The far-right Heritage Foundation may have drafted its Project 2025 as an ambitious agenda for a second Trump presidency, but Republicans in Congress aren’t waiting around for that.
GOP lawmakers in the House of Representatives have already added more than 300 Project 2025 poison pills into draft government spending bills that must be passed before Christmas no matter who wins the White House.
The budget measures for Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) must be finalized by Dec. 20. Republicans hope Trump will already be president-elect by then, but if not, they’re planning to lock in as many of their extremist priorities as possible before Kamala Harris can be inaugurated – or embarrass the Democrats while trying.
The Clean Budget Coalition and the Center for Progressive Reform analyzed all the draft FY25 money bills and found hundreds of attached riders that mirror the goals of Heritage’s Project 2025.
Riders of this kind—often called “wrecking amendments”—are intended to trap Democrats. By attaching measures that they know Democrats will oppose, Republicans plot to make it look like legislators from the other party, rather than themselves, are holding up the money needed to keep popular public services running.
They hope to leave the Democrats in a Catch-22 situation: Risk appearing responsible for a government shutdown just weeks after the election or vote for Project 2025 priorities. It’s a scheme that holds essential services like health care, education, and others hostage for the sake of right-wing political ransom.
Republicans aren’t just pulling this trick on a few bills; in fact, three out of every five riders attached to FY25 appropriations were found to be in alignment with the playbook for a Trump dictatorship. They cover a wide range of policy areas, with many oriented toward increasing the power of the executive branch at the expense of democracy.
For instance, the appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security has been amended to give the president (via the Homeland Security Secretary) almost unlimited power to reroute federal money away from other programs and toward Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
If Trump wins, that means he would already have a blank check for his immigrant crackdown before he even takes the oath of office. And whether he wins or not, Republicans will argue that Democrats are ignoring immigration and border security yet again.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was established to defend the public against scams and abuse by big banks and financial corporations, is to be stripped of its independence thanks to another rider.
The Financial Services and General Government appropriations rider drafted by House Republicans opens the CFPB’s decision-making up to presidential interference. It would give a new Trump administration the ability to neuter one of the few government agencies that has acted as a bulwark against out-of-control finance capital.
Republicans want to give health insurance companies free rein to discriminate against customers based on the color of their skin. A rule that currently blocks the racist practice will be suspended under the terms of a rider attached to the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies budget bill.
Transgender students in public schools are to be thrown to the wolves thanks to a rider on the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies appropriation. The GOP plans to forbid the Justice Department from enforcing non-discrimination laws against public school teachers and staff who discriminate against students who identify as transgender. The move parallels the anti-trans hatemongering that’s been a centerpiece of Trump’s re-election campaign.
Getting a head start on the national abortion ban that Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance plan to impose on the whole country, the Republican Congress pre-emptively strips abortion rights for U.S. military veterans with a specially-crafted rider slipped onto the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs spending schedule. No veteran health care money would be allowed to go toward reproductive health services.
Furthering the agenda of the MAGA camp’s Evangelical Christian base is the goal of two other riders.
One, tacked onto the Financial Services and General Government budget, gives full state blessing to anti-LGBTQ hatred. It would officially sanction unequal treatment on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity by exempting federal agencies and their staff from punishment if they cite their religious beliefs to justify discriminating against LGBTQ people.
In total defiance of the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state, another Republican rider tied onto the Department of Education’s appropriations bill blocks the government from interfering with the imposition of school prayer programs in public schools.
Aimed at ginning up Christian votes, it’s also part of a grander scheme – progressively undermining the Education Department until it can be destroyed altogether. That’s a promise Republicans have been trying to fulfill since the time of Ronald Reagan, and it’s a central pledge of Project 2025.
Trump recently told Tesla / X billionaire Elon Musk that one of the first priorities of his next term would be to “close the Department of Education, move education back to the states.” That’s exactly what he did with abortion rights when his hand-picked right-wing Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and women in GOP-governed states across the country are still suffering.
While the labor and progressive movements are engaged full-time in trying to turn out the vote to block Trump and MAGA from winning on Nov. 5, budget-watchers are also encouraging them to make time to contact lawmakers in Washington about the Project 2025 prototypes being slipped into legislation before voters can have their say at the ballot box.
“Project 2025 is far more than just a blueprint for an authoritarian presidency. Republicans in Congress are already trying to pass Project 2025 into law by hiding hundreds of its most controversial provisions inside the must-pass annual spending bills,” James Goodwin, policy director of the Center for Progressive Reform, said in a statement sent to People’s World.
“It is disturbing to see conservative lawmakers try to enact their extreme Project 2025 agenda through such an anti-democratic process,” he said.
When the GOP leadership in the House under Speaker Mike Johnson began crafting the FY25 spending measures this summer, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., called the process a “charade to appease Republican extremists.”
She slammed the bills, saying they were intended to “further the Trump MAGA Project 2025 instead of working with Democrats to pass bills that could become law.
“At every turn, the Republicans are making abortion illegal, eliminating federal support for public education, undermining workers, and disarming America in the face of the climate crisis,” DeLauro said.
The Clean Budget Coalition, which includes hundreds of member groups, is pressing Congress to remove all the extremist riders from the appropriations package, especially the 300+ plucked right out of Project 2025.
The coalition is calling on voters nationwide to contact their members of the House, letting them know they should oppose all the Republican wrecking amendments attached to the spending bills.
Tell Congress: Remove the Project 2025 poison pills.
Killing them for good, however, requires a massive turnout on Nov. 5 blocking Trump from retaking the White House and denying Republicans another House majority.
As with all op-eds and news-analysis articles published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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