Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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 The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.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 preamble of the Constitution sets up our national aspiration of a government by “We the People” as the basis of a democratic republic predicated on “justice.”
These powerful words have withstood the test of time for over 250 years:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
And of course, in the Pledge of Allegiance, we describe a nation that provides “justice for all.”
Justice, and how we define and implement it, is critical to the health of our democracy. Yet, to this day, our nation has many diverging views on what “justice for all” truly means and how this justice should be implemented in the laws of the land. This debate is not only a matter for our legislators but has also been a focal point for philosophers and theologians for centuries.
In the abstract, justice is simply fairness. However, when it comes to specifics, the debate rages across the land on what fairness means with respect to race, sexual orientation, gender and more.
Nowhere is this debate more apparent than in Project 2025, an 887-page manifesto prepared by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The playbook, designed as a guide for the first 180 days of a future Trump administration, highlights the Department of Justice as a critical battleground for establishing a conservative vision of justice.
Chapter 17, titled “The Department of Justice,” argues that reforming the DOJ is crucial to the success of the entire agenda outlined in Project 2025. The authors make a bold claim:
"Not reforming the Department of Justice will also guarantee the failure of that conservative Administration’s agenda in countless other ways.”
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a key architect of Project 2025, underscored this priority when he told The New York Times in January, “[W]e just disagree wholly that the Department of Justice is independent of the president or the executive branch.” This perspective is emblematic of a broader strategy to bring the DOJ under close control of the executive, emphasizing that “the DOJ must be refocused on the rule of law and away from its current role as a political weapon.”
Robert’s statement on the DOJ’s use as a “political weapon” by the current Democratic administration stands in direct contrast to a statement he made regarding the department and the 2020 election:
“With respect to the 2020 presidential election, there were no DOJ investigations of the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance. ... The Pennsylvania Secretary of State should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted for potential violations.”
This juxtaposition speaks to the vast reach and changes proposed in Project 2025 for the Justice Department, the essence of justice in America and what “justice for all” might come to mean.
Project 2025’s proposed reforms include replacing career civil servants with a "vast expansion" of political appointees, overturning the current “politicization and weaponization” of the DOJ, and conducting a thorough review of the FBI. The vision is to shift the DOJ towards a more conservative interpretation of law enforcement and justice, which includes prosecuting voter fraud, transferring responsibility to the DOJ's criminal division, and halting investigations of groups engaged in lawful and constitutionally protected activities.
How might some of these reforms be specifically implemented? The answer is exemplified in this one radical sentence: "Promptly and properly eliminate ... all existing consent decrees.”
The Justice Department typically hands down consent decrees to local jurisdictions following investigations into police wrongdoing. As just one example, these decrees have historically compelled jails to improve their conditions or police departments to consider their tactics and report back to the Justice Department. This change would drastically impact the oversight of local law enforcement and the protection of civil rights.
The implications of Project 2025 on justice in America extend beyond the DOJ. The cultural agenda embedded within the project is also significant. As stated on the fourth and fifth pages of the playbook:
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
Understanding how the proposed changes to the Department of Justice intersect with Project 2025’s cultural agenda is crucial. Together, they have the potential to fundamentally alter and undermine the application of justice in America, challenging the very foundation of our Constitution’s preamble: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
More in The Fulcrum 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
- 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
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
Maggi plays with a child in the back yard of her child care program. Maggi runs one of a few child care programs that provides 24/7 care in her town. (JACKIE MADER/THE HECHINGER REPORT)
Advocates and experts say upticks in immigration enforcement can cause stress and trauma for young children. In America, 1 in 4 children under the age of 6 has at least one foreign-born parent. (JACKIE MADER/THE HECHINGER REPORT)
