Trump’s Project 2025 is a disaster. Here’s what must replace it.

As 'New Deal' descendants, we know economic security for Americans is key to stopping power-hungry oligarchs from endangering our republic.

Photo by Jessica Tan on Unsplash

By James Roosevelt Jr., Henry Scott Wallace and June Hopkins

When an airplane catastrophe strikes — like the recent deadly American Airlines crash in Washington, D.C. most people expect from government thorough, objective analysis of what went wrong and how to fix it.

Not President Donald Trump. He immediately blamed Democrats and their policy of “diversity” in positions like air traffic controllers and Army pilots, resulting in “hiring people with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities.”

As outrageous as it is to blame “diversity” and Democrats for 67 deaths before the actual cause of the crash is known, it’s a microcosm of Trump’s scheme to replace millions of federal workers with people whose personal loyalty to him exceeds their professional expertise — a scheme central to the infamous Project 2025 plan to dismantle the “deep state” and slash programs and rights that Americans rely on.

Fact checks: Trump’s plan to pay 2 million federal workers eight months of salary if they resign is illegal; resignation buyouts are legally capped at $25,000, while the average federal salary is $100,000. The diversity policy (“DEI”) that Trump complains about was actually in place before and during Trump’s first term and has nothing to do with former President Joe Biden. And the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, responsible for air traffic controllers, was fired on Trump’s inauguration day.

Trump’s zeal for Project 2025 knows no limits. Though he spent months before the 2024 election trying to distance himself from it, he has tapped numerous Project 2025 authors and influencers for key roles in his administration, embraced key goals such as abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, and has stacked his Ccabinet with billionaires.

This situation poses a danger to America's democratic tradition. To counter Project 2025 and realize a positive vision for the nation, go back nearly a century to a time when our economic, social, and military power was at its height.

In January 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt gave perhaps his most important State of the Union speech. He boldly called for an Economic Bill of Rights centered around economic security — including the right to a job, medical care, a good education, and protection from the economic fears of unemployment, sickness, accident, and old age.

These and other rights, FDR declared, “spell security.”

FDR sought to secure these economic rights for future generations to prevent another devastating economic depression, avoid another world war, and safeguard America from the rise of dictatorship. He and our New Deal ancestors understood that economic security was key to stopping power-hungry oligarchs from endangering our republic. As FDR explained in his 1944 speech: “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job, are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

Today, it is no secret that Americans are discontented with the economic status quo. The prices of homes, food, and vehicles are skyrocketing. Health care, child care, and higher education costs are out of control. About 60 percent of Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck. Stress levels are at all-time highs and happiness at all-time lows. All the while, billionaires have more than doubled their wealth since 2018. In short, progress toward a system that ensures the economic security of American workers and their families has taken a backseat to a morally bankrupt system that prioritizes immense and ever-growing profits for the super-wealthy few.

As FDR understood, economic security is about more than just getting by. No American, FDR declared in his Economic Bill of Rights speech, “can be content with mere survival.” Economic security is also about freedom: the freedom of workers and their families to live in their own homes; the freedom to live longer because health care is affordable; and simple freedoms that uplift the human spirit and bind us together, like travel or recreation.

Where Trump and Project 2025 seek to dismantle government and hand over massive tax cuts and power to an ultra-rich, self-obsessed oligarchy, FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights lays the foundation for a structure of economic security that allows all Americans to live a full life within a true representative democracy. The question is: will Americans meekly accept Project 2025’s love affair with the rich and powerful, or demand a more secure economic future for all?

James Roosevelt Jr. is a grandson of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and a former associate commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Henry Scott Wallace is an attorney and grandson of Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s vice president and secretary of Agriculture and Commerce. June Hopkins, granddaughter of Harry Hopkins, FDR’s secretary of Commerce and a leading architect of the New Deal, is a professor of History Emerita at Georgia Southern University.