By Colin Seeberger
The new authoritarian playbook would devastate residents of North Carolina in many ways.
Project 2025 is a plan to gut America’s system of checks and balances in order to enact an extreme, far-right agenda that would hurt all Americans. The plan proposes taking power away from everyday people to give politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives. Here are specific ways that Project 2025 harms residents of North Carolina.
Taxes—Project 2025 shifts the tax burden from the wealthy onto the middle class. Under the plan, the typical family of four in North Carolina would see a tax increase of $2,713 per year, while 45,000 households in America reporting more than $10 million in income would each see an average annual tax cut of $1.5 million.
Social Security—Project 2025 cuts Social Security by raising the retirement age for roughly 73 percent of North Carolina residents —7,847,980 people. Project 2025 authors have endorsed and supported plans similar to the two most recent Republican Study Committee budget proposals, which propose increasing the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 69. Doing so would cut benefits by $4,100 to $8,900 after just one year, depending on when one claims Social Security. A median-wage retiree would lose $46,000 to $100,000 over 10 years.
Health care—Project 2025 proposes imposing “limits or lifetime caps on [Medicaid] benefits.” In North Carolina, 911,500 Medicaid enrollees would be at risk of losing coverage because they are low income and lack access to alternative, affordable coverage.
The plan would raise the cost of prescription drugs for up to 662,600 people in North Carolina by eliminating out-of-pocket Medicare drug cost limits. It also blocks the government from negotiating for lower drug prices.
Abortion rights and contraception—Project 2025 eliminates some emergency contraception medications from free preventive care requirements, meaning 1,560,000 women in North Carolina would lose guaranteed access to free emergency contraception.
The plan instructs the U.S. Department of Justice to misapply the Comstock Act, a pair of laws from 1873 and 1909, to criminalize the mailing of medication abortion. Doing so would result in an effective abortion ban nationwide, even in states where abortion is legal.
The plan instructs the Department of Justice to take legal action against local officials who refuse to bring cases against women and doctors who violate state abortion bans, such as North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban.
Child care—Project 2025 eliminates Head Start, which provides access to no-cost child care—among other services—for 19,641 low-income children in North Carolina. Eliminating Head Start would wipe out a critical supply of child care in rural and other underserved communities that already face a lack of child care.
Student loans—Project 2025 replaces income-driven repayment (IDR) plans with a one-size-fitsall program that would increase payments for all borrowers enrolled in existing IDR plans, including the Biden-Harris administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan. Under Project 2025, 237,800 borrowers in North Carolina enrolled in SAVE would pay $2,700 to $4,100 more each year.
Public education—Project 2025 eliminates the U.S. Department of Education, including Title I, which provides funds to ensure schools serving low-income students have additional resources to deliver a high-quality education beyond that which can be supported by local property tax revenue. Ending Title I would lead to the loss of 6,417 teaching positions, which serve 98,823 students, in North Carolina.
Colin Seeberger is a senior adviser for Communications at the Center for American Progress.
Source: americanprogress.org,, August 1, 2024