How closely is Trump following the Project 2025 blueprint?

The vast majority of Trump’s executive orders have come from The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and the so-called "America First" plan. How the Trump administration is turning Project 2025 and the so-called 'America First' agenda into reality.

Tami Gouveia, Paul Farmer professor of practice at Boston University School of Social Work. Director of the Center for Innovation in Social Work and Health, also at BU. At the center she leads the Beyond 2025 Action Hub, which is a searchable database based on two major policy proposals — Project 2025 and the America First Agenda.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: In April of 2023, about five months after Donald Trump announced he was running in the 2024 presidential election, the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation released a roadmap of how they wanted Trump to run the country if reelected. That roadmap is called Project 2025 and it's 922 pages long. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump denied having any involvement in Project 2025. In fact, he said he didn't even know what it was. Here's Trump at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan on July 20th, 2024.

DONALD TRUMP: Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25, and I don't even know, some of them, I know who they are, but they're very conservative.

Just like you have, there's the opposite of the radical left. Okay? You have the radical left and you have the radical right, and they come up with this project, I don't know what the hell it is.

CHAKRABARTI: And during Trump's first presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris on September 10th in Philadelphia, Trump again separated himself from the project.

TRUMP: I have nothing to do with Project 2025, that's out there. I haven't read it. I don't wanna read it, purposely. I'm not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together. They came up with some ideas, some good, some bad.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's fast forward from there. Trump wins the 2024 election, and in December he sits down with NBC's Kristen Welker, and she presses him on his connection to Project 2025.

Here's a clip from that interview that aired on December 8th.

KRISTEN WELKER: You're now giving people involved in Project 2025 prominent roles in your administration. Are you changing your mind about Project 2025?

Is this now the policy blueprint for the second Trump administration?

TRUMP: No.

Some people, if you take a look at the group, it was hundreds of people were involved. And I was, actually, I reprimanded the whole group. I said, you shouldn't have placed this document in front of the voters because I have nothing to do with it, and I'm the one that's running. You had no right to do this, where you put a thousand-page document in front and many of those things I disagree with. Now, many of those things I happen to agree with.

Many of those things, Democrats should have agreed to. And I think they would've done much better in the election, because they got slaughtered.

WELKER: I guess people see the list. Russ Vought, Brendan Carr, Peter Navarro, John Ratcliffe, Pete Hegseth, Monica Crowley. And they think, these are all the people who were involved in or writing Project 2025.

TRUMP: But they have --

WELKER: This must be a blueprint for work requirements, eliminating the Head Start program, criminalizing pornography. Is that what we can expect to see?

TRUMP: I don't know how they voted. I don't know. I didn't, I never spoke to them actually about it. And I purposely, and I told you, normally it would be just the opposite. I'd review every page. I purposely didn't even wanna see it. Because when somebody like you asked me a question about Project 2025, I can honestly say I've never seen it. I have nothing to do with it.

CHAKRABARTI: Project 2025 clearly has everything to do with him and his administration. Because within days of taking office, Trump issued many executive orders, and a Time Magazine analysis found that nearly two thirds of the executive actions Trump issued mirrored or partially mirrored proposals from Project 2025.

Again, an agenda that the president claims he never read. Trump's claims of also not knowing the Project 2025 authors bears no water as well, because according to a CNN investigation, at least 140 people who had worked in the first Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, including half of the people listed as authors, editors, and contributors, and several of those folks are now part of the current Trump administration, including in cabinet positions.

So this hour we're going to do our own detailed analysis of just how closely President Trump's actions and orders do hue to the literal text sometimes and political ambitions of Project 2025. And with that in mind, what can you expect next? Tami Gouveia is the Paul Farmer Professor of Practice at Boston University's School of Social Work.

She's also the director of the Center for Innovation in Social Work and Health, also at Boston University. And she leads the Beyond 2025 Action Hub, which is a searchable database based on two major policy proposals. That's Project 2025, and the America First Agenda. Professor Gouveia, welcome to On Point.

TAMI GOUVEIA: Thank you so much for having me here today, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. By the way, I should say that we are linking to the work that you and your colleagues have done on our website onpointradio.org. We'll get directly to Project 2025 in a second, but since I mentioned the America First agenda as well, do you wanna give us a quick reminder of what that is?

