Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Making Housing Less Affordable
- Increasing Medical Debt
- Taking Overtime Pay Away From Workers
- Cutting Social Safety Nets
- Ending Student Loan Forgiveness
Introduction
Project 2025 is, at its core, a pro-poverty document. The proposed policies, regulations, and rule changes are designed to make people poor and keep people poor. The authors attack everything from overtime pay to affordable housing and food security, even targeting children and veterans in their plans for the next conservative president.
And while Project 2025 will harm anyone who is experiencing – or will experience – poverty, it goes out of its way to target Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, as well as immigrant people and their families, in its campaign to increase poverty rates in America.
Making Housing Less Affordable
Overview
- Project 2025 would attack programs that make housing affordable.
- Project 2025 calls for the end of the Housing Supply Fund, a program to address the housing shortage and drive down prices.
- Project 2025 seeks to increase Mortgage Insurance Premiums, which would push homeownership out of reach for many Americans.
- Project 2025 would limit access to rent assistance programs.
- Project 2025 specifically targets BIPOC communities.
Rising housing costs are a source of major financial strain on American households.
The Treasury Department recently released a report showing that 90 percent of Americans live in a county where “median rents and house prices grew faster than median incomes from 2000 to 2020.” They also found that 90 percent of households making less than $20,000 a year and 60 percent of those making $20,000-50,000 a year lived in unaffordable housing for their income level. “These Americans are on the brink of being priced out of a basic human need,” the Treasury Department argued.
In spite of this, Trump’s former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Benjamin Carson, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Housing and Urban Development, only proposes plans to make housing more expensive.
Ending The Housing Supply Fund
Carson argues that the next conservative president should end the Biden Administration’s new Housing Supply Fund. The Housing Supply Fund sets aside $35 billion over ten years for state and local efforts that would “remove barriers to affordable housing development,” including through grants, revolving loan funds, and other financing tools.
Programs like the Housing Supply Fund are necessary if there is going to be any hope of resolving the national housing shortage.
It is difficult to understand canceling this program as anything other than a commitment to keeping the price of housing astronomically high, driving more and more people into poverty just to keep a roof over their heads.
Raising Mortgage Insurance Premiums (MIPs)
Project 2025 directs the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to increase MIP rates “for all products above 20-year terms.”
The MIP is a type of insurance that is required on mortgages backed by the FHA, including mortgages for purchasing a home, reverse mortgages for seniors, home rehabilitation mortgages and other FHA programs. MIP coverage means the FHA takes on the risk of loan default, not the bank issuing the mortgage, which allows low-income or borrowers with poor credit scores to purchase or improve homes with a down payment as low as 3.5 percent.
Increasing the MIP rate for FHA-backed mortgage and loan products that have a term length of over 20 years would make it harder for low-income households to buy a home. By definition, longer-term loans have lower monthly payments, even if they may cost more over the life of the loan, meaning low-income borrowers may only be able to afford their monthly payments if they take a longer-term loan.
Any increase in the MIP rate will push low-income households out of homeownership, which research has shown is one of the best pathways out of poverty.
Carson attempts to support this proposal by saying that the “FHA should encourage wealth-building homeownership opportunities, which can be accomplished best through shorter-duration mortgages.” However, according to Freddie Mac, around 90 percent of Americans choose a 30-year mortgage term.
It is clear that 30-year loans are an effective way to build wealth through homeownership. Once again, it is difficult to understand this proposal as anything other than an attempt to keep families in poverty by pricing them out of homeownership.
Limiting Access To Rent Assistance And Public Housing
In addition to those policies making it harder to buy a home and increasing the cost of rent, Project 2025 also proposes changes that would make it harder to get on rent assistance, difficult or impossible to stay on rent assistance and difficult or impossible to find public housing options.
Carson suggests regulatory and legislative changes that would increase work requirements and even “limit the period during which households are eligible for housing benefits.” As elsewhere, work requirements are ineffective, administratively costly, and largely serve to remove otherwise qualified applicants from assistance programs.
Carson suggests the same work requirements and time limits for Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance and Tenant-Based Rental Assistance, while also calling for an end to Housing First policies, which prioritize finding homeless people housing as quickly as possible before attempting to address other issues like mental health or substance abuse. Carson proposes returning to “treatment first” policies, which refuse to provide housing until people meet certain conditions like sobriety or participating in courses.
