Capitol Hill Hearing Exposes Project 2025 as an Extreme Republican Agenda

North Bay Congressman Jared Huffman’s Stop Project 2025 Task Force held its first congressional hearing on Tuesday focused on exposing the nearly one thousand-page conservative playbook many see as a sweeping MAGA manifesto.

For two hours on Capitol Hill, Congressman Huffman joined the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee in a multimedia presentation and testimony that directly targeted the blueprint fueled by former Trump administration officials and led by the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank.

Huffman called the plan for the next Republican president breathtakingly extreme, noting that the final of its four “pillars” — the “Playbook” — is left conspicuously secret, only to be revealed upon the “President’s utterance of ‘So help me God.’”

“Firing tens of thousands of career civil servants and then replacing them with MAGA loyalists,” Huffman said, “directing the FBI, the Justice Department and the IRS to investigate Trump’s perceived enemies … even deploying active duty military on our streets is downright scary.”

Project 2025 outlines an ambitious right-wing agenda to reshape the American government, blurring church and state while curtailing rights for many individuals. Key proposals include a nationwide FDA ban on abortion medication, the elimination of Head Start and the removal of a daily overtime requirement for workers.

Ultrasound Tech Suki O. told lawmakers she was tired of wiping away tears after being forced to tell women they were too far along to terminate pregnancies under the strict abortion ban in her home state of Georgia.

“I question anyone who sees what’s happened in my home state of Georgia and believes that is a model to expand nationwide in a total ban on abortion,” Suki said. “We now know with certainty that if the policies outlined in Project 2025 are put in place, more women, not just in Georgia, but across the country, will die.”

Michigan United Auto Worker JJ Jewell described regularly working 12-hour days on the Ford manufacturing line, reporting for work well before dawn. Jewell said Project 2025’s proposed dismantling of the standard workweek by giving employers the flexibility “to calculate the overtime period over a longer number of weeks” would hurt hourly workers.

“It’s part of a larger goal to make corporations richer at the expense of the workers. We actually keep the wheels turning, both figuratively and literally,” Jewell said. “If we allow [them] to take away our ability to earn fair overtime pay, we’re letting them strip away a key source of income for families like mine.”

Republican political consultant Mike Madrid of Sacramento calls the document concerning.

“When people find out about it, they are very much opposed to it,” Madrid said, who believes that much of the material doesn’t reflect conservative philosophy as much as it does a populist, nationalist agenda. He added that unexpected wins, like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are propelling the movement.

“This is something that even most Republicans never believed would happen,” Madrid said. “But we’re at that point now where the Republican Party, when in a position of influence, is moving forward aggressively on some of these basic rights … regulatory protections, tax structures. Basically, our way of life [is] being upturned.”