While policy debates on immigration, abortion, and other issues took center stage in the 2024 presidential election, the first months of the Trump administration have also signaled major changes in federal disability policy.
An estimated 20% to 25% of Americans have a disability of some kind, including physical, sensory, psychological, and intellectual disabilities.
Billionaires Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are purging park rangers, scientists, and other public land experts while putting oil and gas industry executives and their close allies in charge of America’s public lands. As a result, visitors and communities are already feeling the impacts on their parks, and land protections are being gutted to clear a path for pollution and corporate exploitation.
Donald Trump has a particular formula he uses to convey messages to his supporters and opponents alike: He highlights others’ wrongdoings even though he has committed similar acts himself.
On Oct. 3, 2024, Trump accused the Biden administration of spending Federal Emergency Management Agency funds − money meant for disaster relief − on services for immigrants. Biden did no such thing, but Trump did during his time in the White House, including to pay for additional detention space.
Project 2025, officially titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, is an extremist blueprint crafted by the Heritage Foundation to guide a far-right presidential administration. This 900-page manifesto outlines sweeping policy proposals that would upend nearly every aspect of American life. At its core, Project 2025 seeks to unravel the system of checks and balances that has been foundational to American democracy for nearly 250 years.
Project 2025, the far-right extremist agenda developed by the Heritage Foundation, would increase the power of corporations at the expense of Americans’ health and well-being. It would give more control to health care companies—including some of the most profitable companies in the world—by jeopardizing protections that help many patients access and afford the care they need. Project 2025 would also take us back to a time when corporations were free to pump dangerous toxins into the air we breathe and the water we drink. If Project 2025’s plan for a far-right administration takes effect, corporations will profit while patients are saddled with high bills, less accessible health care, more exposure to toxins, and more harmful health conditions.
School is often a safe haven for marginalized youth, including LGBTQI+ students. The Trevor Project reports in a large-scale 2024 survey that LGBTQI+ students who find their schools to be affirming experience lower suicidality. Even one supportive adult—such as a teacher—can decrease suicide risks for an LGBTQI+ young person by as much as 43 percent.
But in 2023, lawmakers who support anti-LGBTQI+ legislation introduced hundreds of bills that, if passed, would significantly disrupt access to a safe and quality education for LGBTQI+ students. Importantly, the legislation considered in 2023 is part of a larger trend; the number of anti-LGBTQI+ school policy bills considered across the country has steadily and dramatically increased in recent years, and this year, state legislatures have continued to introduce and consider a plethora of similar harmful bills. From censoring LGBTQI+ curricula, to restricting bathroom access for transgender students, the far right has introduced dozens of policies that inflict educational harm, with many becoming state law.
Project 2025 is a plan to gut America’s system of checks and balances in order to enact an extreme, far-right agenda that would hurt all Americans. The plan proposes taking power away from everyday people to give politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives. Here are specific ways that Project 2025 harms veterans in America.
In a nearly 1,000-page proposal, a group of far-right former officials and experts have authored a policy agenda, dubbed “Project 2025,” for a future right-wing presidency. The plan, which would gut America’s 250-year-old system of checks and balances to allow far-right extremism to take over the federal government, includes a vision for the “common defense” that will place the United States in direct confrontation with its adversaries and privilege unilateral militarism over a thoughtful, holistic, and adequately resourced national security strategy. In so doing, Project 2025’s proposals would fundamentally undermine America’s national and economic security, and ordinary Americans will pay the price.
Project 2025 is a plan to gut America’s system of checks and balances in order to enact an extreme, far-right agenda that would hurt all Americans. The plan proposes taking power away from everyday people to give politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives. Here are specific ways that Project 2025 harms American workers.
Gun violence is falling at a historic rate for the second year in a row after surging nearly 30 percent during former President Donald Trump’s final year in office. However, rather than build on the success of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act by passing stronger gun laws and increasing investments in the root causes of violence, far-right extremists are attempting to defund federal law enforcement and invalidate state gun laws that save lives. Their radical policy agenda would make the country less safe by making it easier for people who want to commit violence to carry guns and harder for law enforcement to solve violent crimes.
Project 2025 is an authoritarian playbook to systematically dismantle the checks and balances framework upon which American democracy is built. Specifically, Project 2025 calls for the U.S. Department of Justice to “initiate 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.”
Head Start is a vital support for parents like Javona Brownlee, whose three children all attended Head Start programs. Javona’s two youngest children attended preschool through Head Start while the family lived in a homeless shelter after escaping from an abusive partner. Participating in Head Start allowed them to receive the developmental and academic support they needed and enabled Javona to get back on her feet and start her own cleaning business. She shared, “Those doors were able to open for me because my children had access to Head Start; it had a huge impact on my family and allowed me to become self-sufficient.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a road map for how a new far-right presidential administration can take over the country. The project contains four components: a 920-page book with far-right policy proposals, a personnel database of loyalists ready to replace tens of thousands of civil servants, a private online training center, and an unpublished plan for the first 180 days of a new administration.
Many of the proposals in Project 2025 are sweeping and would eliminate fundamental personal freedoms while cutting the take-home pay of millions of Americans. Unsurprisingly, Project 2025’s policies to increase taxes on the middle class, allow corporations to stop paying workers overtime, implement a national abortion ban, and raise the retirement age for Social Security are wildly unpopular.
