“Now, more than ever, is the time for states to lead.”
This assertion by leaders of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) opens the organization’s Essential Policy Solutions playbook for 2025.
“On Election Night 2024, the American people overwhelmingly embraced the path of lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a fundamental shift of power back to the states. In other words, America chose the path championed by ALEC: federalism,” wrote its longtime CEO Lisa Nelson.
Trump campaigned on a promise to fundamentally disrupt the current system by following his own playbook — essentially The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, as his first few weeks in office confirm — to gut the federal government, expand presidential powers, and impose a conservative social order to counter everything the Right derides as “woke.”
The ideological harmony between ALEC and the Trump administration has been apparent for some time, with Nelson already telling donors in the early days of Trump’s first term that his cabinet and other advisors had “the potential to be an ALEC administration… full of the people and ideas we’ve advanced since 1973.” And she was already exultant then, proclaiming, “Now is our time. And ALEC is ready.”
Indeed, the close alignment between ALEC’s agenda and Project 2025 is no coincidence. ALEC leaders served on the advisory board of Project 2025 and played an active role in shaping its blueprint for a second Trump administration. In the coming months, ALEC will advance a complementary right-wing political agenda at the state level that is just as calculated and well-funded as its national counterpart.
Its Essential Policy Solutions paints a stark picture of the right-wing vision for each state, with proposed legislation to dismantle regulations, bolster the fossil fuel industry, gut funding for public education, curtail voting rights, and much more.
“This document is special in that it includes something for everyone no matter what your committee assignment might be back home, no matter what your area of interest, no matter what you’d maybe like to learn a little more about,” explained Vice President of Policy Lee Shalk in an audio recording obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) of ALEC’s annual States and National Policy Summit in December.
The following policy priorities and model bills highlight a handful of the dozens compiled and disseminated by ALEC in this document, offering a preview of what will likely crop up in state houses across the country during the 2025 legislative session.
Tax Cuts for Corporations and the Wealthy
Trump’s return to the White House guarantees that another big tax bill will be a central focus for Congress this year. The president continues to crow about the impact of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which he takes sole credit for and brought huge tax relief to the corporate world and America’s wealthiest oligarchs.
Several provisions of the TCJA are set to expire at the end of 2025 unless Congress votes to extend it. ALEC has consistently championed these tax cuts, releasing a letter last May with the signatures of more than 400 state lawmakers in support of permanently extending the TCJA. A 2023 report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found that in favoring the rich, the permanent provisions of the TCJA result in a net tax hike for the bottom 80% of Americans. It estimates that the extended provisions in the proposed TCJA Permanent Act would allocate just 1% of total tax cuts to America’s poorest 20% of taxpayers, with 63% of cuts benefitting the richest 20%.
At the state level, ALEC singles out state business and individual income taxes as having “the largest negative impact on economic outlook and growth.” An ALEC model policy first introduced nearly a decade ago advocates for replacing income taxes altogether with higher sales taxes. This is in keeping with Republican views on federal tax policy, including proposals from Project 2025 to replace income and corporate taxes with a flat consumption tax.
Protections for the Fossil Fuel Industry
According to the “economic competitiveness” section of ALEC’s Essential Policy Solutions playbook, this year state governments should seize the opportunity “to make sensible, market-based decisions concerning the costs and reliability of the fuels and infrastructure that power our nation.” ALEC’s conception of “sensible” decisions about the “reliability” of the energy Americans need centers around undermining growth of the clean energy sector in favor of protecting the fossil fuel industry.
Recommended model legislation includes the Electric Generation Facility Closures and Reliability Act, which would “prevent shuttering traditional power plants before new generation sources are online and ready to operate,” as well as the Affordable, Reliable, and Clean Energy Security Act, which classifies both nuclear and natural gas as “green energy” even though they each present environmental issues of their own.
A common scare tactic employed by oil and gas companies is to claim that increasing demand for electricity necessitates a continued reliance on natural gas — the same argument used by ALEC’s director of the Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force during a workshop at the December summit. However, policies like these are inherently flawed because they prolong dependence on fossil fuels, delay the transition to renewable energy, and fundamentally undermine efforts to fight climate change.
Deregulation
Like the Trump administration and Project 2025, ALEC has made large-scale deregulation a central priority since it was established more than 50 years ago. This is especially pertinent in 2025 given that the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine last year, ending the requirement that courts defer to the expertise of federal agencies when interpreting ambiguous statutes and marking a major victory for right-wing corporate interests.
ALEC’s model deregulation bills highlighted for this legislative session include the Act to Establish a Cap on Government Red Tape, which aims to reduce regulations by 35%. The bill also requires that for every new regulation enacted an existing one is sunsetted. Similarly, the Office of Regulatory Management Act calls for creating an office to enforce and manage the cap on regulatory requirements led by a chief regulatory management officer appointed by the governor.
Busting Unions
Despite giving lip service to promoting workers’ “freedom,” for decades ALEC’s “labor solutions” and “labor reforms” have instead pushed an anti-union agenda — one seeking to kneecap public employee and teachers’ unions. In a similar vein, Project 2025 proposes allowing states to ban labor unions altogether and enable employers to get rid of public employee unions during contract negotiations, retaliate against union organizers, and opt out of federal labor laws.
Union-busting model bills featured in the Essential Policies Solutions playbook include the Union Recertification Act, which significantly cripples collective bargaining efforts by imposing arbitrary “recertification” requirements, and the Fair and Accountable Public Sector Authority Act, which outright bans all government employees from collective bargaining.
Undermining Public Education
Under the guise of “education freedom” and “school choice,” conservatives have long advocated for policies designed to bankrupt public schools. The Essential Policy Solutions playbook promotes several model bills to ease restrictions on charter schools, religious homeschooling, and online education, as well as guarantee open enrollment so that students can attend any public school in their state. ALEC also supports universal education saving accounts, another thinly veiled measure to remove funding from public schools.
These positions are in line with “anti-woke” MAGA goals, which include dramatically cutting federal funding for education, ending efforts to make public schools welcoming for LGBTQ+ students, prohibiting the teaching of systemic racism, weakening accreditation standards, and promoting school privatization. Trump is doubling down on efforts made during his first term to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education and is reportedly poised to issue an executive order as soon as his nominee for secretary of education is confirmed to begin putting “herself out of a job,” as he puts it, and urge Congress to pass legislation completely dismantling the department.
Voting Rights
Despite a long, well-documented track record of voter suppression and fighting to limit democratic participation, ALEC now says it wants to protect us from those who would “experiment with the precious American right of suffrage.” For the upcoming legislative session, this means pushing bills opposing an interstate compact to ensure that Electoral College votes are cast for whomever wins the popular vote for president, as well as others that ban ranked choice voting and noncitizen voting (which is already illegal in federal elections). According to Shalk’s characterization at the December workshop, these model policies “really reinforce our founders’ vision for that [Electoral College] system.”
This comes on the heels of the 2024 general election, which saw voters in four states already reject referendums on adopting ranked choice voting, and ballot measures banning noncitizens from voting passed in eight states.
And Much More
ALEC’s sweeping pay-to-play playbook for 2025 covers a host of other high-stakes issues and corporate pet policies that mirror Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 — from restricting public pension investments in order to favor fossil fuels to protecting drug companies, opposing Medicaid expansion, and convening a constitutional convention.
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