Project 2025: A Trump platform to curtail worker protections

At a gathering of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), which is part of the hugely influential AFL-CIO, GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance declared, “President Trump and I are proud to be the most pro-worker Republican ticket in history. And I want to talk about why we’re fighting for working people, why we’re going to fight for unions, and non-union alike.” Not surprisingly, the audience of first responders started to boo – with good reason.

The closest thing to a Trump platform is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. While Donald Trump has vocally said that he disagrees with many passages in the manifesto, the 1,000-page document was assembled by Jeffrey Clark, a former Trump official who sought to use the Justice Department to help Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Clark and many of his co-authors are key advisors of the campaign and are slated to be the transition officials to staff a second Trump administration.

Officially entitled “The Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” the Project 2025 document would eviscerate many of the standards of worker protections that have implicitly become part of the American social contract. While the Harris campaign’s claim that Project 2025 allows “employers to stop paying workers for overtime work” has been called an overstatement, the changes to overtime rules mandated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) could result in some people losing overtime protections, according to experts.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., Louisiana as well as the rest of the southeast United States).” The implication is a return to the $35,568 threshold employed by the previous Trump administration. The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888, with a further increase to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025. That would grant overtime eligibility to about four million workers, the Labor Department said.

Labor organizing would also be curtailed. AFSCME warns that Project 2025 recommendations would make it “easier for corporations to fire workers who engage in collective action or organizing;” allow “corporations to get rid of unions even when the workers are protected by a signed union contract;” force “workers to hold secret ballot elections to form a union even when their employer has agreed to voluntarily recognize it;” eliminate “the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which has relieved many AFSCME members of an overwhelming student debt burden;” and end “merit staffing in the federal government so Trump can hire unqualified loyalists for thousands of positions now filled by qualified, trained, nonpartisan career employees.”

This last provision would rebirth Trump October 2020 executive order to reclassify civil service workers under “Schedule F.” In other words, the White House could redefine tens of thousands of public employees as, essentially, “at-will” political appointments – and fire them “at-will.”

Critics warn that the change in policy might return the U.S. federal government to the “spoils system” so common in the late 19th Century. This staffed the government with often unqualified personnel, but ones who proved to be political loyalty. The entire nature of non-partisan public sector employment could effectively come to an end, perhaps the reason that the firefighters booed.

This article originally published in the September 9, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.