Elections aren’t nearly selecting representatives—they’re additionally about declaring collective priorities. Undertaking 2025 explicitly intends to reshape the federal authorities with a view to decimate civil and human rights, crush environmental protections, and intestine employment and shopper protections in favor of expanded company affect and privatization.
This second requires an equally daring response that facilities human and planetary wants—and uplifts the options that make them potential.
For almost 30 years, YES! has been reporting on these actual options. That’s why we’ve launched Progress 2025, supposed to be a hub for the massive concepts—and grassroots strategies—that gives a hopeful, collective imaginative and prescient that counters poisonous individualism and authoritarianism.
Undertaking 2025 is a 922-page doc crafted by the Heritage Basis, an ultra-conservative suppose tank, that gives a future conservative presidential administration a transition plan to severely restrict how federal authorities businesses serve the general public. The authors of Undertaking 2025’s “Mandate for Management” mock progressive and intersectional beliefs, claiming that “unaccountable federal spending is the key lifeblood of the Nice Awokening,” and particularly goal federal funding for human wants.
Progressives are sounding the alarm over Undertaking 2025 and its proudly regressive agenda to decimate reproductive and LGBTQ rights, undermine racial justice, privatize authorities providers, speed up local weather change, and extra. Equally, many have lamented the dearth of a complete progressive counter-agenda designed to enhance circumstances for and safeguard the rights of all folks.
However the fact is that communities throughout the nation have already been laying the groundwork for a collective, compassionate future. YES! has a long time of archival tales reporting on options that may make this progressive imaginative and prescient a actuality.
Starting on August 20, YES! will publish new, unique tales each week that broaden the framework of what’s potential underneath a Progress 2025 imaginative and prescient. Collectively, we are going to reply to the apt and well timed query posed by YES! contributor adrienne maree brown: “How will we construct one thing that is ready to maintain what’s already taking place now, and capable of assist us thrive into the long run? We’ve to make the world that we have to stay in politically potential.”
Learn on to study extra about our Progress 2025 imaginative and prescient:
Undertaking 2025 targets each undocumented immigrants and authorized strategies of immigration. Within the phrases of its authors, the subsequent administration should be “[p]rioritizing border safety and immigration enforcement, together with detention and deportation.” The mission locations monumental emphasis on immigration as the primary supply of home issues, enjoying up fears of crime and job thefts by immigrants and calling for obligatory detention of undocumented folks.
The broad imaginative and prescient of Undertaking 2025 is that immigrants don’t belong within the U.S., and subsequently the subsequent administration would have a mandate to dramatically improve the funds of the Customs and Border Patrol company, fully seal the border with Mexico, eradicate a number of classes of visas and authorized standing, and federally divest from “sanctuary” cities.
In distinction, Progress 2025’s imaginative and prescient of immigration upholds the tenet that “no human being is against the law.” It adopts the intersectional and multiracial organizing led by immigrants’ rights teams that prioritizes the collective rights and dignity of immigrants. Progress 2025 envisions an finish to detention and household separation, the decriminalization of asylum and immigration violations, an enlargement of sanctuary cities, and complete immigration reform that features everlasting standing for “Dreamers” and their households. The top aim is to think about a world with out borders.
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on immigration.
Undertaking 2025 goals to chop the dimensions and scope of federal businesses together with the Environmental Safety Company, the Nationwide Climate Service, and the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Affiliation, claiming they’ve infiltrated the federal authorities and are “one of many fundamental drivers of the local weather change alarm trade.” It requires the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Conference on Local weather Change so the U.S. wouldn’t want to trace, report, or cut back emissions.
Undertaking 2025 additionally requires a rollback of environmental protections—together with the repeal of the climate-forward Inflation Discount Act—in addition to an enlargement of fossil gasoline drilling. An August 2024 examine decided that if the entire doc’s climate-related suggestions have been applied, the U.S. would spew a further 2.7 billion tons of climate-heating emissions into the environment by 2030, corresponding to what India emits in a 12 months.
Progress 2025 as an alternative highlights the communities taking again the facility to cease burning fossil fuels at present. Teams are holding polluters accountable, passing life-sustaining laws, enshrining the authorized rights of nature, and decolonizing their relationship with the land. Advocates emphasize the necessity to put money into various energies that defend the planet with out sacrificing frontline communities within the course of. As Progress 2025 makes plain, local weather options should be many and diversified, tailor-made to particular person communities and the individuals who name them residence.
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on local weather and surroundings.
Consistent with its authoritarian, Christian nationalist, and white supremacist goals, Undertaking 2025 goals to criminalize the existence of LGBTQ folks—by way of regressive laws that targets freedom of expression, well being care insurance policies that deny entry to medically obligatory care (particularly for transgender folks), and a tradition of repression, intolerance, and hatred for these deemed “completely different.” The Heritage Basis has an extended historical past and deep monetary ties to the Christian proper, which has spent a long time whipping up anti-gay and trans panic, preventing tooth and nail to reject—after which overturn—marriage equality, and falsely equating homosexual (and now trans) folks with sexual predators, even if trans folks, specifically, are more likely to be the sufferer of sexual violence than the perpetrator.