Multiple studies have shown that housing first is an effective policy at addressing and ending homelessness, while also showing similar benefits to health and substance abuse as the treatment first models. Ending Housing First policies will keep people homeless for longer without any benefit.
Creating time limits for housing benefits will just trap people in poverty as they struggle to afford rent, or even force them into homelessness. Kicking people off of rent assistance does not somehow provide them with the income they need to afford a place to live.
Carson also calls on HUD and Congress to “provide authority for maximal flexibility to direct PHA land sales that involve the existing stock of public housing units.” In contrast, nonpartisan experts say that public housing projects are a “vital source of safe, affordable homes” and encourage the government to increase the availability of quality public housing through further funding of public housing programs.
Selling public housing would make it harder for people to find quality, affordable housing, particularly in the context of canceling programs to decrease housing costs, increasing monthly MIP payments for low-income borrowers and restricting access to rent assistance.
These proposals will trap people in poverty and may even force them into homelessness.
Targeting Marginalized Communities
Project 2025 proposes several policies that will directly and specifically harm BIPOC and immigrant people and their families.
The policies we have already discussed will harm everyone, but they will disproportionately impact BIPOC and disabled people, since they are more likely to need housing assistance than their white, non-disabled peers.
Additionally, Project 2025 calls on HUD to immediately end the Biden Administration’s Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) policies, which are designed to resolve the well-documented racial disparities in real estate appraisals. A Brookings study found that “the cost of devaluation across the 113 metro areas in the U.S. with at least one majority-Black neighborhood is approximately $162 billion.”
There is no reason to end PAVE unless you want to allow appraisers to continue to undervalue homes owned by Black and Latino people.
Project 2025 also directs HUD to “prohibit noncitizens, including all mixed-status families, from living in all federally assisted housing.” This xenophobic attack would bar immigrant people facing homelessness from housing services. The broad language would also mean U.S. citizens married to immigrants, even those with green cards, would not be able to access federally assisted housing; and would bar children who are U.S. citizens from accessing federally assisted housing if they have even one non-citizen family member.
There is no reason to ban people from housing assistance unless the goal is to increase poverty and homelessness.
Increasing Medical Debt
Overview
- Project 2025 would make broad cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that would force many people into medical debt.
Project 2025 proposes a set of policies for Medicaid that would kick many people off the program, threatening their ability to receive health insurance coverage and putting them at risk of massive medical debt, which can trap people in poverty.
Project 2025 also targets Medicare by calling for a repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, which capped out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drugs and reduced the price of insulin to $35 a month for Medicare Part D beneficiaries and some Medicare Part B beneficiaries. Repealing those provisions would once again force seniors to choose between poverty and their health.
For a full examination of Project 2025’s plans for Medicare and Medicaid, see our article on the topic here.
Taking Overtime Pay Away From Workers
Overview
- Project 2025 would take overtime eligibility away from millions of American workers.
- Project 2025 tries to make it harder to claim overtime when people work more than 40 hours in a week.
- Project 2025 wants to make overtime pay worth less than it is now.
- Project 2025 would force unions to negotiate just to keep federal protections like the 40-hour workweek.
Project 2025 recommends a set of changes that would make it more difficult for workers to receive overtime pay and reduce the amount of money they receive from working overtime.
Lowering The Overtime Salary Threshold
In his chapter on the Department of Labor, Jonathan Berry, formerly the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy for the Department of Labor during the Trump Administration, recommends returning to the Trump-era overtime threshold of $35,568.
The overtime threshold sets the maximum salary someone can have before they become exempt from overtime. The higher the overtime threshold is, the more workers are able to claim overtime wages when they work more than 40 hours in a week.
The Trump Administration established their overtime threshold in 2019 after rescinding an Obama-era proposed rule that would have set it at nearly $48,000. The Biden Administration has now established a new rule which increased the threshold to nearly $44,000 this year and will increase it again to $58,656 – just under the annual median income of $60,000 – on January 1, 2025, with regular updates every three years based on up-to-date wage data.
