Don't Call It Project 2029 If It's Not A Fighting Document

Policy remedies to kitchen-table issues won't end the fascist threat. I thought we learned this?

(Photo by Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images)

When Donald Trump took office, dusted off Project 2025—the governing playbook he’d disclaimed throughout the election—and handed implementation to Elon Musk, et al., it became clear to me Democrats would need an analog. Before the next election, someone or some entity would have to assemble a plan, with buy-in across the left, that would serve two main purposes: rebuild from the Trump wreckage, and establish an equal right to implement a lightning-strike agenda.

This was by no means some stroke of brilliance. Many people with an interest in liberal politics had some version of the same idea. The ones most closely networked with funders and politicians went on to establish actual organizations or working groups, which they pitched to donors more or less on these grounds.

These liberals, all veteran Democratic operatives, have begun offering glimpses of their work, and I’m of two minds. First, generously: As the saying goes, there’s no bad ideas in a brainstorm. Ideas are good. Ideas that start out bad can become good. Ideas that seem unresponsive to the needs of today can become urgent—or they might just be worthy apart from any particular salience, easily slotted into some future appropriation bill without fanfare.

Second, more importantly: We are not—at this rate—getting a Project 2029 that serves anything like the purposes Project 2025 was meant to serve. We’re getting competing factional agendas, from a familiar universe of people, all of whom want jobs in or influence over the next administration. And so they’re devising policy ideas meant for popular consumption, rather than governing stratagems for fixing the American state.

This is an error of conception. It doesn’t discredit any particular idea let alone the whole suite. It just means that if liberals or progressives thought party operatives were hard at work on a blueprint for the first several months of the next Democratic administration—a series of steps that any Dem president could execute to put the country back on an even keel—they’re going to be terribly disappointed. Unless something changes.

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The post-Trump era will not be a blank canvas for policy makers. To be clear, it will demand a great deal of legislating, bureaucratic deftness, technical knowhow, and creativity. Assembling a new government will need to be undertaken with an eye toward avoiding obvious pitfalls, which will of course place policy expertise at a premium.

But the governing machinery all these operatives expect to be awaiting them will be broken. The challenge will be to get a new apparatus up and running quickly, which will in turn require blowing through obstacles—the procedural ones that have been there all along, and the landmines that will be strewn about by saboteurs.

A hodgepodge of detailed policy objectives is not responsive to that challenge. Not even if the policies tick all the right interest-group and message-testing boxes.

Here, via The Bulwark, is a snapshot of what the group that calls itself Project 2029 has cooking:

Utility Monopolies: America’s electric grid still runs on a century-old monopoly model that leaves 150 million households with no choice in who provides their power and tens of billions of dollars in potential savings locked behind outdated laws. Our proposal outlines how the next President should break these monopolies open, letting competition drive down bills, speed up delivery, and unleash a new wave of cleaner, cheaper energy for families and businesses.

Child Care: Families today are caught in the “Child Care Catch-22.” With child care costs taking up nearly 10 to 20 percent of the average family’s already stretched take-home pay, families can’t afford to pay for child care while they work. And because parents with young kids are managing other costs like saving for a home or paying student debt, many can’t afford to stay home and not work. Our proposal outlines how the next President can ensure that every family has the time, financial support, and high-quality care options they want, giving parents back the power of choice on how to support their young children.

Kids Over Clicks: Parents today are raising kids in a digital environment engineered to hook them and the consequences, from a worsening youth mental health crisis to a new wave of harm from AI chatbots, are no longer in dispute. Just as America sets minimum ages for drinking and gambling, it’s time to set real guardrails around the products targeting kids online. Our proposal would protect children from the most harmful features of social media and AI, give parents stronger tools, and dismantle the surveillance advertising model that drives much of the harm.

The Annoyance Economy: Americans are losing enormous amounts of time, money, and patience to the small, daily hassles corporations deliberately design into modern life: spam calls, useless chatbots, surprise fees, impossible cancellations, endless paperwork. The hassle isn’t a bug; it’s the business model, and it costs households well over a hundred billion dollars a year. Our proposal would take on the “Annoyance Economy” directly, restoring basic fairness and common sense to the everyday transactions that shape how Americans experience the economy.

Project 2029’s peers and rivals at the Searchlight Institute and Center for American Progress have elsewhere proposed health-care reform ideas along the same lines—e.g. “blocking the formation of hospital monopolies, limiting the role of private equity in health care, and stopping insurance companies from denying coverage arbitrarily.”

All fine ideas as far as they go. But you’ll forgive me for doubting that on January 20, 2029 the most pressing problem in America will be the ownership structure of hospitals. The foundations of civic democracy will be shattered. There will be huge but basic problems in America, almost all of them downstream from Trump’s depraved presidency. Earmarking his successor’s most valuable political capital for technical reforms to the health-care delivery or energy-transmission systems would amount to evasion of the crisis staring us all in the face. And everyone fighting the Trump administration today would know they’d been let down.

