WHEREAS: 

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation initiative to create a governing agenda for Donald Trump should he win the presidential election in November, is a direct threat to the union rights, public services and livelihoods of millions of AFSCME members and all Americans; and 

WHEREAS:  

This plan constitutes a radical attack on working people and their unions by eliminating card-check union recognition, authorizing the decertification of unions during the terms of collective bargaining agreements, eliminating project labor agreements and Davis-Bacon wage standards, reversing President Biden’s executive orders that improved union rights and labor relations in the federal government and even recommending Congress ban public worker unions entirely; and 

WHEREAS: 

Project 2025 would end the Head Start child development program entirely. This would eliminate care for 833,000 children living in poverty and would make finding child care more difficult and costly for everyone, since it would take away child care spots that are already in short supply. It would also eliminate the jobs of thousands of AFSCME members who are Head Start caregivers; and 

WHEREAS: 

Project 2025 cuts our health care, eliminating the $35 cap on insulin, the $2,000 annual out-of-pocket cap and protections against excessive drug price increases for Medicare beneficiaries, along with Medicare’s authority to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical corporations.  It also imposes a lifetime limit on Medicaid health coverage and stops middle-class retirees from getting Medicaid to help pay for nursing home costs that can run to $100,000 per year or more, which would inflict unconscionable harm on millions of people and jeopardize the jobs of AFSCME-represented nurses, home care providers, physicians and EMS workers who care for Medicaid patients. For Americans who don’t receive Affordable Care Act premium help, it would roll back key protections against being sold junk health insurance; and  

WHEREAS: 

The blueprint recommends eliminating merit staffing requirements for the Wagner-Peyser Employment Service and unemployment insurance workers, threatening the privatization of state jobs performed by AFSCME merit staff; and 

WHEREAS: 

The plan calls for the complete elimination of the Department of Education, which provides critical funding and support to K-12 schools throughout the county, especially in high-poverty areas, and to higher education institutions. The architects of Project 2025 want to dismantle public education and leave the government’s only role in education policy to be funding private and religious schools with no strings attached for teacher qualifications, curriculum standards or civil rights; and  

WHEREAS: 

The plan contains hundreds of other harmful and extreme policies, including ending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program for student debt, restricting Americans’ reproductive rights, cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy and defunding renewable energy and climate science while discarding environmental and economic safeguards in a quest to increase the use of carbon-based fuels; and 

WHEREAS: 

Project 2025 is a danger to our democracy and system of checks and balances. The plan eliminates civil service protections for thousands of federal government workers, allowing Trump to replace independent career public servants with political hacks loyal only to him. The project has created an extensive database of vetted ideologues to fill government positions, thereby fulfilling Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance’s demand to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” and “replace them with our people.” The plan calls on Trump to exert total control over agencies that operate with independence, such as the U.S. Department of Justice; and 

WHEREAS: 

Candidate Trump claims he knew nothing about Project 2025 or who was behind it. This is false. In fact, 140 people who worked for President Trump are involved with the project, including 27 of the 37 authors of the core agenda. In 2017, 70 former Heritage employees worked within the first Trump administration or transition team, implementing 64% of the policies recommended in that year’s policy agenda.  

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: 

That AFSCME will be tireless in our efforts to educate members and the public of the dangers and harms of Project 2025, and encourage those members and their families to get out and vote for candidates up and down the ballot who support unions, working people, public services, freedom and democracy, in order to make Project 2025 obsolete on Nov. 6, 2024, the day after Election Day; and 

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: 

That AFSCME will redouble our efforts to organize and mobilize members around a positive agenda for working families, including fair wages, safe jobs, the freedom to join a union, decent health care, a secure retirement, time off to care for our families, cleaner energy with good paying jobs and public services that lift all of us up and enrich the lives of all working people.

SUBMITTED BY:
International Executive Board