The End Goal Of Project 2025
With less than two weeks until Election Day, Texas likely remains just on the edge of being a true battleground state. Still, Vice President Kamala Harris is en route to Houston for a rally with Beyoncé, Willie Nelson, and candidates like Colin Allred. It’s the first time in decades that a presidential candidate has visited the state so close to Election Day.
While the Harris-Walz campaign likely does not view Texas as one of their legitimate electoral targets, the state is playing a crucial role in their campaign. This state, with a near-total abortion ban (that dates to before Roe v. Wade was overturned) is part of their final pitch to voters. What happened in Texas could be a preview of what’s to come if Donald Trump is allowed back to the White House.
This is the promise of Project 2025. While both Trump and his running mate Senator J.D. Vance have publicly rebuked this blueprint, which runs nearly 1,000 pages, the fact remains that its authors represent clear ties to the Republican ticket. No matter what either of them says, Project 2025 is a playbook.
From the very beginning chapters Project 2025 outlines a clear picture of this country, and for Texas. The chapter on Health and Human Services envisions a future where a national abortion ban is unnecessary when the FDA reverses the approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in a medication abortion. Beyond a de facto national abortion ban, an HHS under Trump would also curtail research into disease and cancer, enact new restrictions on Medicare and Medicaid, raise the price on prescription drugs, and even eliminate the popular Head Start program which currently supports thousands of Texas children.
Speaking of children, in Texas and the nation Project 2025 would mean a radical realignment of the Department of Education. Truly, it calls for abolishing the department outright (which is also something that Ted Cruz has been saying as he runs for re-election). Public education funding would be gutted in favor of charter schools. It’s hard not to see the parallels to Texas, which remains the biggest red state that has not adopted a pro-voucher bill (though Abbott and his allies are furiously working to change that).
Project 2025 would also rescind several protections for LGBTQ+ students and educators. And there’s also calls to halt student loan forgiveness, even for programs for public servants. That also runs parallel to Cruz, who has called student loan forgiveness a “vote-buying scheme.”
The Cruz connection to Project 2025 gets even clearer in the chapter on the Department of Energy. The author is Bernard McNamee, Cruz’s former energy advisor and senior domestic policy advisor. In that chapter, reaffirming “American energy dominance” would require a repeal of many landmark accomplishments of the Biden Administration, like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Such a move would rescind the subsidies that have gone towards renewable energy developers, like the very kind that have been a boon to Texas.
Project 2025’s final chapter in its Mandate For Leadership (the official title of its blueprint) is called “Onward.” And that is indeed the closing message from Edwin Fuelner, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation (the principal group behind Project 2025). It states plainly that the civil servants that make up the executive branch and their agencies are on the chopping block.
The stakes of enacting Project 2025 are almost too steep to comprehend, but they should not be considered idle threats. As Governor Walz likes to note you don’t draft a playbook unless you intend to use it.
