The right-wing Heritage Foundation produced Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term. Though Project 2025 doesn’t specifically advocate for cuts to Social Security, the right-wing think tank has taken positions that would seriously undermine the nation’s most popular social insurance program. On the issue of Medicare and prescription drug prices, Project 2025 is crystal clear. It explicitly calls for changes that could be devastating for seniors. We chatted with our senior legislative representative, Maria Freese, about the implications of Project 2025 for older Americans.
Q: While it’s true that the Project 2025 plan itself does not call for Social Security cuts, it doesn’t give us much reassurance on the Social Security front. Why is that?
A: The organization behind Project 2025, the right-wing Heritage Foundation, has been calling for cuts for Social Security and Medicare for decades — ever since they were founded. So, this is not a new thing for them.
Q: Exactly. As recently as June 17th, the Heritage Foundation called for raising the retirement age to 69 or 70. What does that tell us about their true intentions?
That’s only one element of the plan that they have for Social Security. It’s the one that is the most dramatic, and the one that they tend to put front and center. In fact, the senior policy researcher at Heritage, Rachel Grezsler, has been behind a lot of the organization’s published writing on raising the retirement age.
Q: So if the Heritage Foundation has advocated cutting Social Security, why don’t they come out and say so in the Project 2025 document?
Well, I think it’s because the Republicans have finally learned that where Social Security is concerned, saying the quiet part out loud scares people to death. And it’s politically poisonous. I think they’ve learned that lesson from Donald Trump when he says, ‘Don’t talk about cutting Social Security because it’s bad politically.’ That doesn’t mean it’s changed their agenda at all. It just means that they have discovered the hard way that when they tell people what they plan to do about Social Security, it costs them politically because voters hate the actual GOP agenda on this issue.
Q: And, of course, we know what House Republicans would like to do if the party consolidates sufficient power in the 2024 elections, because of the budget put out by the House Republican Study Committee earlier this year.
A: That’s right. The House Republican Study Committee represents 80% of the House GOP membership. This year they submitted a budget that would have cut Social Security by $1.5 trillion. That’s a huge amount of cuts. Now the budget is a little quiet about exactly how they would do that — because they know that if they actually lay out a plan, people will object to it.
Q: The website Verify.com did an article about this: We know what the Heritage Foundation and the Republican party really want to do, despite their vague rhetoric about supporting Social Security in general. So is that a fair predictor of what might happen during a second Trump administration?
A: Clearly there is a relationship between what Heritage Foundation promotes and what and members of the Republican caucus in the House, and presumably some of them in the Senate, would be pushing in a second Trump administration. Whether it’s written in Project 2025 or not is irrelevant.
They have learned that it’s better not to tell people what they plan to do because what they plan is so terrible and so badly received by the American people and raising the retirement age is only one piece of it.
They also want to change the way the cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) are calculated, whereas we would like to see them improved so they better reflect what seniors spend their money on, which tends to be housing and health care. The Republicans have promoted this thing called the Chained CPI, which actually would reduce COLAs for seniors.
Q: According to Verify.com, the Heritage Foundation has called for something called a flat Social Security benefit, though it is not part of Project 2025. What is that all about?
A: They propose to “flatten out” benefits across the income spectrum. This wouldn’t hurt lower income people as much as the middle class. The Warren Buffets of the world are not going to be significantly impacted because they don’t rely on Social Security. The people who are going to be impacted are those whose lifetime earnings average, say, $50,000 a year. They’ll simply get less in benefits. The flat benefit would cut deeper and deeper until Social Security becomes just another welfare program. It wouldn’t be so much of an “earned benefit” anymore.
Q: Trump claims that he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025, that it has nothing to do with him. And yet, apparently, the team working on it is 80% former Trump officials. So how do we how do we call him out on that discrepancy or hypocrisy, saying Project 2025 has nothing to do with him?
A: Well, number one, you can’t trust what Trump says. Any connection between things that Donald Trump says and the truth is purely accidental. But the fact is that Project 2025 was designed by people who were parts of his administration in the past, people who are his supporters. Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, is closely affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. In 2023, he wrote, “We owe so much to the Heritage Foundation and all that they’ve contributed to our cause over the past fifty years.” And Heritage was one of the sponsors of the Republican convention!
Q: We’ve talked a lot about Social Security. What would Project 2025 would do to hurt Medicare and the effort to lower prescription drug prices?
A: First of all, Project 2025 calls for repealing Medicare’s new ability to negotiate prescription drug prices with Big Pharma. That’s just the number one thing on their list. They also want to repeal the new $2,000 out of pocket cap on prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries. Project 2025 also advocates eliminating the $35 per month out of pocket cap on patients’ insulin costs. Basically, they want to reverse all the good things that the Inflation Reduction Act is doing for seniors. And that’s just for starters.
They have other provisions that would make it easier to privatize the Medicare program through Medicare Advantage. So we’d end up with more and more people at the mercy of privatized, profit-making insurers.
Basically, they would gut the traditional Medicare program. There wouldn’t be much left of the traditional program if, if it still existed at all, because it would be so expensive that no one would be able to afford to sign up. To paraphrase Newt Gingrich, who giddily promoted privatization, Project 2025 would induce the ‘dying on the vine’ of Medicare as we know it.