Project 2025: The Department of Labor

Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is an ambitious manifesto to redesign the federal government and its many administrative agencies to support and sustain neo-conservative dominance for the next decade. One of the agencies in its crosshairs is the Department of Labor, as well as its affiliated agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Project 2025 proposes a remake of the Department of Labor in order to roll back decades of labor laws and rights amidst a nostalgic “back to the future” framing based on race, gender, religion and anti-abortion sentiment. But oddly, tucked into the corners of the document are some real nuggets of innovative and progressive thinking that propose certain labor rights which even many liberals have never dared to propose.

Attack on diversity in the workforce

In its opening narrative, the document attacks any policy focus based on the diversity of the workforce. Like much of the MAGA movement, it rejects racial classifications and preferences under the guise of the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution” and critical race theory. I’m not sure many of the 161 million Americans employed in the United States who are coping with high prices, inadequate wages and startling levels of inequality — 39 percent of whom are minority and 55 percent are female — lay awake at night worrying over the critical dangers emanating from DEI and CRT. But for the handful who do, Project 2025 has them covered.

Project 2025 demands that federal agencies prohibit the use of any racial classifications or quotas related to the workplace, and also prohibit even the collection of employment statistics based on race/ethnicity. And while they are at it, they should eliminate the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which requires federal contractors and subcontractors to commit to nondiscrimination and tracks compliance by these businesses.

Project 2025 then moves on to gender and transgender matters. The attack on female workers comes in the form of the promotion of what the document calls a “pro-life” workplace and of the states’ right to restrict abortion, surrogacy or other similar “benefits.” Project 2025 also calls for draconian measures against transgender workers, demanding the recission of regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics, including in hiring and firing.

All in all, the strong ideological emphasis on cultural wars within the workplace seems misplaced and disconnected from the working conditions that plague hundreds of millions of American workers. Many of their proposals seem more focused on restoring some nostalgic version of white male supremacy and Christian nationalism than on actually aiding workers.

Project 2025 includes several more bad policy ideas, but also some interesting ideas and even a few good ones.

Key proposals in Project 2025

One bad idea sounds almost medieval. Project 2025 would seek to amend what is known as “hazard-order regulations” to permit teenagers to work in dangerous jobs. “Some young adults,” claims the MAGA manifesto, “show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs” but “current rules forbid many young people … from working in such jobs,” resulting in “worker shortages in dangerous fields.” The Project 2025 visionaries would loosen these regulations to allow teenagers to “work in more dangerous occupations.”

Project 2025 advocates that Congress pass legislation allowing waivers for states and local governments to escape from enforcement of crucial federal labor laws, like the foundational Fair Labor Standards Act (which bestows the right to a minimum wage and time-and-a-half for overtime pay, and prohibits employment of minors in oppressive child labor) and the National Labor Relations Act that guarantees the right of workers to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining and take collective action such as strikes. This provision alone would enact an ominous, far-reaching threat to eviscerate the most important labor laws of the past 75 years.

Project 2025 also would crack down on labor union organizing by banning “card check” as the basis of union recognition and mandating secret ballot elections exclusively. Such a policy would allow employer coercion during certification elections, since many businesses hire anti-union consultants who are skilled in intimidating workers to vote against the union.

It also would reverse Obama- and Biden-era regulations that reined in widespread worker abuses in the fast food industry by holding corporations like McDonald’s and Burger King jointly liable for labor law violations committed by individual franchise owners operating under the corporation’s brand.

Potentially interesting policy ideas

Project 2025 occasionally includes an interesting idea that deserves more attention. For example, it advocates for better quality child care, including on-site child care in the workplace rather than in a separate facility as a way of putting the “least stress on the parent-child bond.”

It also calls for a “day of rest” on “the Sabbath,” defined as either Sunday or another day of “sincere religious observance,” which seems like it could be a good idea for the “No Vacation American Nation,” where workers have fewer vacation days and holidays than any other developed country.

It also proposes the Working Families Flexibility Act, which would allow workers to accumulate paid time off by allowing private sector employees the ability to choose between either receiving time-and-a-half overtime pay or accumulating time-and-a-half overtime off.

The manifesto also somewhat recognizes that immigrant workers suffer frequent employer exploitation via the H-2A visa program that allows temporary agricultural work­ers into the United States. But their primary concern is that the low cost and expanding numbers of H-2A workers undercut jobs for American workers in agricultural employment, so they want a gradual phasedown and a cap on this program. But I’m skeptical. It might be a worthwhile policy goal to prioritize the hiring of U.S. citizens in certain agricultural occupations, but it’s hard to imagine too many Americans wanting jobs handpicking food in the hot sun, backs bent over and exploited, unless the wages were so high that the price of food became completely unaffordable.

