• Breaking through the fourth wall, but I’m an American citizen who is horrified at what the current Administration is doing to the country I love. In the spirit of ‘know your opponent‘ I’ve briefly departed from our normal time with Sy and the gang to shine light on a document that was carefully not publicized prior to the 2024 election. Back to our normal programming next week.
• The material below is based on the Project 2025 document. It’s my understanding that much of the Project’s philosophy underlies and is embedded in the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Act (OBBBA) currently working its way through Congress, but I’ve not read through all of that legislation’s ~900 pages (way too many ‘notwithstandings’). From what I’ve seen, the House‑passed version is every bit as contrary to our founding principles. ~ RJO

I expect only a few people have read through 2025 Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation’s manifesto that lays out much of the tactical structure for what the current Administration is trying to accomplish. It’s a hefty tome, nearly 900 pages including a seven‑page list of Contributors. You don’t approach it like a novel; you settle down with a notepad and a supply of coffee, then scan through looking for mentions of your favorite parts of the Federal government.

Someone asked me which were my Top Three things to dislike about the Project 2025 prospectus. It was like asking which three threads in a plaid should be discarded but making no distinction between warp and woof. Plaid’s not that bad a metaphor, because the document has a warp (the underlying notions) and a woof (specific recommendations laid out for every entity in the government).

Some of the warp threads are explicit, proudly highlighted in the 33‑page Forward (quotes are direct from the text)

1. “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” (page 4) — Family is implicitly defined in the follow-on text as male breadwinner, female homemaker, some number of kids, all happily occupied with “the building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering.” (page 4) Note that political activity is not in the list. Parents must have veto authority over the entire content of their offspring’s schooling, except that screen time for kids is terrible and must be forbidden.
2. “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” (page 6) — “So today in Washington, most policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State. Given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter. Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision‑making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agency’s bureaucrats–not just unelected but seemingly un‑fireable–then leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congress’s preening cowardice.” (page 7) On the one hand the Project authors want to return all decision‑making power to Congress, but on the other hand they point to congressional incapacity for the job. Clearly, the authors have an alternative governing structure in mind (see item 5).
3. “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” (page 9) — The “sovereignty, borders and bounty” notions are stretched to cover diatribes against the “managerial elite” (page 10), “globalization” (page 11), “environmental extremism” (page 11) and of course “wokeism” (page 14) in general.
4. “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’ ” (page 13) Consider the moral arrogance and intellectual acrobatics required to transform ‘the pursuit of Happiness’ to “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.” (page 13) Such a bleak prospect.

There are also implicit tenets and directives throughout the following 875 pages, there if one looks for them:

5. Abrogation of the Founders’ concept of checks and balances. Federal government power is to be lodged in the Unitary Executive branch, not in Congress (see item 2), not in the Judiciary. Orders come top‑down, which looks like an administrative state under another guise but that would be even further from democratic rule.
   • Notably, OBBBA provision 70302 would largely immunize the Executive branch against being held in contempt if it ignores or violates a Judicial ruling.
6. An imperative to privatize any governmental service that someone might or might not make a profit from.
7. Mean-spirited Social Darwinism, as exemplified by Musk’s remark that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
8. The notion that unregulated is always better than regulated, no matter the social cost.
9. Primacy of corporate/employer rights over worker rights (“union” is mentioned 102 times, “contract” 40 times).
10. Indictment of a supposed “climate crisis industry” (“climate” is mentioned 155 times) along with a spirited defense of the fossil‑fuel industries (“fossil” gets 31 mentions).
11. Religiosity, specifically Christian‑flavored. One telling example — “Congress should encourage communal rest by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to require that workers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath.” (page 589)
12. Deprecation of support for basic science and Public Health as governmental responsibilities. Despite more than 1000 uses of the word “science,” NASA is mentioned only once, in a footnote.
13. and a few others I lost track of.

That’s the warp of the plaid, but the woof uses the warp’s tool kit to prescribe actions to be taken in or against (nearly) every Federal Department and Agency, from the office of the White House Chief of Staff through the Cabinet positions out to the independent regulatory agencies ending with the Federal Elections Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Notably not included are the United States Postal Service, the Smithsonian Institution and the Kennedy Center.

My Top Three objectionable items? The document presents hundreds and hundreds of woof‑level recommendations, some of which seem reasonable to me but most of which don’t. In picking anti‑favorites I’ll stick with the warp level. Chief among them are jettisoning checks‑and‑balances, disparagement of science in general and climate change in particular, and the authors’ demonstrated propensity to cling to ideological positions in the face of contrary evidence.  Coming from a union family, I’m not too happy about item 9, either.

Think I’ve mischaracterized what’s in there? Download the document yourself and look through it to check me. Compare the listings to what has transpired so far since January 21. If you care about a particular governmental function (the Veterans Administration, the National Park Service, the Census Bureau, whatever), look up its prognosis. Think about that and decide what you want to do about it. Then do that.

~ Rich Olcott