During the presidential campaign, polls showed that Americans overwhelmingly opposed Project 2025, the radical plan to dismantle large parts of the U.S. government. Candidate Donald Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming he hadn’t even read it.
I wrote a letter to the editor about the subject in October, predicting that if Donald Trump were elected he likely would reverse his stated position, and would implement policies that most Americans opposed. Just hours after he was sworn in, Trump started signing presidential directives to carry out major parts of Project 2025.
Since then, Trump has ruthlessly carried out the Project 2025 playbook. He installed the former head of Project 2025 as the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – one of the most powerful positions in the federal government. He purged career civil servants and replaced them with Trump loyalists who have little experience in the agencies they will now lead. His administration is rapidly gutting agencies, consolidating power, and silencing dissent.
Less than half of American voters chose Trump, who beat Harris in the popular vote by only 1.5%. If Trump had been honest about his plan to implement the extremely unpopular Project 2025, there’s a very strong chance that he would have lost the election.
Americans are just beginning to feel the pain of Project 2025. Trump has set Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire, and a team of twenty-somethings “Muskovites” without security clearances to break into federal computer systems, including at the Department of the Treasury. He has shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has saved Americans billions of dollars by stopping fraud by credit card companies and others – Trump and Musk, who both have financial stakes in such companies, stand to make billions. They have fired thousands of federal workers without even finding out what they do.
In the months ahead, residents of Central PA and the rest of America will see less funding for education, higher prices, and a federal government that is more loyal to Donald Trump than to the American people or the U.S. Constitution. We will feel the pain of Trump’s shameless bait-and-switch.
Rick Thomas (Lewisburg)