The Trump Administration’s decision cost American workers $1.4 billion in wages in the first year alone, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Those lost wages only increase over time, thanks to the Trump Administration’s failure to include regular increases in the overtime threshold. Both the Obama and Biden administrations included regular increases.
Lowering the threshold will cost low- and middle-income American workers billions of dollars in lost overtime wages every single year. Robbing workers of their overtime pay is a pro-poverty policy.
Changing How Overtime Hours Are Measured
In addition, Project 2025 tells Congress to pass a law allowing employers to calculate overtime over a 2- or 4-week period, which would allow them to force employees to work any number of hours in one week without paying overtime as long as they reduce the hours worked in the following weeks.
This proposal would make it more difficult for employees to receive overtime pay, even if they work extreme hours during one week.
Changing What Is Included In Overtime Pay
Project 2025 also calls on Congress to change overtime pay so it no longer includes the total benefit package for employees, just their base salary. In the long term, this would allow employers to offer lower base salaries with more benefits in order to take advantage of cheaper overtime.
This change would lower the amount of money workers make from overtime hours and incentivize employers to offer lower base salaries to take advantage of the change.
Forcing Unions To Negotiate The 40-hour Workweek
Project 2025 then asks Congress to amend the National Labor Relations Act so that unions would have to negotiate over federal regulations. “For example, this reform would allow a union to bless a relaxed overtime trigger (e.g., 45 hours a week, or 80 hours over two weeks) in exchange for firm employer commitments on predictable scheduling,” writes Berry.
Berry tries to sell this as a benefit by claiming it would give unions new levers they can use in contract negotiations.
In reality, this would harm union negotiations. Currently, federal regulations set a “floor” for contract negotiations – the contract can’t go any lower than federal law allows. By removing that floor, union bargaining committees would need to fight just to keep the status quo. Employers could counter a union proposal for increased wages by increasing the overtime trigger to 60 hours.
This change would weaken overtime protections and likely lower salaries for union workers across the country.
Cutting Social Safety Nets
Overview
- Project 2025 would cut anti-poverty programs across the board.
- The proposed policies would harm children in particular, with many suggestions attacking food assistance programs.
- Project 2025 wants to redirect funding away from child abuse prevention and child poverty reduction programs.
- Project 2025 suggests saving money at the VA by kicking disabled veterans off of VA programs.
- Project 2025 attacks child care programs in the US and suggests removing nearly 13 percent of working adults from the workforce.
- Project 2025 calls for reducing regulations on infant formula manufacturers, putting the lives of infants at risk.
Project 2025 seeks to limit access to anti-poverty programs and social safety nets, regardless of who they benefit. The authors frequently target programs that are primarily aimed at assisting women and children, but turn their attention to disabled veterans as well.
Ultimately, their proposed changes would leave children hungry, families in poverty, and limit or end Veterans Affairs coverage of disabled veterans.
Redirecting Funds From Child Abuse and Anti-Poverty Programs
Project 2025 directs Congress to modify the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) so that CAPTA funding can be used for “Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education programs” (HMREs).
Roger Severino, author of Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, justifies this by quoting a report from Republicans on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. The report argued HMREs can counter childhood abuse and poverty by preventing divorces.
Unfortunately, the studies cited by the report do not support this conclusion.
The authors of the report begin by admitting that the “rigorously designed studies” commissioned by the U.S Department of Health and Human Services found that HRMEs did not improve marital outcomes. In fact, one of those studies actually found a decrease in relationship stability among HRME participants, meaning the HRME program made couples more likely to divorce, not less.
When counting those included in meta-analyses, the authors looked at nearly 70 studies. Only one of them found any decrease in divorce as a result of HRMEs, and then only at the one-year mark. The “rigorously designed” HHS studies used a more trustworthy follow-up at three years.
In spite of the overwhelming evidence that HRMEs do not keep couples together, Severino recommends moving funding away from proven methods to prevent and address childhood poverty and abuse.
Attacking SNAP, WIC and TANF
Project 2025 recommends a slate of policies that would cut access to financial assistance for low-income families and children. Severino proposes changes that would cut the budget for and kick people off of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); the Special Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
Reducing TANF Funding
Project 2025 directs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to “require explicit measurement” of marriage, family formation, and sex abstinence.