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Think back to Project 2025. Not the shambolic, DOGE-y, Musk-inflected implementation, but the concept. What was it? It wasn’t really like the old budgets Paul Ryan used to make Republicans vote for, or that Ryan and Mitt Romney ran on in 2012—tendentious but dry descriptions of longstanding conservative policy goals. And it wasn’t a wishlist of social-policy bills.

It was a comprehensive plan to steamroll obstacles to partisan domination, and change on-the-ground realities in ways that couldn’t be easily reversed. They knew it would be fraught and messy. Indeed, it wasn’t a campaign document at all. If it were, Trump wouldn’t have pretended to disclaim it on the hustings. It was an instruction manual for a vast network of right-wing operatives, all of whom were psyched to settle family business.

Project 2025 was born of lies and power madness, rather than necessity, but if you put yourself in the shoes of a Republican who believed the lies, organizing a blitz-like assault on blue America and the federal bureaucracy made perfect sense—much as rioting at the Capitol would have made perfect sense had Joe Biden actually mounted a coup d’etat.

Republicans marinated in their own propaganda for so long, they developed deep-seated hatred for half the country and became hell bent on punishing their perceived enemies. If perfidious liberals have brought America to the brink of destruction, aren’t we obligated to sabotage Democratic states, institutions of higher learning, government bureaucracies, and so on? Isn’t that just doing what needs to be done?

Democrats need a genuine analog to Project 2025, and they need it out of necessity, not as a pretext to grab power. We don’t live in the shoes of Republicans, we live in the world Trump is remaking, where crises unfold everyday in reality, not in a Fox News simulacrum.

I don’t think Democrats should pursue partisan domination. And I don’t think they should lie to voters about what they intend to do. But I do think they should be clear in their hearts and minds about what the conservative movement is—what it’s shown itself to be under Trump—and then respond in the manner of doing what needs to be done. No refracting urgent remedies through data analytics in search of politically palatable half-measures. Just addressing what’s staring everyone in the face, and doing so squarely.

That is to say, Democrats’ actual Project 2029 should be largely for internal consumption, not to populate door flyers. A mission statement that channels the party’s anger into a program of rapid de-Trumpification.

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Regular readers know what I think that means in practice. All the procedural reforms I return to week in and week out.

But there’s a synthesis between what I’ve been calling for and what these groups are proposing—between what you might call Project 2029 For Fighters and Project 2029 For Wonks. It’s to package policy proposals as remedies to Trump’s abuses. To galvanize Democrats and rehash Republican sins in ways that make rapid action seem obligatory. (Because it is.)

Here, through the looking glass of Project 2025, is how the synthesis operates when the underlying grievances are purely tribal:

[T]he Department of Education… is a creation of the Jimmy Carter Administration. The department is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which—as the COVID era showed—is not particularly concerned with children’s education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination—and the more the federal government is involved in education, the less responsive to parents the public schools will be. This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.

Short of this, the Secretary of Education should insist that the department serve parents and American ideals, not advocates whose message is that children can choose their own sex, that America is “systemically racist,” that math itself is racist, and that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal of a colorblind society should be rejected in favor of reinstating a color-conscious society. The next head of this department will have a lot to do—hopefully culminating in the department’s closure and the salutary restoration of educational control to states, localities, and parents

Well-worn GOP policy ideas cloaked in lib owning.

Democrats can adopt a version of this, while omitting all the fantasy nonsense. They’ll have tons of good health-care ideas on the shelf, from transformative policies like Medicare for all to Searchlight’s more incremental antimonopoly plan, and much in between. All of these options should be available. Democrats should be prepared to swing big or small depending on circumstances. Democratic candidates should have room to maneuver, and a menu of options, rather than a rigid commitment to one vision, so that the next president can scale up ambition in the event of a historic landslide, or scale down in the event of a narrow, Trump-sized victory.

But the ideas on that menu belong in the index, or in bullet points. Up front, the party needs a story to tell about why aggressive action is necessary:

MAGA Republicans believe people who can not afford health care out of pocket should not get any. They lied to voters about this, then threw millions of them off their plans. We will ensure that this lost coverage is restored, that everyone in the country can afford to see a doctor, and will enact reforms that make it harder for MAGA Republicans to swindle people out of their health care ever again. Those might include…

Something along those lines.

Likewise, Democrats can either get mired in the weeds of fiscal policy, and fight with each other over what to do about deficits, inflation, and interest rates. Or they can tell a true story about why these challenges materialized so abruptly after Joe Biden pulled deficits down, and set themselves up to act on maximally favorable terms.

Between their tax cuts, their support for Donald Trump’s tariffs, wars, and corruption, and myriad governing disasters that Democrats will now have to clean up, MAGA Republicans have left the country in a dire fiscal condition. We will restore sustainability to our federal finances, but we will do so in a way that insures the people responsible for these failures bear the overwhelming brunt of the sacrifice.

Framed this way—in a way that is true—the need to mow over obstacles is all but explicit. The policy ideas lay a predicate for procedural hardball. Framed as a la carte solutions to random problems, though, the Project 2029 preview is uncanny. Its name is borrowed from the shock-and-awe campaign we just lived through, but its content is blasé. As if the plan is to win the election and then not do what clearly needs to be done.