Representatives continued to raise the alarm earlier this week about Project 2025, the far-right presidential transition operation that threatens to attack abortions and other rights.
To combat the playbook, Democrats announced yesterday the creation of a task force dedicated to making “a coordinated strategy to save America.” Joined by members like House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin and Democratic Caucus Vice Chair Ted Lieu, the task force will reportedly focus on gathering research and holding briefings as they come up with a strategy against Project 2025.
In a congressional hearing held last month, Rep. Jasmine Crockett criticized the conservative policies’ handbook, saying that it set the stage for “authoritarianism” and for “the next dictator” to come in.
Since its announcement in 2023, others have previously echoed Crockett’s statements with Project 2025 already having been labeled as “apocalyptic.”
Created by right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, the project is based on an almost 1,000-page handbook that is set for the next conservative to serve as “commander-in-chief.”
A group of House Dems is launching a task force to take on Project 2025, conservatives' sprawling policy roadmap for a second Trump admin.
— Axios (@axios) June 11, 2024
"We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it's too late," said Rep. Jared Huffman. https://t.co/iLVv4tatOh
According to Time Magazine, as part of Project 2025, conservatives are threatening to attack abortion pills, claiming that they are “the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.”
Through the project, they’re aiming to pressure the Food and Drug Administration to reverse their decision to approve the pills, claiming that politics played too large of a role in the process. For anyone distributing abortions and abortion pills, the project aims to have increased policing and eventual prosecution.
“The next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion,” wrote the conservatives in the handbook.
Segmented into chapters, Project 2025 also calls for changing the workings of the Department of Justice, pushing for more policing for the department as well as ending the F.B.I.’s efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation.
Along with abolishing the Department of Commerce and the Department of Education, the conservatives are looking to limit executive power to the president, giving them the chance to act alone. Allies would also be given opportunities to step into any supporting administrative roles.
Federal workers would also be at risk as Project 2025 plans to reinstate Schedule F. Considered to be an executive order, it would potentially risk the jobs of 2 million federal employees who would be considered “at-will workers.”
“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says — and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” said Philip Wallach, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, per AP News.
