questions 2025

 Questions

What challenges do you think students and universities may face in the implementation

of Project 2025?

It calls for dismantling the agency and putting an end to loan forgiveness. It details plans to overhaul the accreditation system and roll back new Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students and sexual assault survivors while ending all ongoing investigations into reported Title IX violations.

 Republicans’ push against diversity, equity and inclusion policies across the federal government, calling for stripping DEI requirements and references to sexual orientation and gender identity, among other terms, from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The most significant piece of the plan for higher ed is its call to break up the Education Department and disperse the management of federal education programs—those that would still exist, that is—across multiple agencies. For example, the Office for Civil Rights would move to the Department of Justice, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs would oversee tribal colleges and universities. The Treasury Department would handle the federal student loan portfolio.

How can we address the potential social impacts of Project 2025?

 Taxes ■ Project 2025 shifts the tax burden from the wealthy onto the middle class. Under the plan, the typical family of four in Ohio would see a tax increase of $2,814 per year, while 45,000 households in America reporting more than $10 million in income would each see an average annual tax cut of $1.5 million. 

Social Security ■ Project 2025 authors have endorsed and supported plans to cut Social Security by raising the retirement age for roughly 72 percent of Ohio residents—8,482,923 people. Their ideas are reflected in the two most recent Republican Study Committee budget proposals, which propose increasing the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 69*. Doing so would cut benefits by $4,100 to $8,900 after just one year, depending on when one claims Social Security. A median-wage retiree would lose $46,000 to $100,000 over 10 years. 

Health care ■ Project 2025 proposes imposing “limits or lifetime caps on [Medicaid] benefits.” In Ohio, 614,300 Medicaid enrollees would be at risk of losing coverage because they are low income and lack access to alternative, affordable coverage. 

■ The plan would raise the cost of prescription drugs for up to 687,430 people in Ohio by eliminating out-of-pocket Medicare drug cost limits. It also blocks the government from negotiating for lower drug prices. This fact sheet is a part of a series. Read more about how Project 2025 would harm states. 1 Center for American Progress  Project 2025’s Plan To Gut Checks and Balances Harms Ohio 

abortion rights and contraception ■ Project 2025 eliminates some emergency contraception medications from free preventive care requirements, meaning 1,620,000 women in Ohio would lose guaranteed access to free emergency contraception. 

■ The plan instructs the U.S. Department of Justice to misapply the Comstock Act, a pair of laws from 1873 and 1909, to criminalize the mailing of medication abortion. Doing so would result in an effective abortion ban nationwide, even in states where abortion is legal.

 ■ The plan instructs the Department of Justice to take legal action against local officials who refuse to bring cases against women and doctors who violate state abortion bans. 

Child care ■ Project 2025 eliminates Head Start, which provides access to no-cost child care— among other services—for 32,747 low-income children in Ohio. Eliminating Head Start would wipe out a critical supply of child care in rural and other underserved communities that already face a lack of child care slots. 

Student loans ■ Project 2025 replaces income-driven repayment (IDR) plans with a one-size-fitsall program that would increase payments for all borrowers enrolled in existing IDR plans, including the Biden-Harris administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan. Under Project 2025, 299,600 borrowers in Ohio enrolled in SAVE would pay $2,700 to $4,100 more each year. 

Public education ■ Project 2025 eliminates the U.S. Department of Education, including Title I, which provides funds to ensure schools serving low-income students have additional resources to deliver a high-quality education beyond that which can be supported by local property tax revenue. Ending Title I would lead to the loss of 6,819 teaching positions, which serve 111,827 students, in Ohio.

While Project 2025 is often discussed critically, are there any positive aspects of the

initiative that should be considered?

 Tax policy: Project 2025 calls for “low tax rates” and minimal “interference with the operation of the free market and free enterprise.”

Specifically, the plan calls for abolishing the seven tax brackets for federal income taxes — 10%, 12%, 22%, 24%, 32%, 35% and 37% — and creating a “two-rate individual tax system of 15 percent and 30 percent that eliminates most deductions, credits and exclusions.” It doesn’t say what specific deductions, credits and exclusions should be eliminated.

It also calls for reducing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 18%. The corporate tax rate was 35% before Trump signed the Tax Cut and Jobs Act in 2017, which cut the tax rate to 21%. The capital gains tax — which ranges from 0% to 28%, depending on your income and type of asset — would also be cut for a high of 20% to 15%. The IRS says that most taxpayers currently pay 15%.