GOUVEIA: Yeah, this was put out by the America First Policy Institute. Linda McMahon, who's the Secretary of Education, is actually one of the founders and past president of that, as a number of cabinets secretaries were also involved in crafting the America First policy agenda. So when we did our deep dive, we really looked at both Project 2025 and AFPI, the America First Agenda, just to really have a comprehensive look at what's happening with the Trump administration and also with our new Republican Congress, Republican led Congress as well, because they've taken up a number of the issues that are in both of these policy roadmaps. So that's why we wanted to do a deep dive into both of them.

CHAKRABARTI: Very important to mention Congress here. Okay, so we will talk about that in a few minutes. So given Project 2025 and the America First agenda, from the top level of the analysis that your database has found, thus far in the Trump administration, what percentage of executive actions would you say are directly related to what's in these two documents.

GOUVEIA: We see the vast majority, when we did our analysis, we actually broke the policies into more bite-sized pieces. Because the intention with the database is to make it searchable for everyday people who didn't have the time or the stomach or the policy analysis skills to dive deep into these thousand-page documents.

So our analysis was at a more discreet level. And so when we look at it, we say, okay, this executive order covers these five to 10 policy proposals, right? Like when you look at some of the executive orders around immigration or identifying biology as only two sexes, a lot of those came up in multiple places across human rights, women's rights, health and human services, education. So we estimate a vast majority of them, come from the executive orders, really tie closely to what's in our database and what comes out of Project 2025 and America First.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So by a vast majority, forgive me, I'm going to press you a little -

GOUVEIA: 60%, 70% upwards.

Yeah. As time goes on and as more executive orders get signed, we see a little bit more of a mix than not tying quite as closely, we see new things like DOGE. DOGE wasn't anywhere in Project 2025, that caught a number of folks by surprise. Some of the policy proposals just sidestepping some of what's really listed in Project 2025 and America First.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. But you were still saying, at least at this point in time, you're comfortable saying 60%, 70% even.

GOUVEIA: Yeah, absolutely. Yep.

CHAKRABARTI: That's a lot.

GOUVEIA: That's a lot.

CHAKRABARTI: So let me just go back, before we get to some specifics. I wanna go back to something that the president said in one of the clips that we played from July of 2024, where he said some on the severe right is what he called them, came up with Project 2025.

So if 60 to 70% of the actions coming out of the White House thus far are tied to ideas in Project 2025 and America First, would that make his administration severe.

GOUVEIA: I think it does make his administration severe right. There's unprecedented disruptions to the functioning of government, right?

All of the agencies, where we've seen hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their jobs, people have dedicated themselves to public service. Just poof, overnight having their work and their careers just completely disrupted. That's unprecedented. That's a far-right approach to trying to create abuses of power and concentration of power and having a situation where we have more power in the administrative, which is not what the founding fathers wanted.

That's why we have our three branches of government, and this is a step in a far-right direction. To secure more power in the presidency.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. And we'll talk about how Project 2025 actually in particular talks about executive power. But let's get to some of the specifics here. Because I've got Project 2025 in front of me, obviously you do too.

And you have your database as well. Immigration. Can we start with that one?

GOUVEIA: Yeah, please.

CHAKRABARTI: Because what's interesting to me is that in fact, in Project 2025, there's no chapter called immigration. It's organized in a very different way. So take me through your analysis of the relationship between some of the president's executive orders and what is actually in the document.

GOUVEIA: Yeah. So you're right. In a lot of these chapters, not just with immigration, but across a number of issues or topics or areas of interest and concern, the information is spread throughout various chapters. Immigration is definitely one of those.

It's talked about in areas around education, around housing, around health and human services. And what we've already seen is a move in multiple agencies. To make it more difficult for undocumented folks to be able to access health care services, to be able to know for sure that they will continue to have opportunities around housing or employment.

And we're seeing the effect of this on the ground. We're hearing from social workers and from public health folks and folks in hospitals that immigrants aren't coming for their appointments, and they're not showing up for prenatal visits. We saw this during the first Trump administration, so for many of us, it's no surprise that we're seeing the same thing, but the sheer vitriol and real major focus on demonizing immigrants, those who are asylum seekers.

Seeing that across the board in multiple places, across multiple agencies, just the impact on that.

CHAKRABARTI: What if we, can we get into even more detail about it?

GOUVEIA: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Because I'm looking at, for example, the chapter in Project 2025 about the Department of Homeland Security written by Ken Elli Cuccinelli.

Can you point to specific things there regarding immigration and the president's actions?