While Severino does not explain the purpose of this data collection, the Joint Economic Committee report on HRMEs we discussed in the previous section also includes a recommendation to divert money from TANF to fund HRMEs.
As discussed above, HRMEs do not reduce the likelihood of divorce, which is the primary argument for using anti-poverty funds to support these programs. This would only weaken TANF and leave more families in poverty.
Reducing SNAP Funding and Eligibility
Project 2025 recommends reinstating a Trump-era rule that made it harder to qualify for SNAP.
At the time, the rule would have kicked around 2 million people off of SNAP. Re-implementing this rule will make it harder for people to afford food, keeping them trapped in poverty.
Project 2025 also tells the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to re-implement work requirements in the program. As we said in the section on rent assistance, work requirements are ineffective, administratively costly, and largely serve to remove otherwise qualified applicants from assistance programs.
Project 2025 points to a Trump-era regulation to implement work requirements as an example policy. The Trump Administration’s own report showed the change would have removed nearly two-thirds of people subject to the rule from SNAP. That estimate does not include people who would have been improperly removed due to the difficulty of submitting their work hours or proving they qualify for an exemption.
Re-implementing work requirements will make it harder for people to afford food while increasing the administrative costs of SNAP.
Project 2025 also directs the USDA to “re-evaluate” the Thrifty Food Plan, which was updated by the Biden Administration in 2021.
Project 2025 claims that the Biden Administration “unilaterally increased food stamp benefits by at least 23 percent.” The update was mandated by the 2018 Farm Bill, signed into law by former President Trump.
The Urban Institute found that the update to the Thrifty Food Plan reduced poverty by almost five percent and child poverty by nearly nine percent. Another study found that the update increased food security, improved diet quality, and reduced both depression and anxiety among SNAP recipients.
Reverting these changes would increase poverty, lower diet quality, and increase depression and anxiety among SNAP recipients.
Project 2025 also directs the USDA to limit SNAP benefits to families that also receive benefits from the Low-Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).
There is no reason to make it harder for families to afford food when they are also struggling to heat their homes. Families should not need to choose between hunger and heat.
Weakening WIC
Project 2025 recommends that the USDA “reform the state voucher system,” where state agencies provide infant formula vouchers to WIC recipients through a competitive bidding process among formula manufacturers.
Ending this process would increase the cost of infant formula for WIC recipients.
Shockingly, Project 2025 also calls for the deregulation of the infant formula industry, citing the devastating infant formula shortage of 2022.
The infant formula shortage of 2022 was caused by infant formula recalls following several infant deaths due to improper manufacturing.
Deregulating the infant formula industry would put the lives of infants at risk.
Cutting Access To School Lunches
Project 2025 would threaten access to free and reduced school lunches for tens of millions of children and end programs to provide lunches to students during the summer.
Project 2025 calls for the USDA to limit the number of schools that qualify for free and reduced lunches under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which provides free and reduced lunches to all students enrolled at a school or school district with a high enough percentage of low-income students. Without CEP, families need to apply to the program individually.
Project 2025 also calls on Congress to end the CEP entirely.
According to the USDA, nearly 20 million students attended CEP-eligible schools in 2023, when they lowered the threshold, extending access to free and reduced-cost lunches to even more children.
Limiting or ending the CEP would threaten access to food for tens of millions of children, pushing families further into poverty or leaving children hungry.
Project 2025 also calls on the USDA to stop providing meals to students during the summer unless they are enrolled in summer classes, saying that the practice has “turned school meals into a federal catering program.”
Families do not stop being poor just because it is the summer. In fact, a study found that over 70 percent of low-income rural families had a harder time making ends meet during the summer. According to the USDA, over 2.2 million children received summer lunches through the Summer Food Service Program.
Ending summer meal programs would threaten access to food for the millions of children who rely on these programs.
Ending Child Care Programs
Project 2025 is fundamentally opposed to universal child care, calling on the Health Resources and Services Administration to “prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care.”
For Severino, that means “funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare.” Project 2025 does not provide any explanation of what this means or how much parents would receive to stay at home. Unlike in other sections, they do not point to any previous attempts to implement a similar policy.
