Letters

One day last year, I pulled into a parking space at the East Hampton Town Hall campus and saw a big, black, shiny pickup truck parked in the row ahead of me. It had a bumper sticker that read “Project 2025,” with a Trump sticker plastered on the tailgate next to it.

I didn’t know then what Project 2025 is. But now I do. Do you?

Project 2025 is all about putting the fox in charge of the hen house, only worse. Because it’s about pulling down the hen house entirely, and we’re the chickens.

Project 2025 plans to fire up to one million federal workers — the professionals who staff our federal agencies — and replace them with political appointees. Kinda like firing your heart surgeon and putting Cousin Vinnie in the operating room instead. As one commenter wrote, it would “undo the basics of the Pendleton Act of 1883, which replaced a corrupt spoils system with the apolitical, merit-based system we have today.”

But it gets even worse. Project 2025 plans to totally dismantle federal agencies like the Department of Education (goodbye, student aid!) and the Department of Transportation (Forget airline safety! Boeing off the hook!). The Department of Homeland Security would be shut down (so much for controlling immigration), and the Transportation Security Administration would be privatized. With Donald Trump planning to defund the FBI and Department of Justice, it will be a free-for-all for criminal organizations like drug smugglers and cyberthieves.

Trump claims he knows nothing about Project 2025, but his campaign speeches echo its policies to a tee. Remember when he invited the gas and oil tycoons to Mar-a-Lago, promising to gut clean energy programs and give them other items on their wish list if they forked over $1 billion to his campaign? You hear a lot that Trump is “transactional.” But that’s just a fancy word for corrupt.

And if Trump gets to install Project 2025, everything you depend on the federal government for — from Social Security and Medicare to protecting the air and water, from student aid to helping small businesses and small farmers, and much, much more — will be in the hands of crooks who care only about lining their pockets and fleecing the public.

More to come on Project 2025 in the weeks ahead. Stay tuned.

Francesca Rheannon

East Hampton