GOUVEIA: Yeah. A lot of the things, and I can't remember if it's exactly ... in that particular chapter, just the move towards more border security, the changes with the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol and just seeing, around our state here, in Massachusetts, which is where I'm sitting, more border patrol on the streets than we've ever seen, we're hearing border patrols showing up and ICE showing up in various places. And then this whole like issue around sensitive places, where in the past ICE was not able to just show up at schools or universities or places of worship or health care facilities. And that has changed, that has shifted. That was in Project 2025, the attack and the description around.

Allowing ICE to be able to show up at these sensitive places. And that's why we are seeing an effect on immigrants documented as well as undocumented, really feeling the pressure.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: I wanted to pull up some specific examples because really, I think a lot of people don't know. It's not that just like they're mirroring, it's sometimes even direct language.

For example, I was looking at in Project 2025, there is a suggestion just right on ... page 145 and it's a bullet point and it says simply repeal temporary protected status designations. Repeal TPS.

GOUVEIA: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: That actually happened in an executive order.

GOUVEIA: Yes, it did.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So that's what we're talking about here.

GOUVEIA: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: And then what about also there's another one about, something called sensitive zones.

GOUVEIA: The sensitive zones, yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Can you talk about that a little bit?

GOUVEIA: Yeah. So the sensitive zones in the past have been designated hospitals, schools, and places of worship have been considered pretty much hands off by ICE. Just busting in the door and grabbing people.

And that was in Project 2025, was to change the definition of sensitive zones and how sensitive zones could be treated by ICE and border patrol. And now we're seeing that people are showing up. ICE is showing up in places that are sensitive, and we know that they're in the past also with courts, right?

We know that they're showing up at court hearings and grabbing people before they even get to stand trial and maybe be held responsible locally for a crime that they've been committed. People have been snagged right out of the courtrooms, and that's been a major shift and that has, as you've pointed out, connected directly to Project 2025.

CHAKRABARTI: Right.

In Project 2025, it says right here again, page 142, all ICE memoranda, identifying sensitive zones where ICE personnel are prohibited from operating should be rescinded. And that did happen on January 20th, 2025. Day one, very first.

GOUVEIA: Day one. Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: Of the Trump administration.

GOUVEIA: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So we could go into, we could spend the whole hour just talking about the immigration actions, but I wanna move towards the whole concept of the federal government defunding, shrinking, whatever you want to call it. You said earlier that DOGE isn't part of America First or Project 2025, so we'll put that aside, but are there aspects of the reduction in the capacity of the federal government that we do see in these documents.

GOUVEIA: Yeah. Throughout, especially Project 2025, we see over and over again, eliminate this program, eliminate that program, constrict this program, change the definition of this program, consolidate these departments together, like with USAID, right? That was one of the things right out of the gate, that they went after, was USAID.

In a big way, that surprised even some of us who had read Project 2025, just the sheer volume of the disruptions to those programs and like stopping the funding for things that are happening on the ground that are so critical in other parts of the world. When you think about our health and our safety.

USAID, all of those programs, they play a really critical role. And in Project 2025, they talked a lot about consolidating and moving USAID under the State Department, which we have seen a move towards that, in addition to the sheer disruption of the funding. And of course there are court battles going back and forth on so many of the acts and steps that have been taken, whether it's primarily through executive order, to just try to slow things down or stop things from really rolling out and in the way that the Trump administration would like to.

CHAKRABARTI: So it says here, yes. Defund USAID. And then that, by the way, was also mirrored in an executive order from January 20th, 2025.

The executive order reevaluating and realigning the United States foreign aid. Okay. What about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?

GOUVEIA: Yeah, that is another one that they've already gone after. I need to refer to my specific notes. Anything that's related to protecting consumers.

Vought is the sort of head of that. And he's already --

CHAKRABARTI: Russell Vought.

GOUVEIA: Yeah, Russell Vought. And he's already taking steps to close and really dismantle the Consumer Protection Board with 90% reduction in the workforce. And that's what we're seeing across the board is these 1,000 people here, 500 people there, 2,000 people there. Across various agencies, whether it's consumer protection or things happening within TANF or other services, in HUD, just the sheer attack on the folks who are doing the really hard work every single day to make sure that their neighbors have access to the resources and services to get through the day.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm seeing here on page 837.

GOUVEIA: 837, okay.

