Project 2025 is the product of The Heritage Foundation, a well-heeled conservative Washington think tank. While some Catholics may support the project, the reality is that many of the policies offered by Project 2025 contrast sharply with the teachings of the Catholic Church. Moreover, the inherent worldview that knits together the project’s whole is a vision for America that may well be corrosive to our faith’s understanding of the dignity of the human person as imago Dei and to our Catholic ideal for the social order as a community oriented toward the common good of all as measured by the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
Essentially, Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation’s plan for reshaping the entire structure of the U.S. government should Trump win: part blueprint for the policies of such a new Trump administration, part manifesto for MAGA ideology, and part résumé for the dozens of Heritage authors wheedling for jobs if Trump wins in November.
Former President Trump insists he has not endorsed the project (despite some evidence to the contrary) but no fair reading of Trump’s campaign platform could deny an overall conformity with the plan.
A step backward.
Organized in five sections—on the presidency, military and foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, and regulatory policy—the project’s basic structural plan would concentrate more of the power of government in the White House itself, overturning decades of bipartisan reforms that sought to depoliticize civil service.
Project 2025 hopes to swamp the executive branch procedures that shield the professional administration of government from the political and personal interests of the president—and would vastly increase the number of political appointees in government who directly owe their jobs to personal loyalty to the president.
Empowering the president in this way poses significant Constitutional concerns and moves away from the American framers’ hope for a “government of laws, not of men.” It is a step backward toward the corrupt spoils system of the past, but even more, it would allow the president to overcome many of the norms within the executive branch that check the possible capriciousness of the presidential will.
Project 2025’s changes to the Department of Justice are illustrative. Charged to objectively enforce federal laws, the Department of Justice would be compromised if enforcement was biased by partisanship or the personal interests of a president. Yet, Project 2025 establishes policies allowing direct presidential intervention in such enforcement. Even the FBI would be put under political control. This should be very worrisome for Catholics.
Rule of law versus will of the sovereign
Catholicism emphasizes the importance of the rule of law and norms of tradition in government. St. Thomas Aquinas lauded a government of rational rules over one run by the mere “will of the sovereign.” Even more pointedly, a key principle of the church’s social magisterium, the principle of subsidiarity, recommends against centralizing power in the executive, preferring to disperse power where feasible to lower “subsidiary” levels of government—not just for efficiency but also as a check on centralized authority. Worrisomely, Project 2025 would make government radically more answerable to the “will of the sovereign,” a sovereign who announced that he would be a dictator on “day one.”
Yet as troublesome as Project 2025 is given its authoritarian deference to the will of the sovereign, for Catholics the more morally troublesome concerns are with its specific domestic and foreign policy proposals.
1. Its policies would increase or worsen the condition of poverty.
Christ, at the beginning of his public life, holds up a scroll from Isaiah that foretells a savior who will rescue those in poverty. For the next three years of his ministry, time and time again, he speaks of saving those in poverty. From the days of the apostles to Pope Francis’ call for a “poor church for the poor,” the Catholic Church has insisted that saving the poor is a responsibility laid upon every Christian.
So, what does Project 2025 offer for those in poverty? It doesn’t really address poverty beyond a ludicrous argument that prioritizing a 1950s-style nuclear family will solve everything. In fact, the sweep of the project’s domestic and international policy proposals seems cruelly designed to worsen the conditions of life for those in poverty.
The nuclear family argument is bunkum. In the 1950s, poverty rates were extraordinarily higher than they are today. Poverty rates are lower today thanks to the anti-poverty programs initiated by liberals beginning in the 1960s. If Project 2025 would at least maintain such existing programs, it could perhaps be excused by concerned Catholics. Tragically, however, it guts those programs, particularly programs focused on child poverty.
The full listing of all Project 2025 does that would increase or worsen the conditions of poverty in the United States is too long to address fully here, but consider several of the more important.
- It dramatically restricts food stamp (SNAP) eligibility, effectively denying food security to millions of American in poverty or near the poverty line.
- It eliminates the summer meal program, which feeds impoverished children in the months when school lunch programs are not available.
- It eliminates Head Start, which has proven to be critically valuable for the educational success of those in poverty and is equally valuable given the lack of affordable child care for lower income brackets.
- It deeply cutbacks Medicaid, typically the only health care available for impoverished Americans, and puts a lifetime cap on Medicaid benefits.
- It increases the work requirement and limits the time period that families are eligible for public housing assistance, draconian changes that would undoubtedly drive many more Americans into homelessness.
- Perhaps most significantly, Project 2025 does not restore the child tax credit, a resource for not only for those in poverty but one which has been shown to dramatically reduce child poverty and which has long had bipartisan support in Congress.
2. It reverses policies intended to care for creation.
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). The teachings by St. Pope John XXIII, St. Pope Paul VI, St. Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI all emphasize that our faith requires protecting the divine handiwork that is creation. As shown in Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), the moral theology of care for creation has been a landmark of his papacy.
One would look in vain to find support for the moral imperative to care for creation in Project 2025. In language echoed by the Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill” and that global warming would be good for real estate, Project 2025 reverses recent progress toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, carbon emissions, and climate change:
- It rolls back proven safeguards in combatting local air and water pollution.
- It opens vast swaths of wilderness treasured by outdoors enthusiasts, hunters, and anglers to mining and drilling.
- It ends our country’s commitment to climate goal treaties.
- It prioritizes oil, coal, and natural gas as energy sources and starkly lowers taxes and pollution standards for the fossil fuel industry.
- It strikes down President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, ending the tax credits and rebates that have generated more than 300,000 new jobs in solar, wind, and other green energy production.
Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ advises that laws, governments, and international bodies bear the responsibility to coordinate and regulate human activity that might threaten the natural world. Project 2025 turns sharply away from recognizing that moral responsibility.
3. It is in direct opposition to the church’s teachings regarding refugees and migrants.
St. Pope John Paul II said pointedly, “Man has the right to leave his native land . . . in order to seek better conditions of life in another country.” Some may flee dictatorships for political freedom, flee starvation due to climate change, flee civil war or gang violence, or simply seek a better life for their children, but Catholicism maintains that migration is a moral right. And, further, collectively as well as individually, we are obliged to welcome, offer hospitality, and respond to migrants’ needs, because they are our brothers and sisters.
Project 2025, in direct opposition, appears to treat refugees and migrants like vermin:
- It outlines a nationwide roundup of undocumented refugees and migrants, incarcerating them in camps, and then initiating mass deportation.
- It advocates ICE raids without warrants, even in schools, hospitals, and religious institutions.
- It would bar citizens from government services and benefits if they are deemed complicit in helping the undocumented.
- It repeals the limited legal protection of half a million Dreamers (DACA).
- It promises completing the border wall and militarizing the southern border.
The Project 2025 horror does not stop with the undocumented, because the project also drastically narrows legal immigration and the admission of refugees, closing availability to certain countries and sharply limiting visas. Project 2025 utterly rebukes St. Pope John Paul II’s lifting up of Catholicism’s principle that refugees and immigrants have a right to seek a better life.
4. It fails to address most life issues.
Pope Francis writes, “If we deprive the weakest among us of the right to life, how can we effectively guarantee respect for every other right?” Catholic teachings on the sanctity of life do not simply devolve to the issue of abortion. We understand the right to life comprehensively, from conception to natural death. Moreover, the right to life is inseparable from the ideals of human dignity.
Project 2025 gets a decidedly mixed assessment related to the church’s teachings on issues of life. The document focuses much attention on abortion, which the U.S. bishops have called a preeminent issue. Project 2025 would extend the implications of overturning of Roe v. Wade by strongly increasing the government’s involvement in regulating and limiting abortion.
It also creates mechanisms for Washington to monitor any abortion that may occur, collecting data on the fetus’ gestational age, mother’s reasons for obtaining an abortion, and her state of residence. It reverses the FDA’s approval to allow abortion pills by mail or through telemedicine. It redefines morning after pills as abortifacients, ending their easy availability. It looks to constrain physician-assisted suicide. It requires that abortion and euthanasia never be designated as health care and effectively blocks any federal monies from being used for abortion.
Beyond its policies on abortion, however, there is much in Project 2025 that must concern the Catholic Church on life issues:
- It ends President Biden’s moratorium on federal executions.
- It weakens the federal governments oversight of gun sales.
- Maternal, prenatal, and postnatal care are jeopardized by capping and restricting Medicaid and by eviscerating Obamacare. The same would be true for the Medicaid that now pays so much of the cost of nursing home care.
Indeed, for Catholics, the lives of children facing AR-15s in schools, the lives of millions desperate for affordable housing, the lives young workers struggling for a living wage, the lives of those lacking health care, and the life of the planet are all lives that are unaddressed or put at greater risk by Project 2025.
5. Its policies are the reverse of the church’s economic justice doctrines
Pope Benedict XVI wrote that the “dignity of the individual and the demands of justice require, particularly today, that economic choices do not cause disparities in wealth to increase in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner.” The economy must be moral.
The Catholic Church teaches that justice is at issue in all economic activity. Production, sales, consumption, finance, and distribution are all matters of justice that impose moral obligations on individuals and on political communities. In particular, the church’s teachings on the universal destination of all goods and on the priority in justice for the impoverished and vulnerable should inform all economic activity, guiding governmental economic policies and regulating economic markets.
So, where does Project 2025 stand vis-à-vis Catholicism’s doctrine of economic justice? Project 2025 would enact policies that largely are the reverse of the church’s economic justice doctrine. Instead of prioritizing the economic needs of the impoverished and vulnerable it prioritizes the income of the wealthy and the profits of corporations.
On taxes, it proposes an unfair tax structure, a regressive turn that reduces taxes on the highest incomes while raising them on the middle class. It eliminates many of the tax deductions relied upon by the middle class. It also cuts corporate taxes to 18 percent, a percentage well below what many average individuals pay. And, significantly, it cuts taxes on capital gains—the income rich people get from their bonds and stocks—to a mere 15 percent.
At the same time, Americans living paycheck to paycheck will see their overtime pay cut and worker safety weakened. Moreover, Catholic teachings for more than 100 years, recognizing the inherent dignity of labor, have celebrated the importance of labor unions for the security and benefits they provide for workers, yet Project 2025 would profoundly limit the operation of unions and would undercut the freedom of workers to unionize.
The policies of Project 2025 would take many steps backward from the ideals of the church’s doctrine of economic justice.
Contrary to the vision of the church
To return full circle to the worldview behind the nearly 900 pages of Project 2025, two takeaways should be reiterated.
First, the vision for America evident in Project 2025 risks a proper understanding of the human person as imago Dei. It does not conform with the church’s teaching of the equal dignity of all. It values the life and dignity of some at the expense of the life and dignity of others.
Second, it does not conform to the church’s understanding of the social order as directed toward the common good of all, a common good to be measured by the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable among us. Its benefits are directed primarily toward already privileged elements of society and its punishments and burdens are inflicted disproportionately on the less privileged.
Project 2025 has a few scattered good ideas, but the worldview that informs it and many of its policy prescriptions cannot be accommodated within Catholic moral and social doctrine.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/ Elvert Barnes (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Add comment