Progress 2025 as an alternative embraces a progressive imaginative and prescient for queer equality that facilities LGBTQ pleasure, security, and safety. Constitutional protections for same-sex marriage, specific LGBTQ inclusion in state and federal legal guidelines that prohibit sex-based discrimination in training, employment, and well being care, are codified nationwide. The epidemic of lethal violence in opposition to trans ladies of colour—which continues to rise yearly—is a factor of the previous, and all LGBTQ folks get pleasure from protections in and equal entry to public lodging, employment, housing, culturally competent well being care, and all social providers.
This imaginative and prescient imagines a society the place nobody is vilified or faces violence or discrimination due to who they’re, whom they love, or how they select to seek out pleasure and which means of their lives. And plenty of of these LGBTQ individuals who level to historic motion leaders like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—each trans ladies of colour and intercourse staff who have been pivotal within the historic Stonewall Riots—contend that queer liberation can’t be realized with out abolition of the carceral and police state, and an finish to U.S. imperialism, which continues to fund loss of life and devastation for tens of millions of individuals worldwide—a lot of whom are additionally LGBTQ.
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on LGBTQ rights.
Undertaking 2025 promotes independent-contractor-based employment—i.e., gig work—over safe, union jobs that pay a residing wage. It considers federal worker unions to be “incompatible with democracy,” and critiques additional time pay, claiming it punishes companies. Shockingly, it targets baby labor legal guidelines and encourages minors’ entry to hazardous jobs with a view to mitigate “employee shortages.”
Of their quest to “safe free and open markets,” the authors of Undertaking 2025 demand “decrease taxes and deregulation.” They outline “fiscal accountability” as balancing the federal funds through cuts to meals stamps and household help “whereas sustaining a powerful nationwide protection and never elevating taxes.”In sharp distinction, Progress 2025 embraces insurance policies backed by unions and their advocates that make it simpler for staff to unionize, and would strengthen baby labor legal guidelines. It envisions the enlargement of worker-owned enterprises and cooperatives, and builds on the momentum of organized labor’s current successes from home employee organizing to Starbucks baristas’ large unionizing spree. The Progress 2025 imaginative and prescient contains elevated taxes on firms and rich people (adopting the ethos that “billionaires mustn’t exist”), whereas growing federal spending on social applications and defunding the army.
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on labor and capital.
Undertaking 2025 targets public training and college students of colour, LGBTQ college students, and low-income college students. This contains eliminating the Division of Training so “households and college students [can] be free to select from a various set of college choices and studying environments that finest match their wants,” and rolling again federal protections and funding for college students with disabilities, transgender and nonbinary college students, and low-income college students.
Undertaking 2025 would eradicate federally funded applications for low-income kids reminiscent of Head Begin. It promotes privatized training and “common faculty alternative” on the expense of underserved college students, whereas stripping educators of the proper to show correct historical past. It will permit discrimination to run rampant in faculties, rolling again federal insurance policies requiring faculties receiving funding to guard trans and nonbinary kids.
Progress 2025 envisions absolutely funded public faculties no matter zip code, the place dad and mom can select the perfect faculties for his or her kids with out vouchers. Each baby is fed in class free of charge, and federally funded applications guarantee their households are ate up weekends and breaks. Lecturers are paid residing wages, given union safety, and have autonomy to show the total historical past of the U.S. LGBTQ college students, particularly those that are trans and nonbinary, can self-define with out objection, be referred to by their correct pronouns, and have entry to gender-neutral services.
All scholar mortgage debt is forgiven, public faculties provide diminished or free tuition, and race-conscious admissions insurance policies are reinstated and expanded in any respect faculties.
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on training.
Undertaking 2025 would additional entrench the sinister agenda of the Trump administration—alongside plenty of co-conspirators who’ve since been indicted—who focused election staff in a number of states, forged doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, and amplified disinformation within the 2020 election. Undertaking 2025 would additionally proceed the decades-long quest to undo the civil rights motion’s voting beneficial properties.
Undertaking 2025 would intestine the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company tasked with fortifying election integrity. Moreover, Undertaking 2025 proposes eliminating the Division of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which has been on the forefront of bringing lawsuits in opposition to counties and states that violate voting rights statutes, and would encourage the DOJ’s Felony Division to research the widespread myths of “voter registration fraud and illegal poll correction.”
Progress 2025 doesn’t simply wish to fight an authoritarian takeover of the poll field. On this imaginative and prescient, all folks over the age of 16 within the U.S. would have unimpeded entry to the poll field. Election Day could be a nationwide vacation, and the U.S. would have the infrastructure to make sure each voter can forged a poll by way of their cellular phone or different digital system. Mail-in ballots would even be embraced as a vital aspect of guaranteeing voting is accessible to folks with disabilities.