CHAKRABARTI: Of Project 2025. There's a whole section actually on CFPB and it starts by saying The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was authorized in 2010 by Dodd-Frank. Then since the Bureau's inception, its status as an independent agency with no congressional oversight has been questioned in multiple court cases, it's been assailed by critics as a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to what they call leftist nonprofits, politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation.

So then later on it says it should be shut down, which is what I guess DOGE has tried to do, as you said.

GOUVEIA: And I think, if I may, I think that's one of the things that kind of as you read through Project 2025, that becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly. Is the ideological approach to things that there's been pretty much agreement on all sides of the aisle around some of these programs that are really important, like Head Start for example, or USAID, that has had bipartisan support for decades.

And the ways that this has been conceived of in Project 2025 and now under the Trump administration, and as you've pointed out, the severity, the right-wing severity of the changes, are really a departure from what we've had over decades, in terms of many of these lifesaving, nation building services and programs.

There's also another one about education, right?

GOUVEIA: The entire Department.

CHAKRABARTI: of Education, which it says here, Chapter 11, there's a whole, there is actually a whole chapter on it, on the DOE, but it says, federal education policy should be limited and ultimately the Federal Department of Education should be eliminated.

GOUVEIA: Right and relegating a lot more authority and responsibility to the states and to the very local level.

Allowing parents to be able to review and see what the curriculum is of their students and weighing in on that. We're even seeing some bills out of Texas. So our states are a testing ground for a lot of policies that we'll see roll up at the federal level. And in Texas, there's House Bill 37, which it would allow the legislature to really weigh in on higher education.

So we're seeing these attacks both at the elementary and secondary level of education, but also at the higher education level, as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay. So I'm just still scrolling through the education chapter here, again, there are points at which it's like virtually the exact same language, right?

Yeah. For example, there's a bullet list of actions that Project 2025 wanted the Trump administration to take. This is on page 322. And the first one is advancing education freedom. Okay. Empowering families to choose amongst a diverse set of education options is key to reform and improved outcomes.

And then I am looking at an executive order from January 29th, so nine days after the president took office. And section four is all about encouraging education freedom. And it goes into sort of similar points after that about, let me see, I don't wanna misquote this. Encouraging education freedom through the discretionary grant program.

Secretary of Labor and Secretary of Education shall review the grant programs and submit to the president programs that make recommendations regarding how to use grants to expand those freedoms. Okay? So that seems to be, if not word for word, at least, definitely in terms of its spirit, the same as what Project 2025 is asking for.

GOUVEIA: Absolutely. Yeah. And that, with things around critical race theory or DEI, that shows up in multiple chapters within Project 2025. And you see that, again, those kinds of executive orders were right out of the gate on the first day.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And actually, in the advancing education freedom portion of Project 2025. It uses slightly different words, but it's the same idea. They're talking about portability of existing federal funds to assist families to find the school options that they want.

GOUVEIA: Exactly. And we can anticipate what that means. Especially now that there's the religious commission that's at the federal level and just the discussion around allowing that portability to also include religiously based schools and religiously based, maybe even charter schools. And moving us more in that privatization direction as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. There's more, and then we'll get to a bigger analysis, but I think part of the importance of this hour is this exercise of really doing this check to see how close the documents are.

Okay. What about the media overall?

GOUVEIA: The media. Yeah. One of the things that really, concerned me when I read Project 2025 were the attacks on media and we know the sort of the checklist of authoritarianism, right? Go after and other and dehumanize people. We're doing that with our transgender folks and with our immigrant folks.

Go after the media, go after higher education. We're seeing those threats happen over and over again. And when it comes to Project 2025 and the actions around NPR and the public broadcasting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has fought back and said we're an independent agency.

And that's one of the things that the Trump administration has been doing, is going after independent agencies that they actually have no authority over. But it's this consistent testing of how far can they go? And who's going to stop them? And what is that stoppage going to look like. So these threats to the media, kicking the American voice out, going after the AP in the beginning and saying that they couldn't be in the White House, because they weren't referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Those kinds of attacks are threats to the independence of the media that we really wanna have. An educational programming that is also really embedded within PBS. And so these attacks on media should concern all of us.

CHAKRABARTI: Specifically for example about Voice of America. There's a section on it in Project 2025. I'm looking for the exact section.

GOUVEIA: There's a section called media, I think it's chapter eight.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. And it is chapter eight. And does it actually call for either the severe reduction or closing of it? I wanna be sure.

