A shadowy network of dangerous right wing think tanks and action committees have come together to write a nearly 1,000 page manifesto which maps out the strategy they are planning to enact incredibly draconian and sweeping anti-queer and trans laws, and dismantle the federal government as we know it. We must stop them. This is not a defense of the federal government which imprisons, surveils, and bombs innocent people fighting to survive all over the globe, but rather a call to action for anarchists and anti-authoritarians to come together and oppose this plan with everything we’ve got in defense of our queer friends and family. We should therefore develop our arguments against this project in line with our values, and not in simple opposition to the takeover of the federal government.
The project goes by the name of ‘Project 2025’ and it is a comprehensive plan to reshape the Executive Branch of the U.S. federal government in the event that the Republicans win in 2024. The tradition of the Heritage Foundation publishing their Mandate for Leadership goes back to 1981, with the Reagan Administration, which took many of the Foundation’s proposals and enacted them during his time in office. And soon after Donald Trump’s ascension to the position, his administration began implementing the 2016 version. This newest and boldest version of the plan came into existence in 2022, and aims to replace existing employees with people willing to enact the agenda and policies of the far right. They would perform a quick take-over of the entire federal government under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory, which proposes that the president of the U.S. has absolute power over the Executive Branch, upon inauguration. The 920-page document targets everything from the LGBTQIA2+ to school lunches in its rambling screed of tyrannical desires.
The development of the plan is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative U.S. think tank with a global reach, although Project 2025 is truly a coalition of prominent conservative organizations that includes the Claremont Institute, Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Hillsdale College, Freedom Works, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Principles Project, and dozens of others. The organization’s goal is to lay out a “first 180 days” agenda for the next administration, and to recruit conservatives to fill positions within the federal government appointed by the executive branch. They have put a call out for thousands of Trumpers to “come to Washington” to “drain the swamp” by signing up and being trained on how to enact this take-over.
The Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts created the plan in 2022 because in the former president’s previous term, civil servants all over the country refused to comply with his illegal and immoral decisions. The Muslim travel ban, the attempts to install a new attorney general to help overturn the 2020 elections, and when he called for lethal force against George Floyd protestors are all examples of the current set of government employees hindering the dictatorial ambitions of Trump. The 920-page blueprint was published in April 2023, and was drawn up by hundreds of conservative and Neo-fascist former Trump officials and others.
Expansion of presidential powers
The unitary executive theory, in both its forms “weak” and “strong”, is a theory of United States constitutional law which holds that the President of the United States possesses the sole power to control the entire federal Executive Branch. It comes out of the U.S. Constitution Article Two, which vests “the executive power” of the United States in the President. The “weak” version postulates that there are some limits that can be brought to bare against the President’s wishes, while proponents of the strong version argue that the President cannot be challenged and hold all of the executive powers. In either its strong or weak form, the theory would limit the power of Congress to divest the President of control of the executive branch. The “strongly unitary” theory posits stricter limits on Congress than the “weakly unitary” theory.
The phrase and idea has been around since the beginning of the country, but the stronger and more extreme versions have taken root in the psyche of the right since at least 9/11 and the George W Bush administration, when Vice President Dick Cheney promoted it aggressively. Donald Trump has previously stated that Article Two gives him the “right to do whatever as president”, a common claim made by supporters of unitary executive theory. This would essentially make Trump the de facto dictator of the federal government, especially when considering the staffing changes planned within.
Personnel
One disturbing element of Project 2025 is the personnel database being established already online by the Heritage Foundation. A database the Foundation expects to contain 20,000 names by the end of 2024. Although Trump was accused of making staffing decisions based on loyalty, it was not based on ideology or loyalty to the Constitution or country, but to Trump himself. In the last year of his presidency, White House Presidential Personnel Office employees James Bacon and John McEntee developed a questionnaire to test potential employees on their commitment to Trump. They joined the project in May 2023.
The plan is to use Schedule F, a job classification established by Trump by executive order in July 2020, to remove the majority of employees from the federal government. Schedule F has since been rescinded by Joe Biden, but Trump would likely reinstate it upon winning the election. It would have contained policy-related positions, removing civil service protections and making federal employees easy to fire. The purpose of the provision was to increase the President’s control over the federal career civil service. “Anywhere from 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of federal employees can be impacted by it since Schedule F is ‘ambiguously written,’ allowing political appointees to extend its application from top civil servants to those in lower ranks” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver. “The problem with removing job protections from civil servants is that experienced executives are no longer protected should they need to speak truth to power and explain the downsides to what otherwise seems like a ‘good’ idea,” Guy said. “They are at risk of being fired for offering alternative points of view or insisting that laws, such as the Administrative Procedures Act, be followed.”
