WASHINGTON—Eliminate the minimum wage. Emasculate the National Labor Relations Board by cutting its budget, killing its rules and ending its jurisdiction over “small” businesses. Curb overtime pay. Make job safety and health depend on bosses’ “voluntary compliance.”
Kill worker protections in construction, seafaring and mass transit. Eliminate the Department of Education. Fire 50,000 federal workers and replace them with Trumpites, while trashing all federal workers civil service rights.
Let union-busters run rampant by reversing the NLRB’s recent mandate that such “persuaders” disclose who paid them and how much. And, oh yes, abolish government workers unions, citing—believe it or not—FDR.
Welcome to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s real platform, which is not the drivel you heard at the GOP convention in Milwaukee. It’s called Project 2025.
Trump loyalists, directed by the radical right Heritage Foundation, put together the project’s 900-page tome, dissecting the government, agency by agency and program by program.
Project authors brought a hard-right viewpoint and implicit obedience to Trump’s declaration that he would be “a dictator on day one,” and—the authors and critics both believe—ever afterwards.
Organized labor blew the whistle on Project 2025 at a press conference during the convention, and in a tweet before that. But when you delve into its details, Project 2025 is even worse than what AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler warned about.
Would “exterminate and eliminate my union”
“If you’re a working person out there asking yourself ‘Who should I vote for?’ then ask ‘Does this Project 2025 make my life better?’” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a July 17 press conference during the GOP convention in Milwaukee. Would “these extremists exterminate and eliminate my union?”
She added the right wing would “take away my ability to bargain a union contract, or to go on strike.”
“And will my life be better because Trump lets my company force me to work overtime?”
“Some would love for workers to take Trump at his word & forget what he did as president,” the federation tweeted the day before the press conference. “But we didn’t forget. And Project 2025 shows he’ll pick up right where he left off: Dissolving unions, gutting worker protections, & defunding whole parts of the government people rely on.”
The project’s bias is no surprise. Heritage loyalists staffed Trump’s White House, yielding only to his family members. The project’s authors read like a who’s-who of the right wing.
Atop the list: Trump Cabinet officer Ben Carson and top Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, a right-wing Virginia politico. And Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General, Ed Meese.
Sponsors of Project 2025 include the venal, vicious and corporate-funded National Right To Work Committee, various anti-abortion groups, segregationist minister Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and right-wing “non-profit” think tanks such as Michigan’s Mackinac Center.
And it includes the American Legislative Exchange Council, a secretive corporate cabal that writes anti-worker and anti-voter measures and has cooperative state lawmakers introduce and enact it.
Exhibit A: Wisconsin’s infamous Act 10, which devastated public worker unions—unless they were cop “unions” that backed right-wing Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
The Lever’s investigators blew the whistle on the Project’s funding during the convention. It comes from the corporate class, via the Heritage Foundation, from donations to so-called “donor-advised funds.” Those funds funnel the sums to Heritage. Their corporate backers remain hidden.
“Wall Street is now helping the nation’s elite funnel vast amounts of cash to extremist causes with zero transparency or tax repercussions–and it’s spending millions lobbying Congress to keep it that way,” The Lever adds.
Eliminate the federal minimum wage
“Critics point out the plan includes initiatives to abolish overtime, outlaw public sector unions, cut back on health and safety protections for workers, and eliminate the federal minimum wage,” Harvard’s On Labor blog reports. The wage hasn’t risen in 15 years.
Other analysts say Project 2025 would establish a lower overtime pay threshold—the yearly income limit for workers eligible for overtime pay—for lower-paying areas of the country. It singles out the anti-worker anti-union Southeast for that “benefit.”
Democracy Forward calculates “4.3 million people could lose overtime protections” under the Project 2025 plan. But there’s another way Project 2025 would cut overtime: Virtually ban telework.
“COVID (the coronavirus) made telework ubiquitous, but the law and regulations are still stuck in an era when telework was unique. Congress should clarify that overtime for telework applies only if the employee exceeds 10 hours of work in a specific day and the total hours for the week exceed 40.”
The project’s writers also would throw workers out of politics, even though, as one critic noted, it would leave what he called “corporate unions”—the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers—alone.
“We believe the forced funding of political candidates through union dues and other mandatory contributions violates the First Amendment. Just as Americans have a First Amendment right to devote resources to favored candidates or views, they have a First Amendment right not to be forced to individually support individuals or ideologies that they oppose.”
That’s the project’s lie about union campaign spending. Members fund it by voluntary contributions and not—as in the corporate world—coerced cash from executives and siphoned from stockholders.
Speaking of corporate unions, the project advocates a ban on card-check recognition of legitimate unions, and on creating “alternative forms” of union representation—involving management.
End Davis-Bacon, Project Labor Agreements
Wait, there’s more. Construction workers won’t like what they read in Project 2025, either.
“The majority of construction firms and construction workers are not unionized and their temporary forced unionization” through Project Labor Agreements “results in large-scale wage theft,” Project 2025 charges, a lie. The wage theft is by non-union fly-by-night contractors. “PLAs consistently drive up construction costs by 10% to 30%.
“The Davis–Bacon Act requires federally financed projects to pay ‘prevailing wages.’ In theory, wages should reflect market rates for construction labor in the relevant area.” Project 2025 “drives up the cost of federal construction by about 10%,” it charges.
