If you have been reading the news as of late, you may have heard of the elusive ‘Project 2025’. But what exactly is this?
Project 2025, otherwise known as the Mandate for Leadership, is “a collective effort of hundreds of volunteers who have banded together in the spirit of advancing positive change for America” (excerpt from Acknowledgements). This 922 page document acts as a wish list of changes for the next conservative president to execute while in office. Written by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that creates and promotes public policies, the Mandate for Leadership discusses wanted reforms in different areas of government, and despite the Heritage Foundation’s insistence that it doesn't work on behalf of any special interest or political party, the Mandate for Leadership displays almost entirely conservative views and talking points. This is likely due to the fact that the Mandate for Leadership was drafted by more than four hundred conservative scholars and policy experts with the high expectation that former president Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the next president in 2025.
I had known about this Project for several months before reading it, and it immediately caught my interest. As someone who is quite interested in politics and cannot yet vote, I decided to dive deeper into Project 2025, where I took on the challenge of reading the text through my own POV. While my own views and biases may be different from yours, I tried my best to remain neutral and not an opinion piece. The rest of the article will discuss specific recommendations written in the Mandate. The article will include points made in section 3, chapter 14 - Department of Health and Human Services, and section 3 chapter 11 - Department of Education.
Department of Health and Human Services
The chapter related to the DOHHS spoke of many topics, but this article will focus on abortion and various subjects related to the LGBTQ+ community.
On abortion, the Mandate states that the CDC (Center for Disease Control) should eliminate programs/projects that are in support of abortion, since the creators of the Mandate do not consider abortion to be a form of health care. This would include demolishing any sort of funding towards out-of-state abortions, where pregnant individuals travel across border lines in order to have abortions in states that allow them. The Mandate also wishes for the CDC to collect data on how many abortions, and what kind of abortions, are being performed. The data collection would separate abortions performed into four categories, including; spontaneous miscarriages, incidents that result in an abortion (such as chemotherapy), stillbirths, and induced abortion (medical or surgical abortions). This data collection would also track which groups of people show an influx in births or abortions. The Mandate did not state how these said groups of people would be categorized, but I would assume they mean by ethnicity and income. The Mandate also wishes for the FDA to ban medical abortions. Medical abortions come in a two-pill system, which includes mifepristone and misoprostol. Mifepristone blocks the hormone needed to support a pregnancy, while misoprostol engages cramping and bleeding in order to empty the uterus (Cleveland Clinic). One of the reasons for this potential ban is because the Mandate states that “chemical abortion (medical abortion) has been found to have a complication rate four times higher than that of surgical abortion”. According to the National Library of Medicine, medical abortions have a16% chance of failure as compared to a 4% chance of failure in surgical abortions.
On the topic of the LGBTQ+ community and their well being, the Mandate wishes for CMS to reverse the recently-updated definition of discrimination based on gender identity, to the definition of discrimination solely based on biological sex, as it was under the Trump administration. If the Mandate is followed, then all policies that do not specifically support nuclear families (mother + father + children) would be repealed and replaced. This point was a bit vague, but one can assume that the repeal would be related to policies and programs in support of the LGBTQ+ community. The reason for this assumption is because the Mandate also wants to heavily regulate or completely remove the ability for same-sex parents to foster children. This movement comes from the idea that children are better off in homes with opposite-sex parents than they are in homes with same-sex parents, but according to the National Library of Medicine, no differences were observed. To briefly continue with the discussion of the potential future of the LGBTQ+ community, the Mandate states that the CDC should immediately end its data collection on gender identity, and wishes for the NIH to rid themselves of studies on gender and the benefits of gender-affirming care, and only give information about the adverse effects of said care.
Department of Education
One of the larger proposals advocated by the Mandate for Leadership is to eliminate the entire Department of Education, and bring education administration closer to families, granting parents better access to education options and the knowledge of their student’s curriculum. The reason for this grand request of eliminating the DOE is due to many conservatives accusing the DOE of implementing leftist agendas in school curriculums. With the demolition of the DOE, its sections would be split up and given to different departments, in order to decrease the overall size of the current government.
When it comes to changes in education, the Mandate says that curriculums should be controlled at a state level and not a government level. Despite stating that curriculums should not be controlled at a federal level, the Mandate also wishes to rescind the ‘non-binary’ sex category of the office of Civil Rights data collection. Additionally, the Mandate wishes for the new administration to reject any teachings of “gender ideology” and “critical race theory” in classrooms, insisting that these specific topics lead to the overall confusion and guilt of students when it comes to their gender and race. The Mandate also states that school teachers can currently assist students in socially and medically transitioning if a student comes out as transgender. While assisting someone with socially transitioning can be as simple as using their preferred pronouns, stating that teachers are assisting students in medically transitioning is untrue, since that is a HIPAA violation. From personal experience, I know that our school nurse can't even give students Tylenol unless a permission slip is signed, so hormone replacement therapy is certainly not being provided in school environments. The Mandate also requests to prohibit teachers from using a student’s name and pronouns that do not match their birth certificate or their sex assigned at birth.
Another hope of the Mandate that should be touched on relates to student loans. The Mandate states that “[t]he new plan should have an income exemption equal to the poverty line and require payments of 10 percent of income above the exemption. If new legislation is possible, there should be no loan forgiveness, but if not, existing law would require forgiving any remaining balance after 25 years”. The Mandate does not mention what would happen if the remaining balance is not paid after 25 years.
Conclusion
I wish to keep this article neutral by not sharing my own politically-influenced views of the Mandate, but I can speak for others when I say that the Mandate is catching the attention of people from all sides of the political spectrum. Some would view this Mandate as a sign of a dark future, while others may see this Mandate as the desperately- needed light at the end of the tunnel. However you see it, I want to end this segment by reminding all readers to look into and educate themselves on such riveting discussions, so that no matter what happens in the future, you’ll know what to expect.