WASHINGTON (AP) — A group of House Democrats has warned of Donald Trump’s far-right Project 2025 agenda for a White House and launched a task force to fight the proposal and prevent it from taking hold as Republican former president returns to power.
Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California will unveil the Stop Project 2025 Task Force on Tuesday, the latest sign that Democrats in Congress and outside groups are treating Trump’s campaign seriously in the expected rematch against the Democratic Party. President Joe Biden this fall.
“The stakes simply couldn’t be higher,” Huffman told The Associated Press.
Huffman said the Project 2025 agenda will hit “like a Blitzkrieg” and lawmakers should be ready for it.
“If we want to respond to it and understand it in real time, it’s too late,” he said. “We have to see it coming well in advance and prepare for it.”
The Democratic-led task force comes as groups in and around Capitol Hill are growing increasingly concerned about Project 2025, a sweeping blueprint from the conservative Heritage Foundation that is preparing to quickly help staff a new Republican administration with plans for the dismantling aspects of the federal and state government. installing loyalists for a second Trump term.
While the Trump campaign has repeatedly said the outside groups do not speak for the former president, the 1,000-page Project 2025 proposal was drafted with input from a long list of former Trump administration officials poised to take the top positions of a potential new government. .
The core of the Project 2025 plan is to oust thousands of officials and replace them with staff from a database of job applicants, an effort to reverse the setbacks of Trump’s first term, when many of his more extreme ideas were thwarted and blocked by those who refused to break. violate norms, violate laws, or overextend presidential powers.
Huffman’s group is the latest to adopt the Project 2025 proposal and plans for a Trump White House.
Last week, one of the country’s top civil rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, announced it was preparing possible legal action to stop Trump’s campaign promise to launch mass deportations of immigrants on the first day of his presidency if he were elected. It’s the first of several memos the ACLU is rolling out, offering a blueprint for how it plans to respond to a second Trump or Biden term.
And others describe the threats to democracy if Trump’s attacks on the justice system, plans to pardon those convicted on January 6, 2021, the attack on the US Capitol and threats of revenge against political enemies hold up.
Huffman’s group consists of about a half-dozen Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives in a loose coalition, separate from the party leadership. It plans to brief fellow lawmakers about Project 2025, hold a forum on Capitol Hill and educate voters about the ideas.
The idea is for the group to provide a central information center for lawmakers, voters and organizations on the various policy proposals, including immigration, reproductive rights and others.
As founder of the Freethought Caucus on Capitol Hill, Huffman said he was particularly disturbed by the rise of Christian nationalism within the ranks of the Republican Party and efforts to push more conservative theology into government.
“We were able to push back some of the worst things of this Christian nationalist agenda, this authoritarian agenda, during Trump’s first presidency because they didn’t really know what they were doing,” Huffman said. “The fact that they put all this forethought, research and planning into a second Trump presidency means we will be facing a much more formidable enemy if it comes to that this time.”
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