I read the 920-page Project 2025. Here’s what really surprised me, after hours swimming in this filthy pool: I kind of get it.
Senate votes to confirm Russell Vought as OMB director
Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, was confirmed by the Senate, 53-47, to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
Project 2025 is a Magic 8 Ball of doom, and having this document on my desktop is a potent and terrifying lure.
All of those things you’ve felt vaguely queasy about for the past two months – laying off broad swathes of the workforces at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Social Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency; threats to privatize the Transportation Security Administration and dismantling the Department of Education – they’re all in there, and more.
At about 920 pages, Project 2025 is hard to read cover to cover, but search for the function of government most important to your life and you’ll find all the usual suspects – Planned Parenthood, LGBTQ+ rights, Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security, the Affordable Care Act – lined up for a nip and a tuck, if not excision outright.
I could tell you the five weirdest parts of Project 2025, the seven things most likely to happen next or the three items I’m most concerned about ‒ like privatizing Social Security and deregulating baby formula, an obsession with the false notion that abortions frequently result in live babies, or the belief that power-mad Marxist liberals affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party have infiltrated American institutions, particularly universities.
But no tidy encapsulation conveys the scope and breadth of this agenda, portions of which are being enacted every day by a president with a penchant for destruction and an unelected efficiency edgelord.
Except maybe this.
The heart of Project 2025 is the entry on wild horses and burros
I found the heart of Project 2025 in, I’m not making this up, the entry on the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, one government agency that had previously flown under my radar (page 528, if you’d like to follow along):
“In 1971, Congress ordered the (Bureau of Land Management) to manage wild horses and burros to ensure their iconic presence never disappeared from the western landscape. … There are 95,000 wild horses and burros roaming nearly 32 million acres in the West ‒ triple what scientists and land management experts say the range can support. These animals face starvation and death … at a cost to the American taxpayer of nearly $50 million annually to care for them in off-range corrals.
“This is not a new issue ‒ it is not just a western issue ‒ it is an American issue. What is happening to these once-proud beasts of burden is neither compassionate nor humane, and what these animals are doing to federal lands and fragile ecosystems is unacceptable.”
The report goes on to list remedies suggested by the board, such as expanded adoption and sales, additional fertility control and off-range pasturing. None of that will be enough, the authors conclude: “Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals.”
I can’t help but see wild horses as a metaphor for what Project 2025’s authors want to do to America.
US government is bloated and inefficient – according to Project 2025
In these pages, the U.S. government is bloated, rambling and inefficient, a patchwork of unnecessary bureaucracy and programs dominated by Marxist liberals who hate America.
The government, according to Project 2025, has been perverted by “diversicrats” to spread a trifecta of woke lies at home and abroad (namely: It’s OK to be LGBTQ+, women should control our own bodies and climate change is real – that’s why the U.S. Agency for International Development had to go).
The range can no longer support this once-proud nation, and something has to be done. Axl Rose put it a little more plainly: “I used to love her, but I had to kill her.”
Donald Trump is better at this than we are
Make no mistake about what is happening: Our federal government is being put out of its misery. While courts have halted or reversed some of Trump’s blitz of layoffs and executive orders, I’m afraid the damage has been done.
How can you fill gaps in the collection of scientific data, restart scientific research dependent on continuity or reinstate a department once its employees have learned exactly how precarious their livelihoods are?
On the campaign trail, Trump insisted again and again that he had no connection to Project 2025, hadn’t even heard of it, didn’t know the people involved.
And yet.
That is this president’s modus operandi – say a thing, walk it back, say it again, walk it back, over and over until it’s nearly impossible for people like me to write a simple declaratory statement without so many qualifiers that you, the reader, are either left wondering why I’m reporting such a suspect thing at all, or frustrated that I’m bothering to report the president’s hedging when any idiot can tell he was never actually joking.
The sad truth is that Donald Trump is better at this dance than we are at parsing his words for meaning, or even taking him at his word, even when the agenda is spelled out in a 920-page report.
Even when we can see our government breaking in real time.
Headed for the slaughterhouse
Here’s what really surprised me, after hours swimming in this filthy pool: I kind of get it. Not the parts about deregulating baby formula and the malevolent Marxism of liberal elites, but the indefensible largeness of the federal government and the inefficiencies that inevitably result from such a sprawling mission.
Even so, it’s equally indefensible to rip away the supports that our government offers.
America has always been governed by idealists who believed the judicious application of government could solve a host of civic and social ills: Taxation without representation; inequity in wealth and education; pollution in our air and water; not enough kids graduating from college to support an advanced economy; disenfranchisement because of race or gender; needless strife and suffering overseas, coupled with the spread of our soft influence; legislation to extend health care to uninsured Americans; our industrial, agricultural, logistical and personal needs for accurate weather reports and climate data.
And mostly, they’ve been right. Americans rely on Social Security, and federal funding for our schools, and environmental data collected without a corporate agenda.
At least, we used to.
The report’s authors quote James Madison’s Federalist No. 45, published in 1788, lauding the virtues of small federal government: “The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.”
Project 2025’s authors believe they’ve diagnosed the problem ‒ “Modern progressive politics has simply given the national government more to do than the complex separation-of-powers Constitution allows. … The only real solution is for the national government to do less: to decentralize and privatize as much as possible.”
But I’d point Project 2025’s authors to Thomas Jefferson, writing 28 years later ‒ “Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, & deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present. … Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. … We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
That’s where we’re headed – squeezing our massive country back into a child’s coat, designed for 13 sparsely populated colonies almost 250 years ago.
Wild horses are a problem in the western states, but most of them have been rounded up and live off-range. The biggest problem, news outlets report, is that a program to incentivize the purchase of wild horses at auction may instead funnel the animals into the slaughterhouse.
I imagine the authors of Project 2025 wouldn’t object.
Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, where this column originally appeared. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com
