Project 2025: Trump’s Deep State Wants to Allow Racial Discrimination and Weaken Unions
By Steve Wishnia
The Heritage Foundation has a plan for Donald Trump’s “deep state.” As he has minimal command of policy issues and details, he relies on the far-right think tank to come up with specific proposals. They know what “concerted activity” is and have ideas about how to weaken Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.
The foundation’s Project 2025 document is the latest version of the “Mandate for Leadership” it’s been putting out since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. It’s a 922-page compendium of proposals for what a Trump administration should do if he regains power.
Its 37-page chapter on federal labor policy advocates ending the ban on company unions, repealing the requirement for decent wages on federally funded construction projects, and largely eliminating enforcement of complaints about racial or sexual-orientation discrimination. Instead, it would prioritize “claims of failure to accommodate disability, religion, and pregnancy (but not abortion).”
Under the Biden administration, it says, federal labor agencies’ authority has been “abused by the Left to favor human-resources bureaucracies, climate-change activists, and union bosses—all at the expense of the American worker.”
What it wants
The labor section begins with the statement that the federal government’s role is “protecting workers” and “encouraging wages and conditions for jobs that can support a family.”
Its first priority, however, is changing how discrimination law is enforced. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it says, “flatly prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin.” Therefore, it says, the government should not be allowed to collect data on the race or ethnicity of workers, saying that could “lead to racial quotas” and that mixed-race people don’t fit the categories. It also calls for rescinding Executive Order 11246, President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 ban on discrimination by federal contractors and subcontractors, saying there are other laws that would apply.
It advocates terminating any regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that those were covered by the Civil Rights Act’s ban on employment discrimination on the basis of sex, Project 2025 would get around that by limiting protection to hiring and firing: Presumably, it would be discrimination to fire someone for being a lesbian, but not to deny family health benefits to their wife.
It would also prohibit employers from providing health insurance that covers abortion in states where it’s illegal. It would exempt “religious employers” from anti-discrimination laws, and require secular employers to make accommodations for employees’ religious beliefs about “marriage, gender, and sexuality.”
Wages and hours
Project 2025 has several ideas to weaken federal overtime-pay laws. It advocates letting workers get comp time off instead of time-and-a-half pay for working overtime; having employers calculate overtime over periods longer than one week; and giving states exemptions from federal wage-and-hour laws. It also urges allowing unions to negotiate schedules and safety conditions that would violate current federal law, saying that national rules shouldn’t be “non-negotiable floors.”
It does, however, suggest (with some internal dissent) that employees should be paid time-and-a-half for working on Sundays, because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest.” (Employers with a “sincere religious observance” could use a different day.)
Project 2025 advocates returning to the Trump-era standards for determining which workers are considered “independent contractors”—who don’t have to be paid minimum wage and can’t form unions—and which employers are considered “joint employers,” responsible for labor-law compliance and working conditions at their contractors or franchisees.
The National Labor Relations Board’s 2023 independent-contractor rule says workers have to be running a genuinely independent business to qualify. The Trump-era rule said the key test was whether they had the “entrepreneurial opportunity” to make or lose money.
The current joint-employer rule, established last year, says companies, such as McDonald’s, qualify if they share authority to determine “essential terms and conditions of employment” such as job duties, scheduling, or pay. Project 2025 says this takes away “opportunities from small-business entrepreneurs.” The 2020 rule said the larger company had to have “substantial direct and immediate control.”
Project 2025 also wants to lower the minimum age for working hazardous jobs, saying that teenagers could do them with “parental consent and proper training.”
Undermining unions
“Federal labor law offers no alternatives to labor unions whose politicking and adversarial approach appeals to few,” Project 2025 says. Therefore, the federal ban on company unions should be repealed, to enable “employee involvement organizations” that would “facilitate voluntary cooperation on critical issues like working conditions, benefits, and productivity.”
Another idea is enacting a law to end unions’ exclusive representation of workers, so those covered by a union contract in states that ban the union shop could negotiate on their own, to “expand worker freedom.”
Project 2025 also advocates returning the definition of “protected concerted activity” to the National Labor Relations Board’s narrower Trump-era standard, reversed in 2023, under which a group of airport skycaps who worked mainly for tips were fired because they refused to do a job unless they got tipped.
It also says that if unions engage in “left-wing culture-war issues,” the NLRB should argue in court that that is a breach of their duty of fair representation.
Other proposals include investigating the finances of both unions and worker centers; outlawing “card check,” when employers voluntarily recognize unions if a majority of workers have signed union cards; and banning project-labor agreements, which require federal construction contractors to pay “prevailing wages.” It calls that “wage theft” from lower-paid nonunion workers and says contractors should be chosen by who “can deliver the best product at the lowest cost.”
The one pro-union proposal calls for the NLRB to seek more injunctions to have workers who were fired for union activity reinstated immediately. It says firing workers “has an immediate chilling effect” on organizing, because it can take years for them to get reinstated through regular court procedures.
On the other hand, the Supreme Court in June significantly narrowed when the NLRB can get such injunctions. In overturning a ruling that ordered Starbucks to reinstate seven Memphis workers, it held that the board has to be likely to prove that an unfair labor practice occurred, not just that there is “reasonable cause to believe” one did.
Project 2025 is strongly against union-busting in one circumstance: When it is done in foreign countries that have trade deals with the U.S.
It also calls for slashing federal labor agencies’ budgets. The Department of Labor’s $10.9 billion request for the 2020 fiscal year is a “workable target,” it says. In fiscal 2023, the department got $13.8 billion, and it requested $15.5 billion for 2024.
“The number of political appointees should be maximized in order to improve the political accountability of the department,” Project 2025 adds. There were only 150 at most during the Trump administration.
Trump’s former Cabinet
Trump has denied any connection to Project 2025, claiming he has “no idea who is behind it.” But most of Mandate for Leadership’s 41 authors were officials in his administration, which the Heritage Foundation helped him staff in 2016. Jonathan Berry, author of the labor section, was acting assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Labor, overseeing rulemaking and policy development. Project 2025 director Paul Dans was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, while his co-editor, Steven Groves, held several positions, including representing the White House against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Trump’s first Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, wrote the HUD section. Ken Cuccinelli was acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration. Rick Dearborn was Trump’s deputy chief of staff. Christopher Miller was acting Secretary of Defense. Peter Navarro, about to be released from prison after serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress, was one of the three senior White House officials who served for Trump’s full term, mostly as director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. William Perry Pendley headed the Bureau of Land Management. Vote-fraud conspiracy theorist Hans A. von Spakovsky was a member of Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Russ Vought was director of the Office of Management and Budget.
“They must rein in agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which the Biden Administration weaponized to attempt to force COVID-19 vaccine mandates on 84 million Americans through their workplaces,” Edwin J. Feulner, who was Heritage’s president for 36 years, states in his afterword.
Many of Project 2025’s ideas are not new. Florida and several other states have passed laws making it easier to decertify unions. Federal regulations on independent contractors and joint employers have been ping-ponging back and forth for the last decade, depending on which party was in power. The far right has been denouncing OSHA as a gross violation of employers’ freedom since it was created in 1970.
Labor-safety advocates consistently complain that OSHA is chronically underfunded. The agency says there is roughly one inspector for every 70,000 workers.
“The good of the American family is at the heart of conservative labor policy recommendations,” Project 2025 concludes, saying they will “promote family-sustaining jobs.”
That raises one basic question: How “family-sustaining” is it to lower wages and weaken workers’ job security and safety protections?