GOUVEIA: It says that it has to like adhere and make some major changes in order to continue to exist. Is my recollection in that section.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Oh yeah. If the defacto aim of the agency remains to compete in foreign markets using anti-U.S. talking points, okay. That parrot America's adversaries and this was, it says, this represents an unacceptable burden.

Okay, got it. Overall, there's issues about the environment we can talk about. Even the death penalty. Actually let's talk about the environment for a little bit. Because that really matters to a lot of people, for example, repealing the Inflation Reduction Act as a whole.

GOUVEIA: Yeah. There's been moves to really change a lot of the programs and the funding mechanisms that came out of the Inflation Reduction Act. And there has been activity around this from a bipartisan way, to say, wait a second, these things actually have really helped us in our states, get more energy independence, get some additional kinds of green energy really going in the state.

And so we are seeing pushback around some of these. And also, just the disruptions to the Energy Star program as part of that executive order as well, and those efforts. So we're seeing major issues coming forward with climate and with environment and it's this whole framing around American energy dominance.

It's like in this spirit of America is so awesome. We want to dominate in all these different areas, and we don't want to be involved in other places that might need our help. Climate comes up in USAID, climate came up on the ground local efforts, it comes up in multiple sections, even though there is this focus within Project 2025, again, on the framing around dominance. And also, the move to eliminate or privatize things like NOAA and the Weather Service.

All of these are interrelated and the ways that we get access to climate science and climate information and how that helps inform the American public so that we can protect ourselves If there's a big hurricane that's about to come, or a big storm that's about to come. And so this move to privatize these things that have really operated in a way that's much more independent and more based on actual science and not the ways that Trump and some of the folks in the Republican Congress have conceived of climate and being the climate science deniers.

CHAKRABARTI: It's interesting how specific Project 2025 gets about even seemingly small things, like efficiency standards for appliances.

GOUVEIA: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: But you talked about energy, like that relates to the Trump administration's overall view of American energy dominance.

But I understand that also actually made it into, or aspects of that made it into an executive order.

GOUVEIA: That one I don't recall to be, yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Okay.

GOUVEIA: You're really deep in that Meghna, which I appreciate. Yeah. It's been hard to dive deep into every single policy because everything has happening so fast and furious. And that's part of the design, is to just hurl so much at us that it's hard to keep track of everything that's happening. So you're in the details a little bit more on that one than I am.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. It talks about allowing American people to have the freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances.

Light bulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, et cetera. Which, by the way, would require some regulatory changes, especially the light bulbs part. So that's actually from an executive order.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the places where the administration didn't exclusively follow Project 2025, because we've given a lot of examples of how it has, you had mentioned Head Start before and Project 2025 definitely, I think, explicitly calls for the elimination of the Head Start program.

Which was floated by the White House, but what happened there?

GOUVEIA: With the president's budget, it is included in the President's budget right now. I think the devil will be in the details of how that gets rolled out and which version of the budget actually rises to the top and gets passed.

But right now, it is included in the president's budget, which was a little bit surprising to a number of folks. And some are questioning, and this is the thing to sort of, I think, for us to be like thinking about and looking at. Is what's underneath the executive orders? What's underneath and what's the reason behind some of the language that's included in Project 2025?

Because some of these things, you look at it first blush, and you think, that makes a lot of sense, but then if you take a step back and have a little bit of skepticism about, but what really is the motivation here? So I have the same sort of reaction to Head Start, which has had bipartisan support.

It has been demonstrated to be one of the things that's been the most successful programs. It being included in Project 2025 was very confusing and the original actions against Head Start was a little bit confusing. And now seeing sort of the retreating around it, you have to wonder is it a bipartisan, is it that Republicans have come forward and said no, we still need this.

Or is this perhaps a move towards trying to create more privatization at the local level around childcare.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting.

GOUVEIA: Because we're seeing that in numerous ways and they have a lot of sections on childcare and moving childcare into the home and smaller childcare based centers. So you have to wonder, is this part of that family first approach and putting, conceiving of the nuclear family as a mother or father and a couple children, and the mom stays home and is that the move? So it's just a little curious to see where this might go.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And just so folks know, again, this is in Project 2025 on page 482, there's a whole paragraph that just starts with, eliminate the Head Start program.

