Project 2025’s Plan to Crush Unions
The policy blueprint funded by groups with billionaire conservative donors would severely clamp down on unions and worker protections.
By David Moore and Donald Shaw, Sludge
Americans’ approval of labor unions is holding a strong majority in polls, and employees at more workplaces are submitting union election petitions with the National Labor Relations Board than at any point in a decade. But conservative groups funded by anti-union billionaires already have a plan in place to help Donald Trump clamp down on the rights of workers to form unions and discuss workplace issues if he is elected — Project 2025.
The sweeping “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” book published last year by Project 2025 bills itself as a “governing agenda” for the next conservative administration. Led by the Heritage Foundation, the policy blueprint carries with it the backing of over 100 conservative organizations on the Project 2025 advisory board, including the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, Conservative Partnership Institute, and Turning Point USA.
While covering areas from reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights to voting rights and more, the Project 2025 initiative would undermine longstanding worker protections and national labor rules such as overtime pay.
The Trump campaign has been trying to shove the unpopular Project 2025 out of the spotlight ahead of the 2024 elections, disavowing the plan to reshape the federal government and claiming not to know anything about it or who’s behind it. But at an April 2022 dinner, Trump praised the Heritage Foundation’s plans to “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Some of the authors of the book are former Trump administration officials, such as Peter Navarro, Trump’s former director of the White House National Trade Council, and Rick Dearborn, his former deputy chief of staff. A CNN review found no fewer than 140 former Trump administration employees involved in the book’s policy proposals.
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Attacks on workers
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership book says that Congress should pass legislation allowing states and local governments to obtain waivers from federal labor laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that set minimum wage rules. Similarly, the book argues that Congress should let states apply for exemptions from bedrock laws like the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the 1935 law that protects the right to organize, which would further suppress the ability of private sector workers to form labor unions.
On other fronts, the Project 2025 proposal calls on Congress to pass legislation that would remove overtime pay requirements under the FLSA and allow private sector employers to offer paid time off, empowering companies to squeeze workers and pad their profits. The blueprint would have government agencies end the mandatory use of short-term bargaining contracts, called Project Labor Agreements (PLAs), on federal construction projects, and it calls on Congress to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act that ensures “prevailing wages” are paid on such federally financed projects.
The book’s authors recommend that Congress pass legislation establishing stringent rules for how states administer unemployment insurance programs, such as requiring state agencies to cross-check applicants with a federal data directory—rules that would make it harder for people to access UI benefits.
And the section covering the Department of Labor also includes several proposals that could make it more difficult for workers to form and maintain unions — banning card check as a means for union recognition, making it easier to decertify unions, calling for congressional action to enable employer-run “labor organizations” that resemble early 20th-century company unions, and more.
This push comes at a time when unions are as popular as they’ve been since the 1960s: an August Gallup poll found that 7 in 10 Americans have a favorable view of labor unions.
Project 2025’s proposed assault on labor is also laid bare in the Mandate for Leadership’s call for Congress to take up the issue of whether public-sector unions, which represent 7 million people as of 2023, should be permitted. The book praises executive orders issued by Trump that directed agencies to restrict the workplace powers of public-sector unions, orders that were revoked by the Biden administration.
Shortly before the 2020 election, the Trump administration issued an executive order creating a new class of “Schedule F” employees that would be stripped of civil service protections, an order that was overturned by the Biden administration. Project 2025 recommends the Trump order be reinstated, a step that would allow a Republican administration to supplant tens of thousands of federal employees with conservative loyalists—or leave positions vacant.
The usual suspects
Behind the groups pushing Project 2025 are numerous right-wing billionaires who have been among the largest donors to conservative causes chipping away at labor rights for decades.
According to an NBC News article, the Charles Koch network charity Stand Together donated $4.4 million in 2022 to organizations on the Project 2025 advisory board. Koch has long been associated with anti-union efforts, including through his advocacy group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which in 2011 supported Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in 2011 as he advanced legislation that stripped most state workers of their ability to collectively bargain.
For years, AFP has opposed the PRO Act in Congress, a top legislative priority of unions that would reform labor law to remove some of the common hurdles placed in the way of workers seeking to unionize, like captive audience meetings.
The Heritage Foundation’s donors list includes Richard Uihlein, the conservative megadonor and co-founder of packaging company Uline. In 2018, he donated $500,000 to a political action committee in Missouri that was formed to oppose a referendum on the state’s right-to-work law; at the ballot box, more than two-thirds of Missouri voters opposed right-to-work.
The Heritage Foundation is primarily funded by individual donors, with a small percentage coming from foundations and about 1 percent from corporations, according to its 2023 financial disclosure. Among its major donors last year were several well known individuals within conservative politics, including wealthy board chair Barbara Van Andel-Gaby, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and poultry magnate and GOP megadonor Ronald Cameron. Its foundation donors in 2023 included the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, and the Adolph Coors Foundation — all organizations started by wealthy families that primarily fund conservative causes.
The Heritage Foundation additionally received funds through the prominent conservative donor-advised funds DonorsTrust and Bradley Impact Fund, which act as conduits for individual donors. The identities of dozens of its donors are not disclosed on the report because, it says, they wish to remain anonymous.
A pair of donors in the “dark money” network of conservative legal activist Leonard Leo donated millions to Project 2025 groups as well, according to figures from their tax returns cited in NBC News. The donor-advised fund The 85 Fund and advocacy nonprofit Concord Fund combined to give nearly $9 million since 2021.
Leo, known as Donald Trump’s “court whisperer,” advised on the nominations of three conservative Supreme Court justices—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—who have helped tilt the high court against labor rights to a massive degree.