WASHINGTON – Warning about the extreme right Project agenda 2025 For a Donald Trump White House, a group of House Democrats launched a task force to begin fighting the proposal and prevent it from coming to fruition if the former Republican president returns to power.
Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California is introducing the Stop Project 2025 Task Force on Tuesday, the latest sign that Democrats in Congress and outside groups are treating Trump’s campaign seriously in the expected rematch against the president. Democrat Joe Biden this fall.
“The risks simply couldn’t be higher,” Huffman told the Associated Press.
Huffman said the Project 2025 agenda will hit “like a Blitzkrieg” and lawmakers need to be ready.
“If we’re trying to react and understand in real time, it’s too late,” he said. “We need to see this happen well in advance and prepare accordingly.”
The Democratic-led task force comes as groups on and off Capitol Hill are increasingly alarmed by Project 2025, a sweeping project from the conservative Heritage Foundation that is preparing to quickly help form a new Republican administration with plans for aspects of dismantling the federal government It is installing loyalists for a second Trump term.
While the Trump campaign has repeatedly said that outside groups do not speak on the former president’s behalf, the 1,000-page Project 2025 proposal was crafted with input from a long list of former Trump administration officials who are prepared to fill the highest positions of a potential new administration. .
The essence of the Project 2025 plan is to expel thousands of public workers and replace them with personnel from a candidate database, an effort to reverse the setbacks of Trump’s first term when many of the his most extreme ideas were thwarted and blocked by those refusing to break the rulesviolate laws or overextend presidential powers.
Huffman’s group is the latest to accept the Project 2025 proposal and plans for a Trump White House.
Last week, one of the country’s leading civil rights organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, announced that it was preparing possible legal action to stop Trump’s campaign promise from launching mass deportations of immigrants on the first day of his presidency, if elected. It’s the first of several memos the ACLU is releasing offering a blueprint for how it plans to respond to a second Trump or Biden term.
And others are detailing the threats to democracy if Trump attacks on the justice systemplans to pardon those convicted in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol and threats of revenge against political enemies take possession.
Huffman’s group is made up of about a half-dozen House Democratic lawmakers in a loose coalition separate from the party leadership. He plans to begin informing other lawmakers about Project 2025, holding a forum on Capitol Hill and informing voters about the ideas.
The idea is for the group to provide a central hub of information for lawmakers, voters and organizations about various policy proposals, including immigration, reproductive rights and others.
As founder of the Freethought Caucus on Capitol Hill, Huffman said he is particularly alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism in the ranks of the Republican Party and efforts to push a more conservative theology into government.
“We were able to defeat some of the worst of this Christian nationalist agenda, this authoritarian agenda, in Trump’s first presidency, because they didn’t really know what they were doing,” Huffman said. “The fact that they put all this forethought, research and planning into a second Trump presidency means that we will be dealing with a much more formidable enemy, if that is the case this time.”
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