That's what it calls for. And, basically, I think it says the assertion there is waste, fraud, and abuse in the program. Although I don't think they really provide a robust data set to support that. And interestingly, in Project 2025, they say research has demonstrated that federal Head Start centers have little to no long-term academic value for children, which my understanding was the research shows the exact opposite.

GOUVEIA: The exact opposite. Absolutely the exact opposite. Research after research shows the exact opposite. It's one of the most successful anti-poverty and getting students really ready to perform in school. That is the Head Start program. That is what it does. And it's succeeded in that.

CHAKRABARTI: To your point though, this is one program that thus far has not been eliminated, even though it looks like the White House made noises about that, but it's pulled back from that effort. And we'll have to find out why, as things progress. What I wanted to also ask you about is you had said earlier that it's not just the executive branch or the White House that is reading and echoing what's in these documents, in their actions. You said Congress, Republican led Congress also is playing a role here. Can you elaborate on that?

GOUVEIA: Yeah. We saw even early the first bill that President Trump signed was the Laken Riley Act, which is an anti-immigration, anti-immigrant piece of legislation and Bill that was signed into law, and that was put forward by the Republican Congress and moved really swiftly.

So that's one example of where Congress has stepped in and done some of the bidding along with the Trump administration. We see this also now happening with school meals. So school meals and getting rid of universal school meals is also in Project 2025. So we haven't, to my knowledge, seen an executive order specific on school meals, but Congress has proposed making the eligibility requirements a lot more stringent and harder, with the potential impact on 24,000 schools, 12 million students who won't be able to access school meals.

So when you think about what allows a student to show up ready to learn, it's having food in their bellies, it's not stressing about whether or not they're going to be able to eat lunch or if they're going to be able to stand in the lunch line and not feel stigmatized. Because they don't have the same school meal that some of their peers have.

That's where we're seeing Congress also step in. And then the third place, which is going to require Congress, is making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent, which has been part of President Trump's campaign. It's been part of his effort. They passed that during his first administration.

And this is where like the issues around Medicaid and whether or not Medicaid is stripped of a lot of its funding, which would impact seniors and folks with disabilities, instituting work requirements. Is that an administration action or is that a congressional action? But we do know that Medicaid is on the chopping block.

In part because that will actually help fund the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which is really a big boon for wealthy individuals and corporations. So that's the role that Congress is playing in all of this. And I think they are getting pressure. We've seen through the town halls that they are getting pressure from their constituents, but we don't know where a lot of this will end up going in the end.

CHAKRABARTI: So the school meals one is actually quite interesting to me because it's not just a practical change that Project 2025 is calling for, but it's also, again, this sort of political philosophy about the role of government. Which is interesting here. So I just want to read a little bit about that.

In Project 2025, page 302, it says, return to the original purpose of school meals. And it said the original purpose is to provide food to children from low-income families while at school. Okay. There's no doubt about that. But then Project 2025 says, today, federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs.

And represent an example of the ever expanding federal footprint in local school operations. And then it says, to serve students in need and prevent the misuse of taxpayer money. The administration should focus on students in need and reject efforts to transform federal school meals into an entitlement program.

Specifically calling for USDA to clarify who would be eligible for school meals and for reject efforts to create universal free school meal programs, which a lot of states have actually done post COVID.

GOUVEIA: Yeah. Absolutely because the research shows that when kids are, have food in their bellies and they're able to show up and learn and it reduces the stigma.

There's also just such a huge administrative burden that comes along with administering a lot of these programs. So you can put families through all the hoops and they're gonna be eligible anyways. Why spend all that extra money on the administrative side, when you can actually be helping students be prepared to learn by accessing nutritious food.

And that's the other thing that they've also called for, is changing the nutrition standards in schools and allowing for more processed food. And it also will disrupt; a number of schools have these really great partnerships with their local farms. We know that there's been real impact on farmers in various parts of the country because of the tariffs and because of the disruption with USAID.

For those who aren't tracking this, it's a lot of times farmers in the United States are actually the ones that are selling food or providing food to other parts of the world. And so the elimination of USAID has really had an impact on farmers here in the United States. And this is another area that will impact local farmers who have these really great partnerships.

So again, you're talking about disrupting the local food ecosystem. Even beyond just what's happening with the school. So these things are just so interconnected. It's hard to not get into them.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And what's connecting them all again, is this belief of what is the role of the federal government.

And for a lot of Project 2025 and the America First agenda, it's basically like the government should be less involved in people's lives. The government should see universal school meals as an entitlement program that taxpayer dollars shouldn't support, step back federal government. That's the philosophy here.

