As Donald “I Never Heard of Project 2025” Trump falls all over himself to shed the repulsive embrace of that hideous Project 2025 swamp creature from the fetid depths of Washington’s conservative think tanks, so far he’s not done a convincing job. After all, Project 2025 emerges from the putatively intellectual milieu of his supporters. It would gut worker rights. It promotes Trump loyalty tests for the military and intel agencies. It advocates against the morning-after pill. It would let chemical companies poison Americans at will, and more. In short, it’s a blueprint for far-right, late capitalist dystopia, and many of Trump’s allies had a hand in it.
This scheme for extremist rule was produced by the very conservative Heritage Foundation. The Project’s director stepped down July 31, whereupon the Trump campaign wrote that it welcomed news of Project 2025’s demise, but the damage was done, the cat was out of the bag: this series of wildly unpopular, far right policies now brand a possible Trump presidency with a scarlet P for “project.” But Trump sez nope, never heard of this thing. Well, at least that’s something.
Let’s start with the Environmental Protection Agency, created by Richard Nixon. Project 2025 doesn’t like what the EPA does, namely, “forcing the economy to build out and rely on unreliable renewables.” Project 2025 laments as well that this approach “has also been applied to pesticides and chemicals,” that is, curbing their use. So Project 2025 wants unhindered burning of coal, oil, gas and application of agricultural poisons without “job killing regulations.” How do we know the regs kill jobs? We don’t. But we do know that these substances, unregulated, kill us. No matter. What bothers the deep thinkers behind Project 2025 is that “the EPA has been a breeding ground for expansion of the federal government’s influence and control across the economy.” Government bad. Bizness good. The same old mindless song and dance we’ve seen from the rightwing for generations.
This blueprint really kicks into high gear in re labor. That’s to be expected from think tankers whose political allies routinely install rabidly anti-union businessmen to run the labor department. On independent contractors and overtime, Project 2025’s overall prosy opacity yields to hard-nosed money calculations, for instance, that “Congress should clarify that the ‘regular rate’ for overtime pay is based on the salary paid rather than all benefits provided.” Don’t want those overtime expenses to rise too much, after all, if workers’ benefits add to overtime calculations, owners have to shell out more, and, the text informs us, this might discourage employers from offering additional benefits. Ha! As if your average boss is just waiting for the opportunity to offer new benefits.
I don’t know what work universe these think tankers inhabit, but most low-paying jobs in America don’t entail benefits, mandate 60-hour weeks and skip out on paying overtime altogether. That’s when the employer is not busy just stealing wages outright. Unionized jobs are the overtime pay exception, but there’s little danger that bosses in union shops will offer more benefits if overtime pay decreases. If the benefit ain’t in the contract, it’s not happening. And at the bargaining table, these employers will fight tooth and nail against any new benies, for any reason.
Throughout this document, which quite deceitfully eschews clear language, phrases like “unsuspecting employers” and “overzealous enforcement agents” abound, so that a picture emerges through this morass of verbiage, an image of well-meaning, needlessly harassed businessmen, best by pointless rules and fanatical labor department officials. Nothing could be further from the true work reality.
These employers have the whip hand, workers are at their beck, call and every whim, while these supposedly maniacal labor bureaucrats usually arrive on the scene a day late and a dollar short. Heritage’s fantasy world in which labor department “guidance” hurts workers and their bosses would be a laughable chimera, if it wasn’t clear that this is a doctrinal point of the GOP faith. Project 2025 claims “guidance is often used to create new rules overnight without following legal requirements.” While this indeed may have occurred, the opposite, namely guidance HELPING workers, likely happens far more often.
You’ll be shocked, shocked! to hear that most sane working people regard the far-right as anti-labor. Indeed, that’s been transparently the case since FDR’s tenure. The GOP is all about bizness, about crushing wages, cutting costs, speed-ups, trimming the workforce and generally making workers’ lives miserable. Project 2025 can’t come out and say that, since it’s a prescription issued during a presidential campaign, and running on a platform of dispossessing workers is not a winning proposition. Trump knows this very well, hence he treats Project 2025 like Typhoid Mary. And hence Project 2025 itself obfuscates its most brutal arguments with impenetrable prose. But if you parse the persiflage, you’ll see it’s the same old Chamber of Commerce same old. And who in their right mind would have expected anything else from such a source?
When Project 2025 addresses small business, it finally gets its chance to fake concern for the little guy – by pummeling the even littler guy he employs. The document urges labor agencies to exempt small business from regulations and even insists that congress exempt these employers, “first-time, non-willful violators from fines issued by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.” Since OSHA is all that stands between many workers and serious injury or even death on the job, this suggestion is especially cold. It comes right before Project 2025 leaps into encouraging and enabling “religious organizations to participate in apprenticeship programs,” this emphasis on religion being one of the project’s pet obsessions. So, no safety oversight but plenty of religious indoctrination – I guess to prepare these luckless souls for their premature trip to the hereafter.
Another Project 2025 observation is that “some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs.” But those meddlesome regulations prevent these “young adults” from risking life and limb! The nerve of those bureaucrats! If a 14-year-old immigrant wants to work the midnight to 10 a.m. shift in the slaughterhouse, what right does some faceless do-gooder have to prevent him? These are the questions the mega-brains at the Heritage Foundation want you to ponder. But watch out, if you come up with an answer they don’t like and it gets implemented, we could all be in for Project 2025, The Sequel. In fact, it’s probably already waiting in the wings.
