Project 2025 is Even Worse Than You Think
You’ve likely heard of Project 2025, the policy blueprint ginned up by the Heritage Foundation for Donald Trump’s second term as president (although the Republican nominee has tried to distance himself from the plan). Many of its proposals would be terrible for American families, but they’d be especially devastating for the poor.
Project 2025 calls for drastic cuts in social services under the pretext of encouraging “personal responsibility.” It doubles down on the failed ideas that animated welfare reform—time limits, work requirements, and “promoting marriage.” Though purporting to “restore the American family,” its real aims are to gut the safety net and blame the poor for their plight.
The project’s 900-page manifesto wants traditional nuclear families to be “the centerpiece of American life.” It bemoans “the crisis of marriage and family” and resurrects the notion that “family breakdown” is the root cause of poverty and other social ills. “There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father,” the document asserts. “Fatherlessness,” it continues, “is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts.”
These claims are as specious as they are sanctimonious, and they’re the same ones trotted out by conservatives to justify the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. That legislation replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). It imposed a five-year time limit on welfare benefits and required most recipients to work. It encouraged states to promote “the formation and maintenance of two-parent families,” widely interpreted as marriage promotion.
Though touted as a way to move recipients out of poverty and into self-sufficiency, welfare reform’s real achievement was to slash the number of people getting help. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in 2020, welfare benefits reached just 21 out of every 100 families living in poverty (compared to 68 out of 100 in 1996). The federal government’s definitive evaluation of “welfare-to-work” concluded it was largely a dud—recipients typically ended up in low-wage work with few opportunities for advancement, if they landed jobs at all.
Nevertheless, Project 2025 expands this framework to other federal programs for the poor, including housing and health care. Inevitably, poor Americans would strain to meet basic needs, and the impact would be especially dire for children. America’s “safety net” would become more like razor wire—punitive and cruel.
Project 2025 would put a lifetime cap on Medicaid benefits, denying people needed care.
At its most heartless, Project 2025 calls for spending caps, time limits, and lifetime benefit limits for Medicaid, which would almost certainly prevent Americans from getting the care they need.
Under the guise of giving states “a more flexible, accountable, predictable, transparent, and efficient financing mechanism to deliver medical services,” Project 2025 proposes “block grants, aggregate caps, or per capita caps” in Medicaid. Moreover, to “incentivize personal responsibility,” the government would “add targeted time limits or lifetime caps on benefits to disincentivize permanent dependence.”
It’s hard to overestimate the impact per-person caps, lifetime caps on benefits, or time limits could have on patients facing life-threatening injuries or illnesses. What if seniors in nursing homes outlive their benefit limits? Will they be homeless? What if the child victim of a devastating accident hits their benefit limit during adolescence? What about the estimated 129 million Americans suffering from at least one major chronic condition, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or high blood pressure? Would the cost of heart surgery preclude someone’s access to care for the rest of their days? Time limits on benefits mean the denial of care for chronically ill patients.
The “death panels” ginned up by the GOP in their lurid attacks on Obamacare could, in fact, become a reality under Project 2025. If state governments must ration Medicaid—under a block grant or spending caps—they must prioritize care and for whom. Lest this sound farfetched, the first Trump administration also proposed turning Medicaid into a block grant. As KFF’s Larry Levitt points out, Trump promised not to cut Social Security or Medicare, but he has not made the same pledge about Medicaid. Project 2025’s intended overhaul of Medicaid is literally a matter of life or death for many Americans.
Project 2025 would time-limit housing benefits, potentially throwing families into homelessness.
Not content with time-limiting access to health care, Project 2025 imposes “maximum term limits” for people receiving federal housing benefits. Government must “limit the period during which households are eligible for housing benefits,” with the purported aim of “encourag[ing] all non-elderly, able-bodied adults to move toward self-sufficiency.”
But as with time limits on Medicaid, this proposal would have horrendous impacts on vulnerable households, disrupting work and schooling and likely throwing many people into homelessness.
The nation has long experienced a crisis in affordable housing. In 2022, a record 12.1 million households spent more than half of their income on rent, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Households receiving federal housing assistance—either through a housing voucher (i.e., what was known as “Section 8”) or public housing—are typically among the lowest-income families. More than 70 percent have incomes that fall below one-third of their area’s median income, according to the Urban Institute.
