Project 2025 shreds American values
By Larry Hogan
Washington Post
July 19, 2024
Read the full op-ed here.
Larry Hogan, a former governor of Maryland, is the state’s Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.
I am a firm believer in what might be called traditional American values: rule of law, separation of church and state, and respect for civil service professionals. Never before have I seen those core principles more under threat.
On the left, the refusal by some to clearly stand up to radicals such as antisemitic and pro-Hamas protesters, advocates of defunding the police, and the open-borders movement has done substantial damage. However, on the right, there is no clearer example of the threat to American values than Project 2025.
This 900-page proposal from the Heritage Foundation was published last year — with the input of many former Trump administration officials and those with close ties to the former president — to serve as a blueprint for a future administration. To call many of these ideas “radical” is a disservice. In truth, Project 2025 takes many of the principles that have made this nation great and shreds them.
Toxic politics on both sides of the aisle are undermining faith in our system of government. But Project 2025 sends this disturbing trend into overdrive, casting aside the checks on presidential power that have protected our democracy for more than 200 years.
One of Project 2025’s primary targets is federal workers, including about 150,000 Marylanders. Project 2025 proposes to eliminate civil service protections for most of these workers, instead creating more political appointees chosen by the president. The goal is to remove nonpartisan civil servants, most of whom patriotically do their jobs without fanfare or political agendas, and replace them with loyalists to the president.
Republicans who believe this power grab will benefit them in the short term will ultimately regret empowering a Democratic president with this level of control.
Perhaps more troubling, Project 2025 would undermine the Justice Department by weakening its independence from the president, eliminating the norm that the White House does not intervene in federal investigations. My father was an FBI agent who believed deeply that this work should not be infected by politics. It was that approach that gave him credibility when he became the first Republican in Congress to come out in favor of the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon.
It’s true that the ideal of impartial justice that my father embodied has not always been realized. But that does not mean it should be abandoned by choice and design.
Project 2025 also proposes enacting absurd and dangerous policies that must be rejected, including mass deportations, disbanding the Education Department, potentially abolishing the Federal Reserve, and withdrawing the abortion medication mifepristone from the market.
This radical approach is out of touch with the American people. Most Americans — regardless of party affiliation — have more in common than many realize. They want common-sense solutions to address the cost of living, make our communities safer, and secure the border while fixing the broken immigration system. Instead of addressing these problems, Project 2025 opts for total war against the other side, making it impossible to find common ground.
I still believe that bipartisan progress is possible in Washington, but not if we keep going down this dangerous path and fail to defend what made this nation great. The extremes feed off each other, and the exhausted majority of Americans are left trapped between the crazy. The way to start to fix the broken system in Washington is to elect leaders who will do things differently, stand up for American values and hold both parties accountable. That is the only real bulwark against extremism.
