Democrats Must Start Project 2029 Right Now

The Biden administration's worst mistake was forgetting they were operating under a ticking clock. Don't make that mistake again.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

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During the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats did an excellent job of spreading awareness about Project 2025, to the point where a 922-page collection of ideas for policy and bureaucratic change became a genuine campaign liability for Republicans. It got bad enough that Donald Trump felt compelled to claim (absurdly) that he knew nothing about it, and its architects at the Heritage Foundation might even have wondered whether they made a mistake by releasing it publicly.

But surely no one on the right is feeling doubt about Project 2025 today. Yes, they had to endure some temporary bad press. But in the end it didn’t hurt Trump too much, and it was well worth the time and effort it took. It really has provided a blueprint they are now following in their extraordinary attempt to dismantle the American government and just about everything it does to benefit the American public.

In other words, Project 2025 is doing exactly what it was intended to do. The process of creating it helped conservatives clarify their goals, and as important as its specific recommendations was the tone it set. The implicit but unmistakable theme of the document was this: Once we take power, we are going to go absolutely berserk. No right-wing fantasy will be off the table. There is no limit to the glorious destruction we will inflict upon the federal government and everything it does.

Newly appointed Republican federal official maximizing departmental efficiency

One need only look at the wreckage of agencies across the government to see how successful Project 2025 has been. The project has been helped greatly by the fact that it is far easier to destroy than to build; it turns out that an important agency like USAID can be obliterated in literally a matter of days, but if the next Democratic president wants to rebuild it, doing so would take years.

Given what they are going to confront, if that next Democratic administration approaches its task in the way previous administrations have, it will fail. Which is why creating Project 2029 — the plan for what Democrats will do from the first moment they take power — must begin right now.

Not in early 2028. Not after the midterms in 2026. Right now.

This can’t be like the coalitional liberal projects of the past

Let me be clear: I am not advocating that a working group of representatives from a spectrum of liberal organizations arrive at a consensus so they can put out a bland document with a checklist of broad policy principles like “Honoring our veterans” and “Providing a top-quality education to every child.” I’ve seen efforts like that up close before, and they tend to be well-meaning and ultimately ineffectual. Instead, I’m talking about a hard-headed, well-funded, highly specific plan to do two things: undo the damage now being wrought, and then out of the ashes build a new federal government better able to serve the public and accomplish liberal goals.

In order for this project to do what it needs to do, Democrats have to cast off their instinctive modesty and caution. Project 2029 should be animated by a spirit every bit as aggressive as the one driving Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

That doesn’t mean it should be a blueprint for lawbreaking, but that it should be driven by a visionary ambition. Rebuilding from the horror of this administration will be incredibly difficult, but there will also be opportunities to create something better than what Trump is destroying. Liberals have plenty of complaints about plodding bureaucracies and inefficient systems, and while the political task of the moment is not to say “DOGE has some good points” but rather to make clear how Trump and Musk are hurting people, Project 2029 can take on the question of what a better government would look like and how to create it.

There is plenty of money on the left for this enterprise, if only it were deployed. Democratic superPACs spent $839 million trying to elect Kamala Harris, most of which was wasted on weak and ineffective advertising. You could staff up a robust Project 2029 effort for the next three years for ten or twenty million dollars. Double or triple that and it would be even better. There are a dozen liberal billionaires who could write a check for that much tomorrow if they chose.

But it has to start now, because at the core of both the project itself and the way it must reimagine Democratic policymaking is something the Biden administration never understood.

Time is a precious resource that must not be squandered

Much of what Joe Biden accomplished is being dismantled, in many cases because of a factor that I am coming to believe will define how we think of his administration: time.

I’ll have more to say about this in future articles, but the essential problem is that Biden’s administration never fully incorporated the variable of time — particularly what could happen if Democrats lost the White House in 2024 — into their policy planning. Again and again, they designed policies with arduous multi-step processes for implementation, then carried them out in ways that caused even greater delay. They were operating under a ticking clock, and either they didn’t realize it or they convinced themselves that there was little temporal urgency in what they were doing; it was more important to get the policy right than to worry about how long it took.

The result has been nothing short of disaster, because many of the best things Biden did were left vulnerable to a future Republican administration, particularly one with almost no limits on its malice or its ambition.

An example will illustrate the point. The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022, included $27 billion for a newly created Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was divided among three programs: the National Clean Investment Fund, the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator, and Solar for All. The design is intricate, embodying ideas both liberal (community involvement!) and conservative (leveraging private investment!). But because it’s so intricate, it wasn’t until almost two years after the bill’s passage, in 2024, that the EPA finally awarded the grants of the first two programs, totaling $20 billion.

And that award was just to the groups that would distribute the money, not to actual projects; that would only come later, after yet more proposals and evaluations and reports and stakeholder listening sessions and oversight. As a consequence, none of that $20 billion has been spent yet.

So now, Trump’s EPA administrator Lee Zeldin can walk right in and terminate all $20 billion. There are court challenges, and the administration might be forced to give out the money. But maybe not. In which case, all the work that was put into these lovingly crafted programs will amount to nothing.

As I said, I’ll have more to say about this problem in the future. But the point is, Democrats have to conduct both their political and policy planning with a sense of urgency. They are under another ticking clock. The next three and a half years will seem interminable, but they will also go by very quickly. Every day it becomes clearer just how hard it’s going to be for the country to recover from what Republicans are now doing to it. Democrats must start planning now for what they’re going to do with power, and how to make what they do stick, when they get the chance. If they don’t, they’ll fail again, and the entire country will pay the price.