The expiration of benefits would saddle these families with unaffordable rent—if they can find housing. Moving to cheaper housing could mean transportation problems, longer commutes, or job loss; changing school districts could mean academic and social disruption for children. Many households could end up homeless, with especially devastating impacts on children.
Project 2025’s time limit creates a misleading impression that beneficiaries are “mooching” off the system for years. In reality, most beneficiaries are elderly or disabled, and the typical stay on assistance is only about six years (nine years for seniors). Moreover, three-fourths of “able-bodied” working-age beneficiaries either work or are subject to work requirements—their incomes just aren’t high enough to afford the rents in their area.
Project 2025 triples down on work requirements, which are punitive and ineffective.
In another facsimile of the 1996 welfare reform law, Project 2025 expands work requirements in exchange for benefits—but for programs uniquely unsuited for the concept. In particular, it calls for adding work requirements to Medicaid (which Trump also tried to implement) and “strengthening” work requirements imposed on beneficiaries of food stamps and housing assistance (these requirements already exist).
As the Monthly has documented, welfare work requirements have failed, and evidence shows that requiring Medicaid beneficiaries to work would also be ineffective. When Georgia created its “Pathways to Coverage” program, a pilot effort to condition Medicaid coverage on work requirements, just 4,300 people enrolled after a year. That’s compared to the roughly half a million people in the state who would be eligible for Medicaid under full expansion. One health policy expert told the Associated Press, “It’s clear that the Georgia Pathways experiment is a huge failure.”
Project 2025 argues that “promoting marriage” can fix poverty.
Project 2025 casts poverty as a moral failure rather than a systemic disadvantage. It elevates the 1950s ideal of a (heterosexual) nuclear family, declaring that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” It condemns a perceived “crisis of fatherlessness” and asserts without evidence that “homes with non-related ‘boyfriends’ present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be.”
Project 2025 proposes a dubious campaign of “marriage and relationship education,” siphoning child welfare funding and pumping it into marriage education. It even requires federally funded family planning clinics to inculcate “the importance of marriage to family and personal well-being.” It contemplates generous support for faith-based groups that “maintain a biblically based… definition of marriage and family” (i.e., a heterosexual one) and proposes a federally-funded “pro-fatherhood messaging campaign.”
This emphasis on marriage and family formation is misguided. First, simply encouraging poor people to marry is no solution. While it’s true that married couples are less likely to be poor, the connection is correlative, not causative. Marriage can’t solve individual and systemic problems that contribute to poverty, such as joblessness, inadequate education, lack of transportation, poor health, or substance abuse.
Second, marriage education doesn’t work. After welfare reform, Washington and the states invested in programs promoting marriage and “responsible fatherhood.” But as an article by the Council on Contemporary Families at the University of Texas concluded:
Considerable research indicates that the low marriage rates of impoverished individuals are rooted in their economic insecurity and that teaching relationship skills does not increase marriage rates… [E]ven when relationship skills classes improve low-income couples’ relationship experiences, they do not affect marriage or poverty rates. (emphasis in the original).
Focusing on marriage shifts the blame for poverty on the poor, providing conservatives with a convenient excuse for failing to invest in structural fixes (e.g., better schools) that could reduce poverty. Ever since the 1965 publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family,” the face of poverty has been a single Black mother. (In reality, most poor Americans are white.) Moynihan popularized the concept of a “culture of poverty,” which has allowed conservative politicians and many middle-class Americans to demonize the poor. Without a doubt, personal behavior shapes one’s fortunes, but “personal responsibility” alone cannot be relied upon to overcome systemic disadvantage.
Project 2025 heaps additional indignities on the poor. It would eliminate the Head Start preschool program for low-income children and prohibit automatic enrollment in programs like food stamps if someone is eligible for welfare (so-called “categorical eligibility”). It demands that legal immigrants be denied access to federal housing benefits, including “all mixed-status families,” which means citizen children living with their legal immigrant parents (such as refugees) would lose help.
Project 2025 is breathtaking in its cruelty and stands in stark contrast to earlier conservative visions of social policy reform. President George H.W. Bush called for a “kinder, gentler nation,” while President George W. Bush championed “compassionate conservatism.” A second Trump presidency, however, would bring neither kindness nor compassion to vulnerable citizens. Instead, they’ll be victims of the same zeal for punishment Trump promises his foes.
