By Mike Tony, Charleston Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — “Most people won’t read it, but it’s quite chilling.”
That was Jason Walsh’s solemn reflection as he shuddered to think of what’s widely expected to be the White House agenda if former president Donald Trump wins a second term.
Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a national alliance of labor unions and environmental groups, was talking about the Project 2025 proposal, a 920-page collection of policy plans from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, that lays out a blueprint for another Trump term. The document is posted at the Project 2025 website and is available at bit.ly/Project2025Document.
Published last year and crafted by former Trump administration officials, Project 2025 has drawn heavy scrutiny for what critics have said would be a weaponization of the federal government against its own people through consolidated presidential control of a weakened Department of Justice, civil service and domestic policy practices that encourage discrimination and far-reaching rollbacks of climate protection.
Trump’s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Project 2025, which calls for:
- Shuttering the Department of Education because it is “an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm”
- Withdrawing U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, a hormone-blocking medicine that can be used to medically terminate pregnancy
- Setting Medicaid on a block-grant or per-capita-cap track in a proposal expected to deeply cut federal Medicaid spending over time and cause states to cut eligibility and benefits — a move that could have outsized impact in West Virginia given its historically high federal Medicaid matching assistance percentage
- Shifting the majority of FEMA emergency preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government