why Democratic politicians, policy experts and government watchdogs are so concerned. The proposed cuts to civil rights protections, labor protections, and dozens of social services have the potential to impact tens of millions of people.

But what’s most disturbing about all the individual proposals in Project 2025 is how they work in tandem with each other: pieced together, Project 2025 is a roadmap for dismantling democracy in favor of an authoritarian government, fueled by a Christian Nationalist agenda.