The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered

#Project2025 begins with its authors (one of whom stepped down last month) boasting of the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication
“The Mandate for Leadership,” which helped shape the Reagan administration’s policy framework.

It hit its mark: Reagan wrote 60% of its recommendations into public policy in his first year in office, according to the Heritage Foundation.

Yet the 900-plus-page Project 2025, itself a major component of a new edition of “The Mandate for Leadership,” does not contain any analysis of the economic and social price Americans paid for the revolution the Heritage Foundation and Reagan inspired.

If today’s economic #inequality, racial #unrest and environmental #degradation represent some of our greatest political challenges,
we would do well to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of these catastrophes.

Perhaps no day in Reagan’s presidency better embodied his policy transformations or the political ambitions of the Heritage Foundation than Aug. 13, 1981,
when Reagan signed his first budget.

This budget dramatically transformed governmental priorities and hollowed out the nation’s 50-year pursuit of government for the common good that began during the New Deal.

Once passed, it stripped 400,000 poor working families of their welfare benefits,
while removing significant provisions from another 300,000.

Radical cuts in education affected 26 million students.

The number of poor Americans increased by 2.2 million, and the percentage of Black Americans living in poverty rose to a staggering 34.2%.

Of course, this was just the beginning of Reagan’s war on the poor, the environment and education.

Following a Heritage Foundation plan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget would fall by 27%,
and its science budget decreased by more than 50%.

Funding for programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provided housing assistance would be cut by 70%,
according to Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, By America.”

Homelessness skyrocketed.
And, as Project 2025 proposes, Reagan attempted to eliminate the Department of Education but settled for gutting its funding in a manner that set public education,
in the words of author Jonathan Kozol,
“back almost 100 years.”

As funding for these issues nosedived under Reagan,
financial support for the “war on drugs” skyrocketed and the prison population nearly doubled.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-08-25/project-2025-trump-heritage-foundation-election