Climate policy
Unsurprisingly, the plan does not include strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Instead the energy and climate director of the Heritage Foundation has recommended Americans use more natural gas. Project 2025 includes the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered $370 billion to clean technology, closing the Loans Program Office at the Dept of Energy, eliminating climate change from the National Security Council agenda, and actually encourages allies to use fossil fuels. It also supports Arctic drilling and the declaration that the government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and coal resources”. It would reverse a 2009 finding by the EPA that found carbon dioxide as harmful to human health, this reversal would prevent the government from regulating the emissions of this gas.
LGBTQIA2+ rights and “pornography”
President Kevin Roberts, in a section of Project 2025’s manifesto, claims that under the Biden administration:
“children suffer the toxic normalisation of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries… Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualisation of children … is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to first amendment protection.”
He then continues to conflate people who make and distribute pornography and LGBTQIA2+ content, calling them both “child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women” and should face jail time. This includes registering educators and librarians as sex offenders, and closing down the telecommunications and technology companies that “facilitate its spread”. They have also called for the removal of regulations “prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.”
The Project’s blueprint, refereed to as the “Mandate for Leadership”, acts as a guide book for any incoming president to transform the Department of Justice and end the FBI’s efforts to combat the dissemination of misinformation. It also includes plans to intensify the prosecution of people distributing or providing abortion pills by mail. It reads, “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion Project (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity…and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
Their list of wishes include the abolition of abortion, diversity and inclusion efforts, protections for LGBTQIA2+ people, and banning all queer content. In fact, Project 2025 makes it clear that the eradication of the LGBTQIA2+ community as its top priority. This is the cultural hinge point they have staked their movement on. Its number one promise is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” Talking points formed out of the anti-trans and anti-queer rhetoric of the last few years. The “Mandate for Leadership” makes explicit how they plan to do this, they plan on declaring all queer content to be pornographic in nature to start.
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Their rhetoric about pornography includes any content that discusses or portrays LGBTQIA2+ figures, from children’s books to suicide hotlines. This model stems from the “Don’t Say Gay” bills passed recently in Florida, a model also tried in Virginia. It is thought that this would subject LGBTQIA2+ parents to arrest, imprisonment, and registration as sex offenders. It would also criminalize any doctor, therapist, or counselor who provided gender affirming treatments to trans youth. The document calls for nationwide bans of abortions and such affirming care, while calling for long dispelled methods such as conversion therapy to be the only available treatment. Essentially they want a Christian theocracy. These laws could arguably go as far as to criminalize LGBTQIA2+ people in public existence, since they could be seen by children.
The document also targets single mothers in its crosshairs when it says that they are the reason for the crisis in the family that they seek to right. It goes as far as to recommend the Department of Health and Human Services remove children from such households, saying that a child needs both a mother and a father to grow up properly. Homes with non related “boyfriends” and single mother households are responsible, in their minds, for the deterioration of the nuclear family. It says that the Secretary should define a natural and safe family as being a married mother and father, excluding automatically the entire LGBTQIA2+ community.
The manifesto also includes the internet in its persecution of the LGBTQIA2+ community. Any Internet Service Provider (ISP) that transmits or receives any data about transgender people could be liable if this plan is implemented. Also swept into the net would be social media companies that allowed positive discussion or depictions of queer content. They even go as far as to call TikTok a national security threat. The obvious backlash that would occur in largely blue states, and states with sanctuary laws for transgender people, such as California, led to the inclusion of this paragraph:
“Where warranted and proper under federal law, initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the “equal protection of the laws” by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).”
This call for the federal executive branch to use the Department of Justice to attack and prosecute local DAs and state officials is directly opposed to the state’s rights, and small government tenants of conservatism. When employees at the Department refuse to comply, they could be easily replaced under Schedule F. This also applies to immigrant populations and the similar sanctuary laws that apply to them at the state level.
