Project 2025 and GOP Agenda Would Increase Poverty and Wealth Gap, Experts Say

If Republicans were to win the White House and Congress, their fiscal agenda would increase poverty and hardship nationwide in order to provide deep tax breaks for corporations and wealthy families, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a liberal-leaning think tank.

In a new report, the group analyzes the House GOP’s legislative wish list alongside Project 2025, the policy blueprint for another Trump administration written in part by former White House officials and published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Taken together, the documents reveal a conservative vision for policies that would exacerbate existing inequities in life expectancy and generational wealth, with millions of people facing higher costs for health care, child care, food and housing.

The CBPP reports analyzes three conservative policy documents in order to sharpen our view of the current Republican agenda: Project 2025, the House Republican Study Committee’s Budget Plan and the Republican House Budget Committee’s current budget resolution for 2025. If put into practice, the policies proposed by all three would result in increased poverty and a future where federal spending on health care is constrained, eventually leaving millions of people without insurance.

For example, the budget plan released by the House Republican Study Committee in March would cut funding for federal programs that provide health insurance to millions of adults and children by $4.5 trillion over 10 years. The Republican House Budget Committee proposes $2.2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, which provides health coverage to 74 million people. CBPP estimates cuts that large would leave tens of millions of people without health coverage.

Taking aim at a longtime bugaboo on the right, Project 2025 proposes the elimination of Head Start, the federal program that provides early education support for low-income families and benefits 800,000 children aged 3 to 5 years old. This would reduce access to child care and other services that allow parents to go to work and pay the bills.

The United States would be a “harsher” place to live with more inequality and less opportunity under these GOP policies, the report warns. Behind these budget numbers are millions of real people who will lose health coverage, food assistance, and other supports as the nation grapples with interconnected crises of affordability, addiction and homelessness.

Democrats are betting such policies will be unpopular with voters in November and are taking a more populist tack. Vice President Kamala Harris is promoting a platform in line with the Biden administration’s current policies and focused on small businesses, working families and housing affordability. However, Harris has been criticized for making half-baked proposals as her presidential campaign scrambled to catch up in the weeks after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

So far, Harris’s presidential campaign has proposed a massive increase in the tax deduction for startup costs paid by small businesses and raising the corporate tax rate from 21 to 28 percent, according to CNN.

“We are fighting to build an economy that works for all working people,” Harris told a crowd of union members in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 2.

Meanwhile, the House Republican Study Committee would cut the average benefits that low-income families receive from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or “food stamps”) by 22 percent, which would leave the parents of 17 million children with less money to buy food. This comes as a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveals that 18 million families already struggled with food insecurity in 2023.

Republicans say the overall House budget resolution would save taxpayers $4.2 trillion, but CBPP warns that wealthy families and businesses would primarily benefit under a proposed tax regime that skews heavily in favor of the rich.

Both budget plans from the House GOP call for extending the tax cuts signed by former president Donald Trump in 2017 and set to expire next year. The plans call for extending all of the cuts to individual income taxes, which would cost the government $4 trillion over 10 years. Additional tax cuts for businesses would also become permanent.

Project 2025 goes even further, calling for “a host of new tax cuts for wealthy households and corporations, including for multinational corporations that use overseas tax havens,” according to the CBPP report.

Project 2025 also calls for tax hikes on the middle class. An analysis by the Center for American Progress found that Project 2025’s proposals would increase taxes for a median family of four making $110,000 a year by $3,000 annually, while the 45,000 households making over $10 million a year would enjoy up to $2.4 million in tax cuts. Project 2025’s idealogues would also cut the corporate tax rate down to 18 percent, which amounts to a $24 billion tax break for Fortune 100 companies.

Democrats say such policies are as unpopular with voters as they sound. However, with Democrats holding a slight majority in the Senate, many of the budget proposals from House Republicans will never make it to the president’s desk. Media coverage of Project 2025 and its radical vision is a problem for the Trump campaign, and Trump’s attempts to distance himself have been complicated by the fact that many of the project’s authors were members of his administration.

Project 2025 aside, the policy platforms put forth by both the Harris and Trump campaigns continue to shift as the candidates jostle for position in the polls and media. With Democrats and Republicans each claiming to be champions of working families and the middle class ahead of elections in November, it’s important to read the fine print.