Internal NFFE News
October 22, 2024
Project 2025 is the abbreviated name for a 900-page policy playbook written by the Heritage Foundation, titled “Mandate Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” The Heritage Foundation is an ultra-extremist think tank that has pushed harmful ideologies and consistently attacked both workers’ rights and federal employees in general. The Project 2025 document serves as a “comprehensive policy guide” for the next Republican administration by devising a plan to radically overhaul the government.
If this plan were to be implemented, all aspects of American life would be affected. Social rights, reproductive healthcare, access to Social Security, Medicare, veteran’s benefits and more would all be impacted. Each chapter of Project 2025 offers detailed plans and proposals to dramatically restructure the federal government. It also anticipates that political loyalists would step into key positions of power on “Day One” of a new administration and says that executive orders would be signed by the new president the next day.
The project also directly impacts unions and workers at the federal, state, and private sector levels. It outlines rolling back decades of labor laws and rights, instead replacing them with policies that would harm workers’ freedoms and powers.
Project 2025 would dramatically undermine worker rights—and the ability of unions to represent workers overall—by seeking to:
- Fire federal civil servants and end their job protections in order to replace them with political partisan loyalists through “Schedule F.”
- Eliminate public sector unions.
- Create company-controlled unions in the private sector (which are currently illegal).
- End exclusive representation for existing unions.
- Limit health and safety inspections of workplaces to only employers they consider “egregious offenders.”
- Narrow the definition of what is protected concerted activity.
- Eliminate voluntary recognition of unions.
- Treat laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act or OSHA as “negotiable defaults” and not minimum floors of worker protections.
- Pass legislation allowing state-level waivers from federal labor laws like the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act.
- End Project Labor Agreements that create living-wage jobs on public contracts.
- Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act requiring that prevailing wages be paid.
NFFE-IAM members can take action by educating themselves on the Project 2025 framework using the NFFE Project 2025 Toolkit, spreading the word in their communities, voting for candidates who have explicitly stated they do not support the project and by using the Action Network link here or at the bottom of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE)’s Understanding Project 2025 page.