It’s telling that today’s Republican Party no longer veils it’s noxious ends in filmy policy statements and half-measure sound bytes. Owing to a nearly realized vision drawn straight out of Orwell — and enabled by two decades of Democratic leadership naively certain their adversaries would play by the usual rules — an emboldened GOP can now fly it’s freak flag with impunity.
No single document to date has captured this chilling brazenness as Project 2025, an exhaustive, 920-page blueprint for an infinitely more disciplined Trump second term. The product of more than 100 ultraconservative individuals and groups (headlined by the omnipresent hard-right think tank, the Heritage Foundation) dozens of existing federal agencies are either crippled, gutted or eliminated altogether.
To read Project 2025 is to enter a meritocratic universe in which fellow citizens living in poverty are there of their own doing, period. Government’s role is to “incentivize” (read punish) persons to the point at which they become “full stakeholders” in their own economic betterment.
Get-a-job/Trickle-down theory is the sole paradigm for critiquing every agency remotely related to human services, but special disdain is once again reserved for the most vulnerable of the vulnerable: Children and their caretakers in chronic poverty.
Rather than credit and fund proven programs aimed at bringing relief to those who qualify, Project 2025 grandstands, racializes and tortures data:
“Today, the American family is in crisis. Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70% of black children … Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts … The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents. If current trends continue, we are heading toward social implosion.”
Project 2025 radicals want us to lay the blame for the impending “social implosion” at the door of Black fathers, but also the ineffectual federal programs that only make things worse. Along with the Department of Education itself, the document calls for phasing out Head Start, and its mission to prepare disadvantaged 3-5 year-olds for academic parity:
“Head Start, originally established and funded to support low-income families, is fraught with scandal and abuse. With a budget of more than $11 billion, the program should function to protect and educate minors. Sadly, it has done exactly the opposite … Research has demonstrated that federal Head Start centers, which provide preschool care to children from low-income families, have little or no long-term academic value for children … this program should be eliminated along with the entire OHS [Office of Human Services]. At the very least, the program’s COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements should be rescinded.”
Not that the project’s authors would give a good damn, but Department of Human Services statistics from the fiscal year 2022 tell a very different story: Head Start participants were 12% less likely to experience poverty after age 18; Participants were 29% less likely to access public assistance as adults; Participants’ economic returns on the dollar ranged up to 13% annually.
Throughout the tome, Project 2025 invokes similarly imaginary numbers and illogical conclusions to justify MAGA Nation’s favorite empty policies. As to the fear and loathing surrounding Head Start, upping the odds a child will pay back those dollars in wages and taxes still isn’t good enough.
Cover to cover, Project 2025 amounts to much more than another unhinged rant from the usual Republican elites. Its a panoramic how-to for conservative callousness that if only partially realized, will widen the yawning wealth gap, ensure greater economic disparity and inflict needless suffering.
Don Rollins is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister in Jackson, Ohio. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2024
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us