What we do know is that it would result in economic ruin if Project 2025 succeeded in its goal. There are around 32 million families with children under the age of 18 in the United States, and in 22 million of those families, both parents work. Project 2025 is suggesting we remove 22 million people from the U.S. workforce – almost 13 percent of all working adults.
And while Project 2025 says we should pay parents to stay home, we know that the Heritage Foundation argued the exact opposite in 2022 when they said reviving the Extended Child Tax Credit would hurt parents and children. In an almost unbelievable twist, Leslie Ford, one of the authors of that piece, is also listed as a contributor to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.
Ultimately, not a single conservative voted for the Build Back Better Act, killing the Extended Child Tax Credit and leading to a sharp increase in child poverty. They doubled down by rejecting a lesser version in 2022, then again this year, even as progressive politicians made concessions by offering tax cuts for the wealthy. There is no evidence that the conservative movement or conservative politicians would support legislation to help parents care for their children.
This plan would result in economic catastrophe.
Additionally, recent history shows that conservatives – and the Heritage Foundation specifically – are not actually committed to policies that help parents afford childcare, but actively oppose legislation that provides assistance to parents and children.
Project 2025 also recommends eliminating the Head Start program.
The Head Start program provides a wealth of benefits to families that use it, not least of which is access to affordable child care.
Ending Head Start would deprive low-income families of affordable childcare, trapping them in poverty.
Removing Disabled Veterans From VA Programs
Project 2025 also recommends removing disabled veterans from VA programs.
“The VA’s Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VASRD) has assigned disability ratings to a growing number of health conditions over time; some are tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service,” writes Brooks Tucker, who worked as the Chief of Staff for the VA in the Trump Administration.
Tucker argues that disabilities that came from exposure to Agent Orange, Burn Pits and Airborne Toxins should not qualify for VA programs, then suggests that the VASRD could “target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants while preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants.”
Partially preserving disability awards is just another way of saying cutting disability awards.
This plan would abandon veterans who became disabled as a result of their military service, forcing many of them into poverty in order to afford the treatment and assistance they need to live.
Ending Student Loan Forgiveness
Overview
- Project 2025 wants to end all forms of student loan forgiveness.
- Project 2025 also calls on Congress to end public service loan forgiveness and income-based loan forgiveness.
Project 2025 is explicit in its goal to end all forms of student loan forgiveness. This would trap many students in lifelong debt, forcing them into poverty and keeping them there.
The authors argue that “borrowers should be expected to repay their loans” and that “taxpayers should expect those borrowers to repay.” Rather than an anti-poverty measure, they see student loan forgiveness campaigns as an attempt to “curry political support and votes.”
Studies show that student loan debt hurts individuals, local communities and the national economy. The U.S. needs to work towards greater student loan forgiveness, not end the practice entirely.
Ending Public Service Loan Forgiveness
Project 2025 tells the next conservative president to end the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.
This would require Congressional approval, as PSLF was created by the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, signed into law by former President George W. Bush.
The PSLF program offers federal student loan forgiveness to people who work in government or nonprofit organizations. This includes military service members, firefighters, police officers, religious officials like pastors, imams or rabbis, medical care providers in low-income areas, librarians, public defense lawyers, and emergency management professionals like FEMA and Red Cross employees.
People must work in those fields and make the minimum payment on their student loans for 10 years to qualify for loan forgiveness.
Ending the PSLF would punish people who choose military, public or religious service over personal profit, trapping them with student loans and potentially forcing them into poverty.
Ending Income-Based Student Loan Forgiveness
Project 2025 calls on the Department of Education to “phase out all existing Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans by making new loans (including consolidation loans) ineligible,” then create a new plan.
The new IDR plan would “have an income exemption equal to the poverty line and require payments of 10 percent of income above the exemption. If new legislation is possible, there should be no loan forgiveness, but if not, existing law would require forgiving any remaining balance after 25 years.”
Eliminating all existing IDR plans and replacing them with a single, extremely punishing plan would drive many people into poverty or bankruptcy.
Removing the 25-year forgiveness option would effectively guarantee people remain in life-long poverty if they have student loan debt.