Project 2025 and the Lives of Workers

The Washington Post ran an amazing article written by Michael Lewis yesterday, about Chris Mark, the “Principal Roof Control Specialist” at the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Read the article. It’s very long, by you’ll be glad you did. (Hint: If you’re on a long walk or drive, there’s a link on top left of the online Washington Post article that allows you to listen to it.)

Then go read the 935 page Project 2025 to find out why the Republican Candidates for President and Vice President hate government employees like Chris Mark. Or you can save your sanity and just read this blog post.

Because of Chris Mark’s work, coal mine deaths caused by roof falls have fallen from the biggest killers of miners to zero today. Hundreds of miners are alive today because of the work of this government employee that no one has ever heard of.  Mark’s work has made him the winner of the 2024 Service to America Medals (Sammies) for the Paul A. Volcker Career Achievement Award and the fascinating subject of Lewis’s article. The Sammies “highlight excellence in our federal workforce, help to build trust in the federal government and inspire talented and dedicated individuals to join the federal workforce.”

In one sense, Chris Mark’s work has meant everything to this nation’s coal miners — their very lives and limbs.   But in another sense, Mark is nothing really special; just one of millions of  federal employees who strive anonymously every day to make life better for their fellow Americans. The quality of our lives, and our very lives themselves depend on the work that they do.

As Lewis explains

Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials. Even the people who win the award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them — and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back. Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work! Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother. Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.” Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it.

Project 2025 and the Destruction of this Country

I’m telling you this story for two reasons: First, because of the contribution that Mark has made to workplace safety should be recognized — along with thousands of other employees with the Mine Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, NIOSH and other government agencies on the state and federal levels.

What Lewis writes is nothing new to me. I spent around half my career working in various mid and high level jobs in the federal government. And my greatest pleasures in those jobs were my interaction with some of the smartest, hardest working most dedicated people you’ll ever want to meet. They were experts in their field, dedicated to the safety of workers with long experience that they put to use every day. During my eight years helping to run OSHA, the career staff used their experience and expertise to help us get where we wanted to go, even if they didn’t necessarily agree with our politics or our policy initiatives.

Chris Mark’s job, as well as the jobs and contributions of his co-workers, the management abilities of his supervisors and the jobs of all employees throughout the federal government are at risk if Donald Trump is elected in November and is able to implement his governing plan: Project 2025

But second, to remind you that Mark’s job, as well as the jobs and contributions of his co-workers, the management abilities of his supervisors and the jobs of all employees throughout the federal government are at risk if Donald Trump is elected in November and is able to implement his governing plan: Project 2025, also known as Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise. 

Project 2025 is a product of the conservative Heritage Foundation. As the introduction states, “The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.” In other words, this is the future Trump administrations transition document enabling them do be ready on Day 1, zero-hour to begin to dismantle the protections and rights that Americans have enjoyed (and taken for granted) for two and a half centuries.

You can read the entire 922 page document here. (You can even buy a hard copy, but I’d caution you — not only about a potential back injury from carrying it around, but also note the warning in the introduction: “By opening this book, you are now a part of it.”  Wear gloves.)

Trump claims he knows nothing about Project 2025 and has attempted to disavow it, but spend even a short time researching his praise of Heritage for this work and you’ll understand that Project 2025 is his gameplan.  At least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration  have been involved, including former White House adviser Peter Navarro, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and five other former Trump Cabinet Secretaries. Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, said in a video that Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”

The Republican Platform

Every party produces a platform, usually short and general.   The official Republican Platform, ratified at their Convention, is just a short 16-page summary of their program which is detailed and operationalized in Project 2025.

For example, the Republican platform calls for the Trump Administration to  “Cut Costly and Burdensome Regulations.” How?

“Republicans will reinstate President Trump’s Deregulation Policies, which saved Americans $11,000 per household, and end Democrats’ regulatory onslaught that disproportionately harms low- and middle-income households.”

Trump’s deregulation policy, you may remember, was called “One-in, Two-out.” In other words, for every one regulation his administration issued, it would repeal two regulations. That never actually took place — especially in the Department of Labor, but that was the goal.

Destroying the Federal Workforce

There is much to say about the damage that implementation of Project 2025 would rain on this country. For the purposes of Confined Space, we will focus on the damage that would be done to workplace safety. But I want to start with Project 2025’s assaults on federal employees.

