WASHINGTON—A parade of witnesses and sympathetic House Democrats have laced into Project 2025’s bans on abortions for women facing problem pregnancies or even death and its provisions forcing workers to forgo overtime pay.
The session, by the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, ties into two of the party’s current campaign themes against the GOP this fall: The radical right extremism of the Republican agenda and its hatred of women’s rights and workers, especially blue-collar and union workers.
Anti-abortion bans and comp time instead of overtime were among the targets of the two-hour session of the committee, a party panel as opposed to a regular House committee.
And Republicans hate public schools, too, preferring vouchers for parents of private school kids—a cause pushed by former Education Secretary Elizabeth “Betsy” DeVos, a GOP big giver and Donald Trump appointee. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., defended the public schools and teachers.
Project 2025, also known as the real Republican platform, was written at convicted felon Trump’s behest by the extremist right-wing Heritage Foundation. Dozens of Trumpites were among its authors, the Democrats noted.
Lawmakers pointed out it includes a secret annex specifying what actions Trump could take within 180 days of retaking the Oval Office next year by executive action alone should he win this fall’s election. One big one: Firing thousands of federal workers and replacing them with Trump loyalists.
The hearing featured, at its start, video clips of Trump, once again the Republican presidential nominee, endorsing Project 2025 by name. It included other video clips of Trump bragging he named the three U.S. Supreme Court justices—Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanagh, and Neil Gorsuch—whose votes were key to eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion two years ago.
Those in turn were followed by clips of other prominent Republicans—including current House Speaker Mike Johnson, his predecessors Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan, and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell—vowing to extend that ban to all abortions in all states.
The House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee’s two-hour meeting included testimony from and about women who had to take pregnancies to term even though medical examinations long before showed a lack of key organs—such as the liver—or other defects that would prevent the babies from living more than a few hours after birth.
But draconian anti-abortion laws passed in red states after the High Court’s ruling, forced the mothers to carry the infants to term, even in cases where doing so endangered the mother’s life.
The lawmakers and others added stories of women in Florida, Texas, and Georgia who died because their state abortion bans prevented doctors from saving their lives by simple abortion procedures because the MDs faced jail terms for doing so.
But women wouldn’t be the sole sufferers under Project 2025. Workers would too. That’s because the GOP platform’s provisions demand replacing overtime with comp time, which workers can use only at the boss’s say-so. The catch is Project 2025 is silent about the boss’s power.
In practical terms, said Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., who introduced Auto Worker J.J. Jewell, it means Project 2025 “could force people to work overtime without being paid—to work harder and paid less” while Trump and the GOP “raise their taxes.”
Jewell, a 12-year veteran of Ford’s Sterling Heights, Mich., plant, described how vital overtime was to earn enough money to feed his family. That’s because, under the former two-tier pay system at the three big Detroit automakers, he started at $12 an hour on the lower tier, before overtime.
UAW’s new contracts with the Detroit firms, achieved via its rolling Stand Up strikes, now bring him more than tripled his pay, to $38 hourly, Jewell said. But given the rising costs of everything, including housing, he still gets some overtime pay. He just doesn’t need it as much.
“I was on the 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. to 1 p.m., or 2 p.m. shift, with an extra four hours of overtime once a week,” he testified. In his first year on the job, he had so much overtime that it added an extra $5,000 to his annual pay.
The work takes a toll
But actually, the overtime was even more, Jewell noted. “Staying on the job until 1 or 2 a.m. takes a cost on your body” and your family, he added.
“Under Project 2025, the employer could manipulate my hours and my overtime pay by destroying the standard workweek” of eight-hour days and 40-hour weeks before overtime kicks in. “People would be working 60 and 70 hours a week without overtime.
“It’s exploiting workers. Changing the overtime rule gives bosses more control over workers and over their paychecks. This isn’t about me. It’s about millions of American workers.”
Project 2025 bluntly says “Lower- and middle-income workers are more likely be in jobs that are subject to overtime laws that require employers to pay time-and-a-half for working more than 40 hours a week.”
It advocates the Republicans’ Working Families Flexibility Act to “allow employees in the private sector the ability to choose between receiving time-and-a-half pay or accumulating time-and-a-half paid time off. For example, if an individual worked two hours of overtime every week for a year, he or she could accumulate four weeks of paid time off to use for paid family leave, vacation, or any reason,” Project 2025 reads.
What it conveniently leaves out is the provision Jewell discussed: That getting the comp time is up to the boss, and in the meantime the worker must continue to toil the extra hours, unpaid.
Rep. DeLauro, the top Democrat and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee—which is supposed to help write congressional money bills—took up the cause of the public schools and their teachers and kids against DeVos, Trump, and the GOP privatizers.
She called the project “a direct attack on teachers and public education.” The Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association, and the School Administrators (AFSA) make the same arguments.
“It would abolish the Department of Education, end Head Start, end Title I funding” for schools with high populations of students from lower-income households, “and even end funding for food” in schools. The department has been a favorite and longtime target of the Radical Right in general and of Trumpite white nationalists in particular.
Instead, Project 2025 “will privatize student loans,” turning them and their profits back over to banks, with federal guarantees of cash in case students default “and fund vouchers,” DeLauro said.
“Just take a look at their [Republican] funding bills,” DeLauro exclaimed. “They’ll make education a privilege for the wealthy and the well-connected” alone.
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