Project 2025 has become a focus of liberal scaremongering. The 922-page book, published by the Heritage Foundation, lays out policy recommendations “for the next conservative‌ administration”—presumably one led by Donald Trump. More than one Democrat has called it a “blueprint for fascism.” Trump himself denounced it as “seriously extreme” and said, “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t wanna know anything about it.”

A heritage of oligarchs

Heritage was founded in 1973 by reactionary brewing magnate Joseph Coors. He mandated it to lend intellectual weight and credibility to the conservative movement coalescing around the notoriously dimwitted Ronald Reagan. In addition to the Coors family, it attracted generous support from Walmart’s Walton family and the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum dynasty—not to mention big corporations like ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, and Pfizer.

After enjoying significant influence in the Reagan and Bush White Houses, Heritage tried to toe the line between Trumpist populism and the traditional conservatism of its big-bourgeois paymasters. Ultimately, a succession of insufficiently pro-Trump foundation presidents were fired and replaced by Kevin Roberts, a hardline Trumpist who has spearheaded Project 2025.

Blueprint for fascism?

Roberts’s rhetoric sets liberal teeth on edge, particularly his proclamation that, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” But Project 2025 is decidedly not a blueprint for fascism. Its authors do not call for mobilizing petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarian elements to physically attack and destroy working-class parties and organizations. Indeed, they don’t envision mobilizing the former president’s supporters at all, apart from a call for “Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith to come to Washington” and serve in a second Trump administration.

Nevertheless, Project 2025 does have a bone to pick with unions. “It is hard to avoid reaching the … conclusion” that public-sector unions are “not compatible with constitutional government,” they write. But they do not envision using either Trumpist goons nor the executive of the capitalist state to smash these unions. Instead, they punt the ball to the most useless and toothless branch of government: “Congress should … consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place.”

Attacking the unions

The only concrete proposal they offer to fight public-sector unions is reissuing three Trump-era executive orders. One contains a vague call for federal departments and agencies to be tougher in contract and other negotiations. The second calls for them to be tougher fighting union grievances. The third is an order to discipline federal workers who engage in union business doing working hours, except when their right to do so is protected under federal labor law.

Certainly, unions must fight such measures, and communists will aid and support any and all militant labor struggles, regardless of who wins in November.

On private-sector unions, Project 2025 advocates familiar tactics—using the NLRB and capitalist court system to make it harder for workers to organize. They also suggest amendments to federal labor law allowing companies to create “employee involvement organizations,” company unions which try to unite workers and bosses in the same organization, as an alternative to real labor organizing.

Alongside these reactionary policies, Project 2025 advocates an extremely mild program of pro-worker reforms, including more paid vacation and on-site childcare, which they pitch as “pro-family” measures. They also call for mandatory time-and-a-half wages on Sundays—to incentivize observance of the sabbath day and counteract capitalism’s relentless assault on the fourth commandment.

Dissension in the camp

But there’s dissension in the Project 2025 camp. The chapter concerning private-sector unions includes no fewer than nine separate minority reports, under the heading “alternative view.” These take a more vigorous line against workers and unions. Where the main text concentrates on stifling new organizing drives, the alternative view urges attacks on existing unions as well. They also oppose any pro-worker reforms, no matter how tepid, arguing American workers are already too highly paid and their conditions too cushy.

Project 2025’s alternative view stands in direct contradiction to the demagoguery of Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, who calls Trump, “A leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike.” This underscores how, contrary to liberal hysteria, Project 2025 is not a unified programmatic preparation for power, but a broad, heterogeneous group of right-wing intellectuals and organizations trying to negotiate the contradictory class forces at the heart of Trumpism.

Trump and Vance appeal to traditional petty (and big) bourgeois conservatives, while at the same, their populist rhetoric against establishment elites and big business has won support from a layer of workers. But no political movement can faithfully serve hostile classes with fundamentally opposing interests.

Trade wars and shooting wars

Project 2025 is meant to be a handbook for political appointees in a second Trump administration, but regarding some of the most contentious issues within the Trumpist coalition, its authors cannot speak with one voice. When it comes to trade, the book contains two conflicting chapters. The first, authored by Trumpist Peter Navarro, is a blueprint for protectionism. In the second, conservative policy wonk Kent Lassman argues for free trade. Lassman struggles to give unpopular policies a populist tinge, saying protectionism is tantamount to placing “our trust in Washington elites to revive a declining country.” But free trade is a dead letter in the Trumpist party, and Lassman’s clever framing won’t revive it.

On the Ukraine War, Project 2025 offers not two contradictory options, but three—one of which is continuation of the Biden-Harris policy alongside sending “NATO and US troops if necessary.” The very next paragraph presents an alternative line which “denies that US Ukrainian support is in the national security interest of America at all.” Finally, they present a “third approach” which would cut, but not end, American funding for the war effort.

The federal bureaucracy

Perhaps nothing in Project 2025 alarms the liberals more than its proposal to replace career civil servants, hired and promoted based on merit and expertise, with Trumpist political appointees. They write:

When it comes to ensuring that freedom can flourish, nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state. Political appointees who are answerable to the president and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task. The next administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan [sic] “experts,” who pursue their own ends while engaging in groupthink, insulated from American voters.

Such criticism is nothing new. The book itself praises the efforts of both Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan to reform the bureaucratic behemoth, which employs no fewer than 2.2 million people.

Prior to the late-19th century, federal offices were staffed almost entirely by political appointees. Under the so-called “spoils system,” presidents used appointments to potentially lucrative positions, like tax or toll collectors, to buy support or repay political favors. As the capitalist system developed and became more complex, the bourgeoisie required a more centralized federal administration staffed by experts, not amateurs. Shielding bureaucrats from political pressure would ensure that they were guided by the long-term interests of capital, not the whims of public opinion or party policy.

The result was the Pendleton Act of 1883, which began the process of replacing political cronies with career civil servants. Project 2025 claims this as the work of “progressive intellectuals and activists.” Not true. The Pendleton Act was popular in both capitalist parties, winning over 75% support in the House and nearly 90% in the Senate. Its namesake, George Pendleton, had been a leader of the extreme pro-slavery and pro-Confederacy Copperhead faction of the Democrats during the Civil War. Wide support for Pendleton’s reforms reflected a simple fact: they met an urgent need of the whole ruling class.

Project 2025 is unclear on the number of career civil servants who would be replaced by appointees from the Heritage Foundation’s “presidential personnel database.” Figures as high as 10,000 or even 50,000 are bandied about in the capitalist press, and Roberts has called for “more than 50,000.”

The capitalists will certainly not welcome a return to the old spoils system. Blowback has already begun. Heritage’s tax status allows them to keep their funding a secret, but bourgeois press reports indicate Exxonmobil and the Walton Family have cut off their financial support since Roberts took the helm. Meanwhile, Paul Dans, coeditor of the book and coauthor of the federal bureaucracy chapter, was forced out of the project at the end of July.

Class War 2024

There’s one notable absence from Project 2025—any discussion of how to fight the reenergized American communist movement. This indicates the tremendous organizing work communists have before us, beginning with a militant, class-war campaign against both reactionary, capitalists parties in 2024. If the communist generation does its work right, the Revolutionary Communists of America will certainly rate a mention in Project 2029.