One of the most chilling things I’ve seen coming from the Trump-Vance team are the occasional admissions their real goal.  Or as they say, “saying the quiet part out loud.”

The report starts out with a general condemnation of regulations and everyone who helps execute the laws that make those government safeguards possible:  The regulatory protections that prevent workplace injuries, illness and death and poisoned water and air. They protect our consumers from fraud and keep our food and drugs from killing us and our children.

The most egregious regulations promulgated by the current Administration come from one place: the Oval Office. The President cannot hide behind the agencies; as his many executive orders make clear, his is the responsibility for the regulations that threaten American communities, schools, and families. A conservative President must move swiftly to do away with these vast abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats who fuel it.

The report criticizes government employees as “largely underworked, overcompensated, and unaccountable federal civilian workforce.”

That characterization would be funny if it wasn’t so destructive. Anyone working in a federal agency knows that government employees are largely overworked, undercompensated and fully accountable to the law and the President.

“I think that what Trump should—like, if I was giving him one piece of advice—fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state.” Senator and Vice Presidential Candidate J.D. Vance

But more chilling is what led up to this.   In 2021, Vance was quoted “saying the quiet part out loud:”

“I think that what Trump should—like, if I was giving him one piece of advice—fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” Vance said on a 2021 podcast appearance. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

But what may have sounded like a crazy suggestion from another MAGA kook is now on the verge of being operationalized by implementation of Project 2025.

Trump began the process of replacing non-political government employees with political operatives at the end of his Presidential term. As Project 2025 describes the effort, Trump’s goal was:

to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F.

With respect to the Department of Labor, which houses both OSHA and MSHA, the authors of Project 2025 are troubled that there are far too many career experts and far too few political appointees in the Department. The report states that “The number of political appointees should be maximized in order to improve the political accountability of the department.”

This is somewhat ironic considering that they want to fire the entire “deep state” because it is too political, and then hire actual political appointees who answer not to the law, but to the President.  Imagine replacing Chris Mark with a kid who campaigned for Trump in Phoenix.

OSHA and Workplace Safety & Health

We’ve all heard about different aspects of Project 2025: using the power of the federal government to prevent abortions and restrict certain contraceptive coverage, cutting regulations, reducing federal spending on the poor, abandoning efforts to fight climate change, increasing military spending, outlawing pornography, imprisoning its creators, and so on. (You may think you know what “pornography” is, but Project 2025 broadens the definition to include “propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.”)

All that is well and fine, but the main question for all Confined Space readers, of course, is “what would it mean for workplace safety and OSHA — as well as other public health and labor protections?”

Glad you asked.  Not all of the attacks on workplace safety are obvious or listed under an “OSHA” section. You have to go deeper. And lucky for you, I’ve read the Project 2025 so you don’t have to.

Project 2025 only has a long section covering the Department of Labor, but only a few of direct references to OSHA. The DOL chapter, by the way, was written by Jonathan Berry, an managing partner at the law firm Boyden Gray and former Regulatory Policy Office at the Department of Labor during the Trump administration where “his office credited the Department of Labor with over ten billion dollars in deregulatory cost savings for the American public.” (No word on how many lives his office was credited for saving.)

The Right to Bargain Away Rights

There is a general call to “rein in agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which the Biden Administration weaponized to attempt to force COVID-19 vaccine mandates on 84 million Americans through their workplaces.”

Of course, OSHA had no standard or policy that forced COVID vaccine mandates on Americans.  Instead, OSHA’s 2021 Emergency Temporary Standard only required employers to test employees weekly for COVID-19. Or, to avoid weekly tests, employees could choose to get vaccinated.

On page 603, the report gets more specific, discussing “Tailoring National Employment Rules.”

National employment laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act set out one-size-fits-all “floors” regulating the employment relationship. These substantive worker protections often do not mesh well with the procedural worker protections offered through the NLRA’s collective bargaining process. Unions could play a powerful role in tailoring national employment rules to the needs of a particular workplace if, in unionized workplaces, national rules were treated as negotiable defaults rather than non-negotiable floors.

Congress should amend the NLRA to authorize collective bargaining to treat national employment laws and regulations as negotiable defaults.

