“Project 2025” pt.2

Last week I began looking at The Heritage Foundation’s massive “Project 2025,” which you can find here and focused on Kevin Roberts’ Forward, “A Promise to America.” I do not know how long I will continue to blog through “Project 2025,” but I will keep giving you the links to it because I trust your ability to read things for yourself. If you would prefer to do that, rather than to read what I have to say about it, you get no argument from me. Have at it and read “Project 2025” for yourself right here. Blessings. 

Last week we looked at Roberts’ “Promise #1: Restore the Family as the Centerpiece of American Life and Protect Our Children.” This week I’ll look at “Promise #2: Dismantle the Administrative State and Return Self-Governance to the American People.” In this section, Roberts points to two examples of public “corruption” that need overturning, the Federal Budget and the Administrative State. As in the first promise, many of us have sympathies with both goals. Who wouldn’t prefer to pay less taxes, see projects we don’t understand de-funded or less-funded with “our money”? Lower taxes, less spending, and more dollars into our pockets to do with as we wish – few people would find those to be objectionable goals. Likewise with the “Administrative State,” as Roberts calls it, who doesn’t get frustrated with bureaucracy, with regulations and requirements that seem to have been hammered out in such contentious committee and sub-committee compromises that the end result is massive and unwieldy? Federal spending and bureaucracy are persistent frustrations and can evoke a wide spectrum of reactions from irritation to corruption.

Roberts presents spending and bureaucracy as intentional corruption and his descriptions place the blame on extremists of “the Great Awokening.” Here are his specific examples, with my own touch – I will put into italics rhetoric worth noting: 

• A combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes;

• Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a feckless Administration, order border and immigration enforcement agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity; 

• Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms; 

• Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists; 

• Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend “training” seminars about “white privilege”; and 

• Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about “intersectionality” and abortion. 

Many of us say “Bravo” to the large ideas of cutting spending and reducing bureaucracy, but the difficulties are not the large picture. The challenges arise when we ask, “Which spending?” or “What bureaucracy?” Judging from Roberts’ choices and rhetoric, his aim seems to be to tap into ire over spending and bureaucracy per se and direct it to things he identifies as pet projects of extremists: Environmental concerns; historic racism; LGBTQ rights, and immigration. Is it really the case that if the EPA establishes regulations to keep oil wells from contaminating local drinking water resources, that it is “quietly strangling energy production”? Is it really the case that teaching about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is “anti-American” or “racist” propaganda? Is it “woke extremism” to ensure that our Foreign Aid programs are aware of how US dollars might be used in other countries to violate the human rights of non-binary persons? 

While many of us cite frustrations with Federal spending and regulations in general, the devil is ever in the details. Therefore, the work before us requires difficult, cooperative conversations that rely on some mutual respect and dialogue. One would hope that “Project 2025” for all of its gravitas and pages, could engage in addressing the hard work ahead without scapegoating their pet peeves with slanted rhetoric. So far, that is not the case. 

Mark of St. Mark