Operating for workplace wouldn’t be reserved for a choose few who get into energy and stay there. As an alternative, marketing campaign donation reform, the undoing of gerrymandering, and time period limits would be sure that any particular person, regardless of their internet value, might run for workplace and have a good likelihood to win.
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on voting rights.
One in every of Undertaking 2025’s most bold—and far-reaching—goals is to not solely finish abortion entry within the U.S. however to radically limit and redefine reproductive well being care. The mission envisions a nationwide abortion ban—together with ending entry to emergency abortion care and contraception—and restricted entry to assisted copy applied sciences like IVF, along with “fetal personhood” insurance policies that criminalize the termination of a being pregnant and prioritize the “life” of a not-yet-viable fetus over the life and rights of the pregnant particular person.
Undertaking 2025 proposes eradicating the phrase “abortion” from each “federal rule, company regulation, contract, regulation, and piece of laws that exists,” and as an alternative would fund the proliferation of deceptive, religiously based mostly “disaster being pregnant facilities” that peddle harmful misinformation and anti-abortion dogma to pregnant folks.
Against this, Progress 2025 embraces reproductive well being care as a non-negotiable aspect of well being care. It envisions not solely the reinstatement of constitutional protections for abortion, however a future the place abortion is secure, free, and destigmatized. This reproductive well being care can also be explicitly inclusive of—and educated concerning the distinctive well being care wants of—LGBTQ folks, folks of colour (reversing the Black maternal mortality charge, for example), and ageing folks.
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on reproductive justice.
Undertaking 2025 takes goal at Medicare, the biggest nationalized well being program within the U.S. Linking the prices of government-funded well being care to the federal authorities deficit, its authors declare that “our deficit downside is a Medicare and Medicaid downside.” They denounce the applications that tens of millions depend on as “runaway entitlements that stifle medical innovation, encourage fraud, and impede value containment.”
The authors hope to chip away on the program by making the privatized program, Medicare Benefit, the default when seniors enroll. In addition they take goal at Medicaid—on which tens of millions of low-income kids and adults rely—with work necessities and means testing, hoping to show Medicaid protection right into a voucher program. Undertaking 2025 additionally goals to improve Medicare Half D prescription drug costs. Presently solely particular teams of individuals are eligible for government-funded well being care: seniors, veterans, and low-income folks.
In distinction, Progress 2025 acknowledges what physicians, nurses, and activists have been saying for years: Well being care is a human proper. As such, the Progress 2025 imaginative and prescient seeks to reject the insurance coverage trade’s intense lobbying efforts and broaden Medicare to everybody within the U.S. Not solely would “Medicare for All” be cheaper for all stakeholders, however, based on Nationwide Nurses United, such a system “would offer well being care based mostly on affected person want, not revenue.”
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on well being care.
Undertaking 2025 justifies the racist affect of policing by empowering the Division of Justice to deal with violent crime, despite the truth that violent crime has fallen dramatically. Undertaking 2025 denounces prison justice reform efforts, and, relatively than selling federal oversight of police departments with abusive officers, it desires federal oversight of jurisdictions the place police divestment efforts have had some success.
In distinction, Progress 2025 helps the visions of abolitionist organizers who’re responding to the ever-increasing loss of life toll from police violence by reinvesting tax {dollars} from legislation enforcement into confirmed applications of public security reminiscent of fundamental revenue, psychological well being help, and non-police disaster responders. Progress 2025 envisions the elimination of discriminatory boundaries in employment, training, and housing, and embraces the instructing of correct historical past to assist college students perceive the roots of racial injustices. The nationwide motion for reparations for Black folks builds on its rising momentum, to safe reparations on the federal, state, and native degree to compensate households devastated by enslavement, segregation, and ongoing systemic racial discrimination.
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on race and policing.
Undertaking 2025 argues that an excessive amount of public land is just not getting used to its full potential and ought to be bought to personal pursuits for improvement and fossil gasoline extraction. The authors wish to strengthen the U.S. army and its colonial mandate that “democracy” be embraced around the globe. The plan requires growing the military’s funds with a view to “defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty in opposition to world threats.” Undertaking 2025’s aim is to carry onto its authors’ imaginative and prescient of preeminent energy and mission that impression of energy around the globe. To make sure this, they name for funding in weapons improvement and increasing our nuclear arsenal.
Progress 2025 acknowledges the company of Indigenous peoples, territories, and their rights to self-determination with out the interference of the U.S. authorities or army, whether or not domestically or overseas. The organizations we cowl are trustworthy concerning the U.S.’s ongoing position in colonialism in its territories and around the globe. Progress 2025 acknowledges that true sovereignty comes when populations make choices for themselves—controlling entry to (and conservation of) sources like land and water in addition to establishing their very own financial agendas. Advocates emphasize that solidarity between Indigenous peoples and different traditionally marginalized populations can transfer their actions for sovereignty ahead.
Learn extra Progress 2025 tales on colonialism and sovereignty.
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YES! Editors
are these editors featured on YES! Journal’s masthead. Tales authored by YES! Editors are considerably reported, researched, written, and edited by no less than two members of the YES! Editorial workforce. |