What does all this mean? It means that Project 2025 would allow employers to bully or blackmail unions into accepting weaker safety protections than the law allows.  Even weak OSHA, Wage & Hour or organizing rules would no longer be the floor that we accept today; unions would be “free” to negotiate even lower standards.

Maybe a future Musk-dominated Tesla union won’t care about workers decapitating themselves by trying to fix machinery that hasn’t been shut down? And then workers suffering under government mandates can also be free vote away their right to an 8-hour workday, overtime pay, the minimum wage and the antiquated concept of “weekends.”

This scenario is not so unimaginable being as the report also recommends allowing employers create their own sham company-run unions, getting a “union” to bargain protections away might not be too hard. Despite the unprecedented popularity of labor unions, Project 2025 argues that

Federal labor law offers no alternatives to labor unions whose politicking and adversarial approach appeals to few, whereas most workers report that they prefer a more cooperative model run jointly with management that focuses solely on workplace issues. The next Administration should make new options available to workers and push Congress to pass labor reforms that create non-union “employee involvement organizations” as well as a mechanism for worker representation on corporate boards.

Because who knows, maybe a future Musk-Dominated Tesla union won’t care about workers decapitating themselves by trying to fix machinery that hasn’t been shut down? And then workers suffering under government mandates can also be free vote away their right to an 8-hour workday, overtime pay, the minimum wage and the antiquated concept of “weekends.”

The Right to Kill

Regarding enforcement, the report argues that “Congress (and DOL, in its enforcement discretion) should exempt small business, first-time, non-willful violators from fines issued by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.”

Aside from Berry not knowing the correct name of the agency, the report fails to answer why small businesses get a mulligan on breaking the law, or injuring or killing a workers. Why should the chance of coming home alive and well at the end of the day depend on the size of the business that someone works for?

Actually, Berry, being a former DOL official, should know that small employers already get a free first inspection in the form of an OSHA program called the Onsite Consultation Program,  which provides “no-cost, confidential consultations [to] help employers identify and address hazards and establish or improve safety and health programs.”

Why should the chance of coming home alive and well at the end of the day depend on the size of the business that someone works for?

In other words, there is no excuse for any small business to be exempted from an OSHA citation for a any kind first-time violation — serious or willful.

For those businesses still subject to enforcement, the report would require OSHA to “Focus health and safety inspections on egregious offenders, as other inspections are often abused and usurp state and local government prerogatives.”

Well, first, of course, being as OSHA only has the resources to inspect every workplace once ever 186 years, OSHA is already forced to focus on the worst employers.

But being as Project 2025 doesn’t define “egregious,” I’m assuming they mean only those employers who kill multiple workers.

Obviously preventing such “egregious” deaths by citing employers — large and small — for violations before workers are killed has no value. We’ll just have to wait until after  workers are killed in preventable incidents before OSHA can issue a citation. Right?

The Laboratory of the States

And by criticizing inspections that “usurp state and local government prerogatives,” I assume they’re opening the door to allowing states to issue weaker standards and enforcement policies than federal OSHA’s.  This is a recipe for a “race to the bottom,” where states seek to compete by offering weaker labor protections than neighboring states. It was to avoid this “race to the bottom” that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act was created to set national standards that could not be undermined by anti-labor states.

Regarding the budget of the Department of Labor, and the agencies (like OSHA) within the department, Project 2025 recommends that the President and Congress “reduce the agencies’ budgets to the low end of the historical average.” What is the “historical average?” Does that mean you average all OSHA budgets since 1971 to come out with next year’s budget?

One way to kill government is to ensure that no one wants to work for low pay at agencies that don’t have the funding to do anything.

Imagine reducing your pay to the “low end” of the average salary you’ve made since your first job. Government agencies like OSHA are already starved for funding, and government employees already make less than they would make for equivalent jobs in the private sector.  So one way to kill government is to ensure that no one wants to work for low pay at agencies that don’t have the funding to do anything.

The Myth of Home Inspections

Project 2025 doesn’t shrink from proposing solutions to problems that don’t exist. The report calls on the Department of Labor to “clarify that a home office is not subject to OSHA regulations.” This is basically been OSHA policy forever, but especially since 2000 when a faux scandal forced OSHA to strengthen its policy of not enforcing OSHA standards in private home, except when workers are exposed to “hazards caused by materials, equipment, or work processes which the employer provides or requires to be used in an employee’s home.”