Among many other things in their crosshairs is school lunch programs, diversity and inclusion programs, repealing of anti-discrimination laws, expansion of ICE detention centers, allowing for religious discrimination, abortion bans, eliminating the Department of Education, and political prosecutions.
The likelihood of state officials to stand up to a concerted and organized federal government attempt to prosecute their transgender citizens is incredibly low. We all know that Democrats are as weak as can be in today’s political climate and the last thing we could expect from them is any resistance to this plan. Since Democrats would likely face political death and even prosecution themselves if they resisted it will not happen, not to mention the constitutional crises that would unfold if the states actually stood up and refused to comply with the federal government. If we are expected to persevere, we must take action into our own hands.
One question remains for the naive: will they be able to get all this past the Supreme Court? If not immediately, then they will simply replace those justices with more subservient ones and pass it then. Or dissolve the court altogether in favor of more power in the Executive Branch. Conservatives at the Claremont Institute have stated that they intend to seize power for generations and remake the U.S. entirely in their image. The “Mandate for Leadership” is an announcement of their goals, and the roadmap to achieving them.
The overall point of this plan is to purge the “deep state” of any who would oppose Trump and his policies. That means the full suite of surveillance and detention authorities, the capability to determine someone to be a terrorist and black-box them, the institutions created to imprison, torture, and disappear “enemy combatants” created out of the War on Terror would be in the hands of a President determined to wield them against Americans. This makes as good an argument for abolishing these powers (and all police and prisons) as anything I’ve ever heard. The key is to stop this dictatorship before it starts, as it is entirely possible Trump will be elected in 2024. This Handmaid’s Tale is not out of the realm of possibilities for us in the near future. It is imperative we talk about this plan and what we can do to combat it in our spaces.
One thing that can be done is connecting to or building a local mutual aid network where you live. These networks are critical for disseminating information, finding comrades to work with, learning valuable skills, taking care of each other, and educating people about our struggles. They can provide a space for talking about these issues and coming up with a variety of action plans to respond on a local level, a regional level, and even a national level. Resources like A Radical Guide and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief have non exhaustive lists of such networks, plus additional resources for learning about mutual aid and radical politics.
Another action that we should take is expanding our outreach to marginalized communities, as they will be under the most threat during this period, and will need our solidarity. It will also strengthen our organizations to be more diverse. Often the most marginalized communities have the best and most direct answers to the problems faced by us all. We should do our best to listen to them during this. Centering the voices of the oppressed will be the most sure fire way to protect us against state repression and non state violence. This outreach should be responsive to the needs of those communities, while participating in public education around these intersecting issues. Publishers like AK Press, PM Press, and Haymarket Books have books you can read based around these subjects. Books like:
An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T. Mays
Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies by Andrea J. Ritchie
Settler Colonialism: An Introduction by Sai Englert
This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers edited by Elias Jahshan
Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies edited by Scott Branson, Raven Hudson, and Bry Reed
Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism by Michael Zweig
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction edited by Sumaya Awad and Brian Bean
Queer Ultra Violence: A Bash Back Anthology edited by Fray Baroque & Tegan Eanelli
The last suggestion we have is to use the previous two paragraphs to guide us in forming affinity with comrades you can trust and acting in small affinity groups to leverage our power most effectively. Affinity means you share certain values and desires of what to accomplish, this means that much of the difficult decision making woes of large groups is avoided. By acting in small groups raised out of mutual affinity and trust, we can do the most damage to the system, while remaining safe ourselves. These groups have historically been the hardest for the State to repress and break up. They also provide the most resilience and protections from burnout, since operating with friends keep you honest about what you can take on. To learn more about affinity groups check out theanarchistlibrary.org or read this article from Crimethinc.
They are trying to govern us into submission, the only response is to become ungovernable.
Sources:
www.project2025.org
Shah, Areeba (2023-09-05). “”Dark” right-wing network recruits MAGA “army” to replace 50K federal workers Trump plans to purge”. Salon. Retrieved 2023-09-24.
Mascaro, Lisa (2023-08-29). “Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision”. AP News. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
Tannehill, Brynn (August 14, 2023). “The GOP Has a Master Plan to Criminalize Being Trans”. damemagazine.com. Dame Media LLC. Retrieved September 10, 2023.
Ackerman, Spencer (August 3, 2023). “This Is How Trump Becomes a Dictator”. ISSN 0027-8378. Retrieved September 10, 2023.