[credit header image: Joe Lambert – Washington Post]

“From attacking overtime pay, student loans, and reproductive rights, to allowing more discrimination, pollution, and price gouging, those behind Project 2025 are preparing to go to incredible lengths to create a country only for some, not for all of us.”
~ from The People’s Guide to Project 2025 | democracyforward.org

The posts appearing on this Creation Justice blog seek to expose injustice not only in matters affecting ecology/environment, but in every corner of God’s Creation while promoting the just treatment of all God’s creatures (flora and fauna) for the sake of the common good. Therefore, in 2024 with legitimate democracy and authentic Christianity under siege in America, we keep revisiting the topic of Project 2025. Also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, the political initiative published by the Heritage Foundation aims to promote extremist policies to reshape the federal government and consolidate executive power if Donald Trump wins the 2024 Presidential election.

The more the average American citizen learns about the draconian, anti-democratic, Christian Nationalist ideology driving the playbook for a MAGA takeover of the federal government, the more they cringe at its plans to elevate wealthy oligarchs at the expense of America’s middle class and the poverty stricken. The proof of that statement can be seen in the attempts of the MAGA candidates for POTUS and VPOTUS to distance themselves from the Project by falsely claiming no knowledge of it, no affiliation with it and no intent to use it when elected.

All of which again is pure poppycock, bunk and hocum. In fact, many of the authors of the document have a close association with Trump and his inner circle, and many expect to receive jobs if he is elected. One of the authors recently even said that Trump had given it his blessing. Forbes reports that more than 140 former members of the Trump administration are involved with Project 2025, according to CNN, including six of his former Cabinet secretaries.

Because Project 2025 and the policies it has inspired are a threat to all Americans and would disrupt nearly every aspect of American lives from climate chaos to health care and education access to taxes and retirement security, the Center for American Progress (CAP) has created Fact Sheets for every state in the Union. These fact sheets provide truthful, ‘factual’ information about how this agenda would affect people in states across the country.

Because these blog posts originate from the geographic heart of the great state of North Carolina, the remainder of this post presents the Fact Sheet for the Tar Heel state as written by Collin Seeberger under the title, Project 2025’s Plan To Gut Checks and Balances Harms North Carolina. Here it is:

“Project 2025 is a plan to gut America’s system of checks and balances in order to enact an extreme, far-right agenda that would hurt all Americans. The plan proposes taking power away from everyday people to give politicians, judges, and corporations more control over American’s lives. Here are specific ways that Project 2025 harms residents of North Carolina.

Taxes
+ Project 2025 shifts the tax burden from the wealthy onto the middle class. Under the plan, the typical family of four in North Carolina would see a tax increase of $2,713 per year, while 45,000 households in America reporting more than $10 million in income wold each see an average annual tax cut of $1.5 million.

Social Security
+ Project 2025 authors have endorsed and supported plans to cut Social Security by raising the retirement age for roughly 73 percent of North Carolina residents – 7,847,980 people. Their ideas are reflected in the two most recent Republican Study Committee budget proposals, which propose increasing the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 69. Doing so would cut benefits by $4,100 to $8,900 after just one year, depending on when one claims Social Security. A median-wage retiree would lose $46,000 to $100,000 over 10 years.

Health Care
+ Project 2025 proposes imposing “limits or lifetime caps on [Medicaid] benefits.” In North Carolina, 911,500 Medicaid enrollees would be at risk of losing coverage because they are low income and lack access to alternative, affordable coverage.
+ The plan would raise the costs of prescription drugs for up to 662,000 people in North Carolina by eliminating out-of-pocket Medicare drug cost limits. It also blocks the government from negotiating for lower drug prices.

Abortion rights and contraception
+ Project 2025 eliminates some emergency contraception medications from free preventative care requirements, meaning 1,560,000 women in North Carolina would lose guaranteed access to free emergency contraception.
+ The plan instructs the U.S. Department of Justice to misapply the Comstock Act, a pair of laws from 1873 and 1909, to criminalize the mailing of medication abortion. Doing so would result in an effective abortion ban nationwide, even in states where abortion is legal.
+ The plan instructs the Department of Justice to take legal action against local officials who refuse to bring cases against women and doctors who violate state abortion bans, such as North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban.

Child Care
+ Project 2025 eliminates Head Start, which provides access to no-cost child care—among other services – for 19,641 low income children in North Carolina. Eliminating Head Start would wipe out a critical supply of child care in rural and other underserved communities that already face a lack of child care slots.

Student Loans
+ Project 2025 replaces income-driven repayment (IDR) plans with a one-size-fits-all program that wold increase payments for all borrowers enrolled in existing IDR plans,including the Biden-Harris administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan. Under Project 2025, 237,800 borrowers in North Carolina enrolled in SAVE would pay $2,700 to $4,100 more each year.

Public Education
+ Project 2025 eliminates the U.S. Department f Education, including Title I, which provides funds to ensure schools serving low-income students have additional resources to deliver a high-quality education beyond that which can be supported by local property tax revenue. Ending Title I would lead to the loss of 6,417 teaching positions, which serve 98,823 students, in North Carolina.”

The project has assembled a database of over 10,000 names, job candidates vetted for loyalty to Trump’s cause, who will be ready to deploy into federal agencies should he win the 2024 election. It has delivered a toolkit, ready for use, to create a second Trump administration that would be decidedly more MAGA than the first.

To learn more about the anti-democratic content within the MAGA authoritarian playbook, visit CAP series Project 2025: Exposing the Far-Right Assault on America that can be found at this link: www.americanprogress.org/series/project-2025-exposing-the-far-right-assault-on-america/. AND also to The People’s Guide to Project 2025 – https://democracyforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-05_Peoples-Guide-Pro-2025.pdf