My Analysis on the "General Welfare" Section of the Project 2025 Report

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is a presidential transition project to set the country on a path that resists leftist values. The goal is to promote the nuclear family, all states' self-governance, improve our military, and protect our “God-given” constitutional rights. Section 3 is titled “The General Welfare” and starts off with the goal of managing our national debt. It immediately discusses medicare and medicaid reform, as the authors know it is a hot topic. The author, Daren Bakst, is a Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment at the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the implementation of conservative policy. They have funded this entire report.

My Analysis:

The General Welfare section of the Project 2025 report uses words well-known for being triggering or divisive. Phrases like “aliens, DEI revolution, racist math, and cyber attacks” upset people and increase political polarization. The biggest enemy is always “The Left” (capitalized in the report as well) and any action that side completes is always blown out of proportion: “for the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic (283).” The language is simplistic, unless they are trying to hide certain policy choices, discussed later below, and the structure in each section is sometimes convoluted. For example, a section in the Department of Agriculture starts with nutrition, then follows with forest service management, and ends with dietary guidelines. 

There is no part of this report that is unbiased. From the statistics and definitions picked, to the experts quoted, all completely support the vision of this report with relatively few contrary arguments. If quotes are used from the opposition, they are negative or show incompetence. Sources are not peer reviewed and many are just opinion articles such as “No, We Don’t Need to Transform the American Food System” by Daren Bakst (yes, the author of this section) and Gabriella Beaumont-Smith and “Sri Lanka’s Green New Deal Was a Disaster” by Gary Baise. It also uses cherry-picked definitions to help prove their point. The definition of racism used in section X specifically says “in this case, treating individuals differently based on race (341).” The visuals are boring, easy to skip over. They are also inaccurate, with no way to actually read them as there are little labels and no numbers. Finally, data used can be incredibly misleading: “as documented by writers such as Abigail Shrier and others, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons documented a four-fold increase in the number of biological girls seeking gender surgery between 2016 and 2017 (345) “ There's no actual numbers here so this is just fearmongering. A four fold increase could literally mean it went from one person seeking surgery to four.

Misinformation is also a problem throughout the report. Sometimes they have biased sources backing up the claims, or a source will be a government report where one line has been taken from it. Many times there are no sources at all, especially for bold claims, such as “facilitating social gender transition without parental consent increases the likelihood that children will seek hormone treatments, such as puberty blockers, which are experimental medical interventions. Research has not demonstrated positive effects and long- term outcomes of these treatments, and the unintended side effects are still not fully understood (333).” Bakst also seems to turn his nose up at scholarly sources: “cherry picked from politically malleable observational studies (437).” Another interesting thing Bakst does is source the document itself, “under COVID, as former director of HHS’s Office of Civil Rights Roger Severino writes in Chapter 14, the CDC exposed itself as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” If someone is not reading carefully however, they could miss this and think these decisions are supported by real evidence. At one point Bakst claimed that Grad PLUS loans are redundant and not needed because they have no limits (353). As someone who literally just took out one for this journalism program, I know from firsthand experience that this is false. 

The report is full of dangerous activity that can be split into two categories, with the first being actions that encroach our civil liberties, that are supported by republicans and their constituents. In this case, policy recommendations are made blatant. Bakst wants to rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics. He wants the administration to pursue groups they disagree with, such as removing the charter of the National Education Association, which is described as a “demonstrably radical special interest group that overwhelmingly supports left-of-center policies and policymakers (341).” The public is asked to snitch on researchers by asking the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct. Like mentioned in the summary, there is also an incredible amount of regulations and protections removed that are promoted as good for the public. 

The next division of dangerous actions has been snuck in used stealthy language, as it will either be difficult to convince even their constituents to go for them. Many times the language will be difficult to understand like “ new administration should also direct the department and DOJ jointly to issue enforcement guidance stating that the agencies will no longer investigate Title VI cases that exclusively rest on allegations of disparate impact (335)“  or not wanting to teach students “action civics.” This means they are no longer investigating discrimination claims or informing students about the democratic process. Dangerous policy actions are also snuck in between good language. An idea to help bring back affordable transportation to consumers included: “airport landing fees for aircraft, per-gallon taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, but also toll charges on roads and bridges (620)” , which will be a charge to consumers not oil and gas distributors. “  Ideas like “Focus on studying threats to the grid” are given but none that actually fix or improve it. Another recommendation that was given sounds great at first: all ongoing investigations against “schools should be free to drop any policy changes pursued under pressure from the Biden admin (333)”. Though this is under the Title X section, this regulation doesn't actually include the language “under Title X” like the others. This means someone could use this to drop ANY policy, not just ones under Title X, which is already bad enough. The report also used subtle language to target minorities: “Washington should convert some of the lowest-performing public school systems in the country into areas defined by choices, creating rigorous learning options for all children and from all backgrounds, income levels, and ethnicities (348).”  In the paragraph just above it stated “ schools on tribal lands and under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) are among the worst-performing public schools in the country (348).

On top of dangerous and misleading information, there are also plenty of illogical and juxtapositional choices. Bakst claims that the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that provides scholarships to children should be expanded to all children but then in a different section discusses how lunches for all schoolkids are a waste of taxpayer money, and should only be for those who are low-income. He discusses wanting to move away from globalization but then introduces a plan where “the next Administration should promulgatea new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests (355).” There are policy ideas where even I can't understand why it's necessary such as “New regulations should clarify the definition and requirements of regular and substantive interaction (602)” which is just asking for a rule regarding how much time a boss spends with a subordinate. 

Another issue with the report is that the author is making recommendations that seem redundant. Asking for a rule that allows parents full access to children's education records isn’t needed because that's already possible. The same is true for passing a law that “to the extent an employer provides employee benefits for abortion, it must provide equal or greater benefits for pregnancy, childbirth, maternity, and adoption (584)” because employers already do that. 

There is also some language that the Project 2025 report just loves to use as comparisons. California comes up the most frequently out of all democratic states and often it wants to limit states from copying California’s actions. The goal is also to always undue Biden or Obama-era policies, and there is significant emphasis on congress consolidating power, and agencies being delegated to them. Finally, Bakst is obsessed with privatization, wanting to hand over significant government control to private companies. It makes you wonder who will be monitoring the actions of these companies and assuring that Americans are not taken advantage of. 

For regular members of the public, the goal of this section is presented as wanting to bring down our debt and make services more affordable. However, as you delve deeper, this is not the case. Many of these sections state they want to curb corruption and abuse but then pass the duties to private companies with even worse checks and balances. The reasoning given for these actions makes sense, people are suffering and being taken advantage of by the upper class, but then they give power right back to those causing the issues. It is not discussed that many of these agencies only came from public need, because of abuse from private companies in the first place. There are also no plans describing how the money that’s being saved from these proposed cuts will actually go back to the public, other than telling us we’ll save taxes, and of course there's no mention of public finance education. If Bakst and supporters want certain civil liberties banned or limited, they ask for decisive language to be used and then the rule codified so it can never be undone. Regulations pertaining to their goals though are completely arbitrary, leaving room for disputes and misinterpretations. 

Finally, despite all the sponsors and funding supporting these actions, there is an author's note that says “The author alone assumes responsibility for this chapter. No views expressed herein should be attributed to any other individual” placing the blame for the entire idea of this section on one specific individual. This is a clear plan for the destruction of our democracy, while allowing those who complete it free of official guilt or association. We must not forget the name of any person or organization involved and fight to reverse all policy made from this report.