But the specter of OSHA inspectors in muddy boots ransacking your home and leaving you with unaffordable penalties is a scenario too frightening for Project 2025 to overlook.

Make Child Labor Great Again

We’ve written before about Republican efforts to make child labor great again. The Project 2025 report doubles down on that great idea arguing that the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Administration should “amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent.”

Wage and Hour’s Hazardous Occupation Orders set standards for what jobs teen workers are allowed, and not allowed to do. Right now they prohibit youths under 18 from working in coal mines, operating machinery in meat processing plants, roofing operations, fighting forest fires, trenching and excavation, being exposed radioactive substances and ionizing radiation and other jobs.

What’s their reasoning for loosening up these burdensome regulations?

First, “Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs.”

Yeah, right. That makes sense.  Some young adults also “show an interest in” riding skateboards off of roofs, blowing up toilets with M80s, driving drunk and trying every drug they can get their hands on.

Have these guys ever had teenagers — especially boy teenagers?

In fact, after raising several human beings that somehow survived to adulthood, I’m thinking the term “young adults” should be eliminated and replaced by the term “older children.”

The report continues:

Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job. With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.

No one ever cites any evidence that worker shortages being caused by forbidding children from working in dangerous jobs. What we do know is that if Trump were to succeed in his plan for massive deportations of undocumented immigrants, worker shortages will get much, much worse.

“We protect children from hazardous work as a statement of our values as a society and because the young people most likely to agree to hazardous work are the most vulnerable to that power imbalance.”  — Former Wage and Hour Administrator David Weil

Labor rights experts are not amused.

David Weil, who headed the labor department’s wage and hour administration under Barack Obama, criticized this recommendation, saying the nation had adopted child labor laws partly because of the huge power imbalance between employers and young workers. “We protect children from hazardous work as a statement of our values as a society and because the young people most likely to agree to hazardous work are the most vulnerable to that power imbalance,” Weil said.

To this I can refer to Wisconsin State Representative Deb Andraca who famously tweeted: “The answer to our worker shortage is not shorter workers.”

Chemicals Are Our Friends

The report also does the bidding of the chemical industry.

Because OSHA is extremely slow to issue chemical standards, EPA is using an updated Toxic Substances Control Act to set chemical standards that would be applicable in the workplace. But Project 2025 wants to “Ensure that risk evaluations and risk management rules presume that workplaces are following all OSHA requirements, including requirements or personal protective equipment (PPE).”

What does this mean? It means that chemical protections would be undermined by assuming the worker was wearing a respirator before any exposure measurements or risk assessments are conducted. So no exposure, no problem.

The only problem with that is that first, workers exposed to chemicals often can’t wear respirators all day. (Try it sometime.) And second, respirators are much less effective than other control measures like substituting safer chemicals or using ventilation to such the hazardous chemicals out of the workers’ breathing zone. That’s why respirators are the last — not the first — choice in the industrial hygiene hierarchy of controls.

The Department of Labor

Trump’s minions are, of course, very concerned about the workers of this country. And they certainly know the rhetoric:

While it is primarily the culture’s responsibility to affirm the dignity of work, our federal labor and employment agencies have an important role to play by protecting workers, setting boundaries for the healthy functioning of labor markets, and ultimately encouraging wages and conditions for jobs that can support a family.

Sounds good. So what’s the problem?

DEI of course. And Critical Race Theory (remember that?)

Under the Obama and Biden Administrations, labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution. Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views. The next Administration should eliminate every one of these wrongful and burdensome ideological projects.

The solution is to:

Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Trainings. The Biden Administration has pushed “racial equity” in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race.

(I will confess that we did spend considerable time and energy during the Obama administration attempting to increase the number of people of color and non-English speakers at OSHA. Was that a bad thing?)

Does all this mean that OSHA should ignore the fact that immigrant and Latino workers suffer significantly higher injury and death rates than white workers?  Or maybe the Bureau of Labor Statistics and OSHA should just stop collecting any information based on injury, illness or death statistics based on race or ethnicity. See no evil….

Should the agency get rid of all foreign language publications as well?  What about the requirement in OSHA standards that training be conducted in a language that workers understand.

I can see the new OSHA posters: “Speak English or Die.”

I mean, do workers who don’t speak English really deserve to live?

