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Tyler O’Neil | The Daily Signal
As Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said Monday, the Left’s inflammatory attacks on Project 2025 show that it’s “right over the target.” President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is so desperate to defeat Project 2025 that it spreads direct falsehoods about it, perhaps not expecting the American people to actually examine what the project comprises.
The Biden campaign launched a special website dedicated to attacking Project 2025, and posted totally baseless claims about the initiative.
“Project 2025 is the plan by Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican allies to give Trump more power over your daily life, gut democratic checks and balances, and consolidate power in the Oval Office if he wins,” the webpage claims. “Trump’s campaign advisors and close allies wrote it—and are doing everything they can to elect him so he can execute their playbook immediately.”
As The Heritage Foundation’s Evan Maguire explained recently, Project 2025 developed independently of Trump’s reelection campaign. I wrote the exclusive story introducing Project 2025 to the world back in April 2023, before Trump entered the presidential race.
So, What Is Project 2025?
Before debunking Biden’s claims, it makes sense to first explain what Project 2025 is.
The project would be unnecessary if the federal government operated the way the Constitution stipulates. Under the Constitution, Congress should make laws, the president should sign them, and the courts should resolve disputes about them.
In Washington today, however, a vast bureaucracy of alphabet-soup agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of Energy (DOE), and countless others—actually write the regulations that Americans must live by. Sure, Congress passed laws delegating part of its authority to those agencies and could defund them if it chose to do so, and sure, those agencies are technically under the president’s Article II powers to administer the laws, but in practice, these agencies act like a fourth branch of government.
While the president heads up the executive branch, bureaucrats in the alphabet soup enjoy many protections that make it difficult for the president to fire them, even if they directly flout his policy objectives. The Trump presidency saw the rise of a hostile “deep state,” where bureaucrats slow-walked the president’s orders, undermined his policies, and leaked to the media, even bragging that they were restraining him from inside the executive branch.
Project 2025 aims to prevent that going forward by equipping an incoming president with a comprehensive strategy. Key facets include pointers on how to structure the executive branch, drafts of executive orders to cut the red tape and allow presidents to fire hostile bureaucrats, and a database of commonsense Americans who won’t oppose a conservative president’s agenda.
That strategy is designed to bolster the will of the people, as it allows the people’s elected representative—the president—to bring the fourth branch of government to heel and to implement the policy agenda that the American people voted for.
Without further ado, here are the biggest whoppers the Biden campaign tells about Project 2025.
1. ‘Terminates the Constitution’
Ironically, the Biden campaign claims that Project 2025 “terminates the Constitution.” While the campaign backs up some of its claims on the website with drop-down menus and explanatory bullet points, it doesn’t even bother backing up this particular claim.
Contrary to Biden campaign spin, Project 2025 actually represents an attempt to restore the Constitution, not terminate it.
Bringing the administrative state more firmly under the control of the president, whose authority traces directly from the Constitution, could not be further from terminating this quintessential founding document.
2. Gives Trump ‘More Power Over Your Daily Life’
With no sense of irony, the Biden campaign claims Project 2025 aims to “give Trump more power over your daily life.”
That’s completely false. Project 2025 aims to weaken the bureaucracy that churns out tens of thousands of pages of rules every year. A more restrained administrative state translates into less control over Americans’ daily lives, not more.
3. ‘Guts Democratic Checks and Balances’
The Biden campaign claims Project 2025 “guts democratic checks and balances on presidential power,” but the fine print on the website makes a consequential admission about these checks on Article II powers.
The website claims that the project will empower a president “to fire and replace independent civil servants across the government with extreme MAGA loyalists—turning independent government employees with specialized technical expertise, such as the people who keep our food safe, working for the American people into political creatures implementing his extremist agenda.”
The campaign complains that “Project 2025 outlines a plan to reclassify thousands of federal workers so they can easily be fired by Trump for simply not doing his wishes.” In other words, it would allow Trump to fire bureaucrats who oppose the people’s elected president, in whose hands the Constitution places “the executive power.”
Note: The Biden campaign mentions “democratic checks and balances,” but the actual checks on a president’s power that it aims to protect are technocratic, not democratic.
Project 2025 would not undermine Congress’ authority—to pass bills, override vetoes of them, or impeach a president—nor the people’s authority to choose the electors who select a president. Those democratic checks on a president’s power remain, and Project 2025 supports them.
Project 2025 aims to make the administrative state more democratic, more receptive to the people’s will expressed in a presidential election. The Biden campaign aims to insulate the administrative state from the people’s will. Its opposition to Project 2025 is anti-democratic.
The Smaller Lies
In addition to these big-ticket whoppers about Project 2025, the Biden campaign released graphics with claims about specific policy proposals in the “Mandate for Leadership,” the policy document for Project 2025.
Among other things, the Biden campaign has falsely claims that Project 2025 would end no-fault divorce, ban abortion without exceptions, eliminate unions, cut Social Security, ban Muslims from entering the country, and completely eliminate the FDA and the EPA.
The Biden campaign’s lies come across as a desperate attempt to distract Americans from the president’s horrific debate performance last month and from the many ways that the Left has twisted the administrative state to its purposes.
Biden is so insistent on defending the status quo because the Left has already done what he claims Trump is trying to do—leverage the “expertise” of the administrative state to shove its agenda down Americans’ throats without a single vote. Contrary to his spin, reversing this is both democratic and constitutional, not to mention in the best interests of the American people.
SOURCE: THE DAILY SIGNAL
Tyler O’Neil | @Tyler2ONeil
Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