GOUVEIA: Except for --

CHAKRABARTI: I was gonna say yeah. But there's a whole other part or multiple parts of this, these documents that call for even more involvement in the federal government in people's lives. And I'm wondering we should talk about that regarding the whole concept of families in America and how what we see in Project 2025 and America First, The America First agenda, might evolve into actual actions by the federal government.

GOUVEIA: Yeah, I mean I think this piece around the family is something that I would encourage folks to take a look at. Because it is more government intrusion into the ways that people choose to live their lives, whether they choose to have children or when, or not, for some of the requirements for access to some of the programs that for like TANF, right?

So temporary assistance for needy families and having requirements around the role of the father in the situation. The fact is that sometimes that could put women and children in greater harm, maybe perhaps due to domestic violence. And if we really care about families and making sure that families are able to succeed. Let's look at access to health care.

Let's look at access to living wage. Let's make it easier to get access to child care and to higher education. And what we're doing is with Project 2025 and the Trump administration is rolling back all of those things that have really helped families be successful and be able to thrive and now have this other imposition into our lives around what does a nuclear family really look like and what does it consist of.

CHAKRABARTI: So does Project 2025 go so far as to define what the government should see as what a family is?

GOUVEIA: I think they do pretty clearly. Talking about that the best, there's some language in there around, we all know that the best American family is one that includes a mother and father. So they're pretty clear about what their conception of a traditional or an ideal family looks like in the country.

And they've even gone so far as to say if there is an incarcerated parent, then the incarcerated parent will actually get more of the services so that they can do education while they're incarcerated, rather than looking at it as a both and really supporting the family and being able to be successful.

So the choices they're making are very obvious about who they think is deserving and who is less deserving, depending on if you fit the mold that they conceive of as the appropriate or traditional or ideal family state.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm looking here at the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, to your point.

And it actually, Project 2025 calls for three major goals in HHS's even core mission. I'd say. It says, goal number one, protecting life, conscience and bodily integrity. Two, empowering patient choices and provider autonomy. And three, regarding families. Goal number three. This is on page 451 of the version of Project 2025 that I have, promoting stable and flourishing married families.

And it says, families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation. That's interesting. And healthy society. Unfortunately, many family policies and programs under Biden's HHS are fraught with agenda items focused on, and they put this in quotes, LGBTQ+ equity.

Subsidizing single motherhood, disincentivizing work and penalizing marriages. Then Project 2025 says these policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable married nuclear families. And it sounds like the specific programs you're talking about could actually be changed in order to, I don't think this goal can actually be achieved necessarily, but to try to advance that goal.

GOUVEIA: I absolutely think that they will make moves to do that if they haven't already, or if they're not like planning it within, whether it's Congress or some future executive order. We did see the Trump administration back off a little bit or actually ask the court to dismiss a case that's in federal court around mifepristone.

Not really exactly sure what that means. Some folks are saying, oh, that means that he's backing off of mifepristone. He's backing off of some of these family first policies. I don't think that's the case. I think there's probably something a little bit more strategic that's happening in that space and really relegating the decision making to the state level. So with TANF and some of the other programs, they wanna create them, push them really at the state level back to that federal piece, except for they still wanna be able to say, this is how it ought to be conceived of.

So I think they're trying to have a both and we're backed off, but we're still gonna tell you how it has to go.

CHAKRABARTI: It's interesting because Project 2025 talks explicitly about the federal government should not subsidize single motherhood, but then it also calls for a child support tax credit for fathers who are non-resident with their children or the mothers of their children. It says the key to that policy is it empowers fathers with their own resources and money.

Rather than creating another government assistance program, but it's essentially a government assistance program for non-resident fathers.

GOUVEIA: It's diverting some of that funding too, that would normally go to the mom and her children if she's not living with the father. So that's part of the issue that I see. Is that we're gonna see it get even more difficult for single head households, which I've been a single head household. I understand how to navigate not exactly these programs, but what the challenges are in trying to raise your family on lower dollars. And this is about shifting the dollars to the dads.

CHAKRABARTI: I think the overall lesson from your work and today's hour is believe what's in Project 2025 and the America First Agenda because it is actually being enacted in several ways. And you can go to the database that Professor Gouveia is helping to build. We have a link to it at onpointradio.org. Thank you so very much.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.