“It’s hard to know who gets hurt by this because they never say what the standard deduction is. For low-income people, moderate-income people standard deductions [are] a big deal,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said about Project 2025’s tax proposals in an interview with CBS News. “But, as you say, there are seven rates and three of them — 32%, 35% and 37% are higher than 30%, so it’s pretty clear that high income people who are currently paying a top rate paying higher than 30% would benefit significantly. They are also going to benefit substantially from the lower capital gains rates. Many of them are paying capital gains almost at 25%, and in this proposal, they’d be paying as low as 15%. So, a big deal for high income people. Impossible to know what it means for lower income people.”

Project 2025 is nearly 900 pages long. Since many voters may rely on social media to

learn more, how can individuals ensure accuracy?

do your research.. 

For students who want to learn about Project 2025 directly rather than from secondary

sources, how would you suggest they approach reading or understanding the document?

there are 30 chapters...covering eveything from the White house and presidency to the department of treasury and military...pick those that you want more info on and read them.  Then go to different analysis from NPR, ACLU, to conservatives like Fox, and the Heritage foundation.. 

Project 2025 is part of a broader tradition of policy recommendations. Do you think it’s

receiving more media coverage than past initiatives, and if so, why?

How might Project 2025 impact long-term job creation, particularly for students who will

be graduating soon?

How can local communities stay engaged in decision-making processes related to Project

2025?

What effect could Project 2025 have on students' decisions to pursue higher education,

especially if government financial aid programs are impacted?

How could Project 2025 potentially affect access to healthcare in underserved

communities?

https://time.com/7014947/project-2025-health-trump/ 

 

Making medications more expensive

I’ve taken care of countless patients who rely on insulin to control their diabetes. When these patients don’t take their insulin, they’re at risk of not just worsened diabetes (which increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes) but also life-threatening medical emergencies from dangerously high blood-sugar levels. In the decades preceding the Biden-Harris administration, the out-of-pocket cost of insulin steadily grew, forcing many patients to cut back elsewhere to afford their insulin and others to forgo it altogether.

Yet at a time when a third of Americans report not filling a prescription due to cost, Project 2025 calls for these life-saving provisions to be rolled back. IRA repeal, supported by Trump and Vance, would make drugs like insulin more expensive and force patients to shoulder more of the costs of the medications we prescribe them, forcing impossible choices between health and livelihood. 

Decreasing access to Medicaid

Project 2025 doesn’t just try to scale back recent successes in making care more affordable for people on Medicare. It also seeks to weaken Medicaid, which more than 70 million low-income Americans rely on for health care. The authors propose instituting lifetime caps on benefits and adding work requirements as a condition for coverage, creating administrative hurdles that make life harder for people who have the least. Together, these provisions could cause millions of people—including those who are currently working—to lose coverage. These policies punish patients for being poor, and in one of the harshest ways: by denying them health care.

Restricting reproductive health care 

And at a time when reproductive rights are under attack in so many states, Project 2025 would not only further restrict abortion at the national level but also eliminate no-cost coverage for some contraception, erecting more barriers to evidence-based care for patients of reproductive age.

Endangering childrens’ health

Finally, Project 2025 takes particular aim at the well-being of children. The authors seek to prevent public health agencies from requiring vaccination in school children, which could cause more outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles. They also propose invalidating state laws intended to stem gun violence, a leading cause of death for children in the U.S. Project 2025 would even eliminate Head Start, a critical program for early childhood development, especially in low-income and rural communities.

If elected, Trump might not adopt all of these proposals. But if he institutes even some of these plans, it would set back decades of progress in medicine and public health. 

As doctors, we know that progress on these issues did not come easily. The Affordable Care Act was hotly contested and survived multiple partisan efforts to dismantle it—including by Trump during his first term. For more than ten years, Medicaid expansion has been a fierce and ongoing state-by-state battle. The pharmaceutical industry fought tooth-and-nail against drug-price negotiation. At every step of the way, countless doctors have stood up for their patients, advocating for greater access to affordable medical care. The prospect of these hard-fought victories being reversed—and the suffering it would cause our patients—is worth another fight.

How might Project 2025 influence Title IX enforcement?

What are some current barriers preventing the implementation of Project 2025? What

could influence its use or adoption in the future?