“Agencies should end all mandatory Project Labor Agreement requirements and base federal procurement decisions on the contractors that can deliver the best product at the lowest cost. Congress should enact the Davis–Bacon Repeal Act and allow markets to determine market wages. “
And Trump and his VP nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, make a big deal out of touting bringing back manufacturing to the Great Lakes states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin. Not coincidentally, all but Illinois are swing states.
But what manufacturing? The Auto Workers successfully negotiated with the Detroit automakers over converting factories from creating gas-powered cars, trucks and SUVs to creating electric-powered vehicles. The project goes backwards—regardless of its environmental impact.
Congress “never approved “ increasing “fuel economy requirements to levels that cannot realistically be met by most categories of international combustion engine vehicles,” the project’s authors proclaim, without evidence.
The Biden administration, it says, wants “to compel Americans to accept costly electric vehicles despite a clear and persistent consumer preference for” gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.
The result, the project proclaims, wrongly, is Tesla benefits and the Detroit automakers and auto workers lose. Its solution: Scotch the electric vehicles, dump the tax credits for them and roll back fuel economy standards, too. The tax credits are $5000 if you buy an EV and $7500 if it’s union-made.
Ending EV production delivers on a Trump promise, which he accompanies with a statement that scares rank-and-file auto workers: That they’ll lose their jobs. The Detroit automakers’ contracts with the UAW prevent such losses. Unionized EV battery plants and factories are in the contracts.
Cut transit workers’ fringe benefits
Project 2025 contains a contradiction about mass transit, which is mostly unionized. On the one hand, its Transportation Department section says, people like and use mass transit. On the other, it costs too much, and the Highway Trust Fund “subsidizes” it.
The project’s solution? Cut the labor costs, end the trust fund payments, which “prop up” transit systems and let states and cities decide if they want to pay for buses and subways—and workers.
The government, the “platform” writers said, now requires “any transit agency receiving federal funds cannot reduce compensation,” a fancy way of saying mass transit systems can’t cut workers’ pay. “Returning to the original intent would allow transit agencies to adjust fringe benefits without fearing a federal lawsuit.”
“It is also vital to move away from using the Highway Trust Fund to prop up mass transit. The fund was driven into insolvency and repeated bailouts through decades of transfers to transit without any increase in transit usage to show for it.” Project 2025 uses “rising federal debt as the reason to remove federal subsidies.” for transit spending.
Transit workers could lose jobs, though the report doesn’t say so. And let the railroads keep cutting workers, regardless of the safety impact, the project’s transportation writers add.
“The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is promoting actions that favor the status quo and inhibit the use of technology to improve railroad safety. FRA should be making decisions based on objective evidence of the most cost-effective way to accomplish the agency’s safety goals. FRA’s singular focus on job preservation is contrary to FRA’s mission.”
Eliminating that “focus on job preservation” plays right into freight railroads’ aims to both cut workers, including safety inspectors, overall and have one worker—or even none—driving miles-long freight trains filled with often-hazardous cargo. They put profits over people, and safety, and have cut one-third of their workers in the last decade.
The East Palestine, Ohio, crash, fire and toxic cloud showed the impact. Freight rail unions and workers, and the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department have worked with Ohio’s other senator, Democrat Sherrod Brown, to re-regulate the railroads, in safety’s name.
East Palestine’s mayor, a Republican, apparently doesn’t agree. He spoke to convention delegates for just over a minute, blasting Biden and embracing Trump—just because the Republican showed up there first after the crash.
While the NLRB would get cut and its rule over “small” businesses banned, the Education Department would get killed, a longtime cause of the radical right.
Want states to decide
Right-wingers want to let states decide what to do with whatever federal funds they get. That’s “states’ rights,” and the president of the NAACP says African-Americans know what “states’ rights” means for people of color.
Project 2025 pushes expanding charter schools, letting federal, state and local dollars follow students to private and religious schools, and eliminating graduate student loans and loans to families to help put their children and grandchildren through grad school.
“In order to fully wind down the Department of Education, Congress must pass and the president must sign into law a Department of Education Reorganization Act–or Liquidating Authority Act–to direct the executive branch on how to devolve the agency as a stand-alone Cabinet-level department,” it says.
In one of its few criticisms of the corporate class, Project 2025 rails against foreign trade—as part of its blasts against what it calls Biden’s “open border policy.”
Biden, Project 2025 says, “allows for the unlimited migration of cheap labor, depresses American wage rates and thereby boosts corporate profits. At the same time, offshoring gives American corporations readier access to the sweatshops and pollution havens of Asia and Latin America. Our skies and water may be cleaner, and our products may be cheaper, but Main Street manufacturers and workers bear the brunt of these policies.”
But would U.S. workers who lose jobs to unfair foreign trade get aid? Project 2025’s answer is “no.”
“Unemployment remains low because it grows alongside population, and real wages continue to rise over time,” it admits. “Trade-displaced workers should be eligible for the same benefits for which anyone else is eligible, no more and no less.”
The project is silent on the fact that Republican-run state regimes started their reigns 14 years ago by cutting the number of weeks a jobless worker could collect benefits while continuing to job-hunt.
In words the right-wingers could apply to many sections of their report, the transportation section concludes: “The obvious political problem in adopting many of the policies proposed here is they will be opposed by the special-interest groups that benefit from open borders and offshoring and that contribute lavishly to both political parties.
“These special-interest groups range from the hedge funds of Wall Street and tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley to big-box retailers that stuff their aisles particularly with cheap ‘Made in China’ goods,” it declares.
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