Labor Unions and Organizing

Project 2025 authors would also make it harder to organize unions and protect workers’ pay and rights. As veteran labor reporter Steve Greenhouse writes

Project 2025 contains several recommendations that would, when taken together, cut the pay of millions of workers, especially by making overtime pay available to fewer workers, even though many Americans rely on overtime pay to make ends meet. This so-called “Presidential Transition Project” shows outright hostility toward government employee unions – whether police unions, firefighters’ unions or teachers’ unions – saying that Congress should consider abolishing all public sector unions. Project 2025 would further undermine unions by recommending a ban on the use of card check, one of labor’s most effective tools to organize workers. Once a union gets a majority of employees at a workplace to sign pro-union cards, unions often point to this majority support to persuade employers to grant union recognition and bargain.

Greenhouse continues:

Project 2025 has several far-reaching proposals that would reduce corporations’ labor costs and boost their bottom lines. The project calls for repealing the 93-year-old Davis-Bacon Act, which requires contractors on public works projects to pay the prevailing wage paid to local workers doing similar work. Davis-Bacon was enacted to prevent government contractors from winning projects by underbidding competitors through ever-lower labor costs. The nation’s building trades unions vigorously oppose repealing Davis-Bacon because that would push down construction wages.

Project 2025 would shrink many workers’ paychecks by calling for a law that limits when they receive overtime pay – to only when they work more than 80 hours over a two-week period, instead of the current system of working more than 40 hours in one week. That means if an employee works 55 hours one week and 25 the next, that worker won’t qualify for overtime pay, despite working 55 hours one week.

In another proposal that would slice labor costs, Project 2025 says workers who qualify for overtime pay should be able to choose to receive compensatory time rather than time-and-a-half overtime pay. The project says this idea aims to give workers more time with their families, but many worker advocates say it is a ploy to enable employers to twist workers’ arms so that they take comp time instead of time-and-a-half pay.

The report would also allow employers more freedom to designate employees a “independent contractors,” who would be exempt from most labor protections, allow states to receive exemptions from federal labor laws, get rid of unions for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers and other federal security workers, and limit the rights of other federal government unions. And Project 2025 calls for repealing the 93-year-old Davis-Bacon Act, which requires contractors on public works projects to pay the prevailing wage paid to local workers doing similar work.

Just to make organizing even more difficult, the report recommends banning on the use of card check, one of labor’s most effective tools to organize workers. And just in case workers manage to organize anyway, Project 2025 makes it easier to get rid of unions.

Under current law, workers can only vote to decertify, ie get rid of their union, for a short period before their union contracts expire (or when there is no contract in force). Project 2025 would allow such decertification votes any time a union contract is in force.

Conclusion

Now I don’t want to imply that Project 2025 is all bad news. For workers who manage to survive until the next weekend, Project 2024 recommends that “Congress should encourage communal rest by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to require that workers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath.”

God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day. Moreover, a shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals, and provides a healthier cadence of life for everyone. Unfortunately, that communal day of rest has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism, especially for low-income workers.

But seriously.

I often end posts that deal with election issues by appealing to readers to vote as if their lives depend on it. (Or the lives of others, even if they speak a different language.) And I mean that quite literally.

Now, more than ever, that warning is relevant.  We are facing the choice between a government that works for the people of this country, (even if those efforts are sometimes flawed), or a government that works for the benefit of one political party — or more precisely — one man. White men without a college degree were once the strong base of the Democratic party. But no longer. Partly because of the demise of unions and economic dislocation, as well as the growth of wedge issues like abortion, LBGTQ, misinformation on social media and many other causes, many of the white working class are choosing a candidate that works directly against their interests.  The solution lies in education — conversations, door to door visits, the media — and of course blogs like this.

So spread the word. Let’s fix this country.

And of course, we’re not going back.

But wait! There’s more!

If you’re interested in what else Project 2025 can offer, check out these resources:

• How will Project 2025 affect me?
• Trump claims he’s pro-worker. Project 2025 will gut labor rights, Steven Greenhouse
• As Go Unions, So Goes America, Michael Podhorzer
• Power At Work Blogcast #53: Project 2025 and Labor – The Plan to Destroy Worker Power
• Trump Loyalists Lay Out Plan for Second Term: Gut Worker Protections, Noah Lanard

Note: Cover photo by Earl Dotter.