In April of 2023, the right-wing Heritage Foundation published a 900-page document called Project 2025. In it, prominent corporate and right-wing operatives have created a comprehensive wishlist for expanding corporate power under a second Trump administration — and a detailed plan for achieving them.
While Trump has publicly distanced himself from the document, many of those who wrote it are his former staffers. Furthermore, the record of his administration from 2016-2020 suggests that the agenda of a second Trump presidency would, like the first, largely be driven by the Republican establishment and right-wing think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation. As much as Trump seemed to campaign rhetorically against that establishment, once in office his two signature achievements were exactly the priorities of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: the 2017 tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, and stacking the courts with right-wing justices.
Some of Project 2025’s goals would require action by Congress, but many of them can be implemented by the President alone, using his executive authority. Indeed, the plan envisions greatly expanded the role and politicization of the executive branch, including reclassifying thousands of civil service jobs as political appointments so that they can be filled with Trump loyalists.
The document is explicitly anti-union, stating that union representation of government workers (including state and municipal workers) is “incompatible with democracy.” It proposes a variety of changes to labor law which would make it easier for employers to discipline and fire workers who engage in collective action, allow them to set up phony company unions, and encourage them to bust existing unions by initiating decertification petitions mid-contract.
In addition to attacks on unions, Project 2025 would:
- Create loopholes in OSHA, allowing small businesses to put worker safety at risk;
- Eliminate the child labor rules that protect teenagers from working in mines, meatpacking plants and other dangerous workplaces;
- Tax workers' health care and benefits;
- Allow state and local governments to seek waivers from federal labor laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which establishes national minimum wage and overtime laws, and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which protects the rights of private sector workers to join unions;
- Change the overtime rules in the FLSA to allow employers, especially those in the South, to avoid paying overtime;
- Repeal the requirements for federally-funded projects to have project labor agreements (PLAs) and pay the prevailing wage in the region, leading to lower pay and more safety risks for workers;
- Make it harder for workers to access unemployment benefits;
- Outsource the administration of unemployment programs to “non-public organizations” (a fancy phrase for private companies), causing government workers to lose their jobs and workers to get poor services; and
- Eliminate training and employment services for workers whose jobs are sent overseas due to international trade.
These bullet points are taken from or based on the AFL-CIO’s summary of Project 2025.