A crowd of about 80 people gathered just before Halloween at the La Grange Public Library to learn more about Project 2025 at an open forum Oct. 29 organized by the La Grange Area League of Women Voters.
Jack Bentley, executive director of the Citizens Advocacy Center in Elmhurst, spoke for more than one hour, saying that while his organization was normally involved in issues on democracy at a local level, the current political climate called for a national approach.
“Since our mission is rooted in democracy and has been for thirty years, and since people are concerned about where democracy stands federally, uniquely in the last year or so, we’re going to talk about it,” he said.
Project 2025, was put together by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2023 to serve as a template for leadership in the modern age.
The almost 900 page document, officially titled “A Mandate For Leadership,” is posted online at static.heritage.org.
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The work is divided into five sections and includes essays on taking the reins of the executive branch, the common defense, the general welfare, the economy, and independent regulatory agencies.
Although President Donald Trump said during the 2024 campaign that the project was not a formal part of his plans, it includes the work of several influential Trump administration advisors, including leading trade adviser Peter Navarro, White House Budget Director Russ Vought, and Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission.
For background, Bentley recommended the Atlantic Magazine article “The Project: Project 2025 Is Reshaping America,” by David Graham. But Bentley’s presentation focused on Project 2025 as it relates to Constitutional issues.
“We’re not going to get into the weeds on policy,” he said. “We’re going to talk about Constitutional theories and laws. … Tonight is not the substitute for doing your own research.”
Several audience members were familiar with the basic premise of Project 2025, although Bentley told one woman that it was not a mandate for “authoritarian” leadership as she said.
But he agreed with one audience member who said that the project was something that had its beginnings as far back as the era of Ronald Reagan.
“This is not something that just happened,” he said. “This is not something that just happened in the Trump era or the last couple of years.”
Bentley said the original plan was to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, and provide tax cuts for the wealthy.
“Project 2025 is much kinder to environmental regulations than the original version was,” he said.
Bentley said that it is difficult to estimate how much of the Trump agenda has been implemented because so many of his executive orders have been challenged by lawsuits; some were successful and others not.
“A consensus in the media seems to be that about 48% — less than half — have been accomplished,” he said.
Bentley laid out several areas of concern regarding the project, including its goals of expanded executive power, promoting a traditional cultural agenda, and deregulation of the private sector.
He also highlighted where Project 2025 stood on matters of gender/family rights, immigration, economy and trade and global security.
Bentley spoke of the role the Federalist Society played in the modern conservative movement, noting that its purpose was to promote an originalist view of the constitution, pointing specifically to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as a proponent of that legal theory.
He said that originalism was the legal reasoning behind overturning long-standing legal precedents, the most obvious of which was Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Constitution does not confer a right to an abortion.
When asked why it mattered to understand Project 2025, one audience member posited that it seemed conservatives were taking aim at our nation’s founding document.
“It seems to me that they’re trying to break down the Constitution,” she said, citing the conservative attacks on education and “the pillars of democracy how I see it.”
Another man echoed the first audience member’s sentiments.
“It (Project 2025) matters because the way things seem to be working right now, things just happen without any deliberative process,” he said. “When I grew up I thought, maybe naively, in the legislature there was a lot of give and take … it was a broad -based decision making, rather than what I perceive to be an individual making policy.”
Bentley offered some suggestions as to what positive actions citizens could take. Among them were calling government representatives, attending public meetings, attending a protest, signing petitions and voting in every election.
Beyond that, he recommended organizing protests, starting voter registration drives and running for office.
Andrea Martonffy, event coordinator for the La Grange Chapter of the LWV, was pleased with the turnout for the event.
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“I think this was good, a good start,” she said afterwards. “I think we’re going to get started here on a study group for that whole document. It’s not that long and we should just educate ourselves in detail about what some of the projects are about.”
Hank Beckman is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.