In that same vein, Project 2025 would have Congress mandate that all new federal contracts require at least 70 percent of the contractor’s employees be U.S. citizens, with the percentage increasing to 95 percent over a 10-year period. But good luck with that — it’s conservative business owners who want low-wage immigrant labor, so it’s hard to imagine that such a policy would generate support, even in Republican circles. This is more likely a symbolic overture to win votes this November and not a serious policy offer.

A few positive proposals

While liberal organizations and media outlets have warned that Project 2025 is a threat to the American way of life, there actually are some positive proposals that deserve closer examination. Many of these positives reflect the influence of a young economist, Oren Cass, and his “new conservative” organization American Compass, which is not so welded to the libertarian free market brand of Trumpism and has a more benign view of labor unions and government regulation in their market-harnessing role.

William Galston from the Brookings Institute called Cass’s book “ The Once and Future Worker ” a “welcome common ground for policy debates across partisan and ideological lines.” Cass is listed as one of the co-authors of this part of Project 2025.

Cass’s good ideas include “non-union worker voice and representation” and “Employee Involvement Organizations.” By this he means a U.S. version of German-style codetermination, in which “works councils” in every workplace and worker representation on corporate boards of directors flex worker power and consultation rights, beyond what labor unions provide. Union leadership in the U.S. finds this threatening, but labor unions in Germany are more powerful than their U.S. counterparts, illustrating that such a structure can be a win-win toward cooperation on critical issues like working conditions, wages, benefits, productivity, and employer-employee communication and agenda-setting.

Another good idea is a proposal for interstate compacts that allow occupational license recognition for practitioners like doctors, lawyers, mental health therapists, plumbers and other licensed professionals. That would create more competition in these fields and provide more options for consumers.

Another farsighted idea is a broadening of workers’ access to employee stock ownership plans, which allow workers to become owners in the business in which they work and allows them to receive compensation beyond wages and benefits. Today 14 million U.S. workers are covered by over 60,00 ESOPs, almost as many workers as are members of labor unions, providing over $1.4 trillion of employee benefits. It’s been a decades-long success, and it has always puzzled me that both Republicans and Democrats haven’t done more to promote this policy.

What’s missing is revealing

For workers and labor markets today, the latest trends that are most impactful are remote work and gig platforms like Uber, DoorDash and TaskRabbit. But the Project 2025 manifesto has little to say about these market shapeshifters. Many remote and platform workers are subject to increasingly complex challenges of precarity, such as constant digital surveillance by bosses, lack of separation between home and work lives, employee misclassification, lack of health care and safety net coverage, companies ignoring labor laws, and other types of exploitation.

A number of innovative policies would better meet the needs of the 21st century labor force, including implementing a portable safety net that would allow all workers, no matter how or who they work for, to benefit from health care and safety net coverage for themselves and their families. Also helpful would be wrap-around job and vocational training, in which companies are surveyed about their upcoming skill needs and unemployed workers are trained to fill those identified needs. These kinds of innovations are commonplace among U.S. competitors, like Germany, Denmark and other advanced economy countries.

Yet Project 2025 has little to say about these issues other than token rhetorical shout-outs to teleworking and the need to “protect flexible work options” and “worker independence”, i.e. independent contractors. One small proposal calls for Congress to provide a “safe harbor” from job misclassification penalties for employers that offer safety net benefits to independent workers. This is a small step and much more needs to be done to prepare the workforce for the very near-future of widespread platform and remote work.

For example, the Biden administration is spending nearly half a billion dollars to establish technology hubs in rural areas, so that the employment benefits of technological development are not just primarily enjoyed by urban-based workers living in tech hubs like Silicon Valley or Seattle’s Microsoft-Amazon hub. Project 2025 does not propose anything comparable.

Interestingly, Project 2025 occasionally presents an “alternative view,” in which a different conservative philosophy and policy goals are presented. This reflects the very real debates within the conservative movement about the best approaches toward addressing labor issues and the concerns of working women and men. Unfortunately the sensible minority view within conservatism is mostly overwhelmed by the dominant view and its cultural race and gender obsessions.

More articles about Project 2025

• A cross-partisan approach
• An Introduction
• Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
• Department of Education
• Managing the bureaucracy
• Department of Defense
• Department of Energy
• The Environmental Protection Agency
• Education Savings Accounts
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• The Department of Homeland Security
• U.S. Agency for International Development
• Affirmative action
• A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
• Department of Labor
• Intelligence community
• Department of State
• Department of the Interior
• Federal Communications Commission
• A perspective from Europe
• Department of Health and Human Services
• Voting Rights Act
• Another look at the Federal Communications Commission