Center for American Progress
Project 2025’s Plan To Gut Checks
and Balances Harms California
By Colin Seeberger
The new authoritarian playbook would devastate residents of California 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 California.
Taxes
■ Project 2025 shifts the tax burden from the wealthy onto the middle class. Under
the plan, the typical family of four in California would see a tax increase of $3,201
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 76
percent of California residents—29,577,660 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 California, 3,467,900 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 2,180,530 people in
California 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 5,560,000 women in California 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.
Child care
■ Project 2025 eliminates Head Start, which provides access to no-cost child care—
among other services—for 85,236 low-income children in California. 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 slots.
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, 597,300 borrowers in California
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 15,897
teaching positions, which serve 346,553 students, in California.