Project 2025, for those of you who do not know, is the blueprint the Heritage Foundation and several Trump advisors and former officials have put together to lay out their plans to remake American government and society. Remake is not too harsh a term — this is a very radical document. So radical, in fact, that Trump is trying to distance himself from it. It is a document outlining a plan to turn the American democracy into something very close to a presidential dictatorship.
What has this to do with tech or the tech industry? Quite a bit, actually. Much of what the report lays out is the destruction of the Independance of the federal civil service and the subjugation of independent regulators to the opinions of the court (The same Supreme Court that confused nitrogen oxide (a bad pollutant) with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) with five time in the opinion declaring that Courts were capable of figuring out technical regulations as appointed experts). Aggregating power to the executive could have profound effects on industrial policy, including climate change technology. Technology is, as it almost always has been in the US, intimately tied to the power and whims of the state.
What, then, does Trump and his Project 2025 want to do to technology? Below are some answers — not all, as the thing is 1000 pages long and moderately dense. These are my impressions after a first read. I hope they are a reminder that we vote for Administrations, not Presidents, and that one Administration is promising a radically different view of the power of government. That difference is going to affect your life and the technology path of the country in multiple ways.
I am going to start with porn. How’s that for a click bait?
The report says that porn should be banned, and codes porn in a manner that implies that LGBT+ content of any kind would be classified as porn. So, what does that have to do with technology? A lot, as it turns out:
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Bolding mine.
What is the definition of “telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread”? That could be huge. Is it the ISP that allows it? Is it the firms like Akami that cache material near to users to make the user experience faster? Is it the backbone utilities that run the Internet at large? is it places like Substack that allow LGBT+ people to write newsletters about their lives? You may think that the 1st Amendment will protect these firms, but that is not entirely ensured. Until this Court, it was widely understood that the President was not above the law. And there are already exemptions, narrow as they are, to pornography when it comes to free speech protections. At a minimum, it seems clear that any firm that supports LGBT+ content faces a legal minefield if these recommendations are put in place. This would be a fundamental shift in how the first amendment protects or does not protect speech, giving the government potentially much more control over what Americans are and are not allowed to talk about online.
The desire to control technology is evident throughout the document, with a heavy focus on gutting climate science. I will talk about that in its own section, but the desire to ensure that the government does not spend one dime on climate science or mitigation is evident throughout. Experts in the Executive are to be monitored and controlled:
Given a long list of priorities, coordinating efforts across agencies and measuring success are extremely challenging. The OSTP and OMB are required to work together on an annual basis to prioritize the funding requests and whatever Congress adds on top of them, but there continues to be concern about mission creep and funds expended on nonscientific R&D
Again, bolding mine. It seems clear from the context (there is significant discussion about climate science not being kept in its proper place and these Executive organizations getting in the way of business and de-regulation in this section) that nonscientific R&D is largely related to climate science. Regardless of the target, however, the intent is to reduce or eliminate the independence of these organizations and replace expert opinion, science, and independent information with the whim of the President.
Now, experts do not rule us. In a democracy, expert opinion is one input into the decision-making process. But for decisions to be meaningful and correctable, experts must be able to retain their Independance. Without that, the President and other decision makers do not get good information (look at the history of how the Ira War intelligence was manipulated and experts were pressured to give a desired answer). Just as importantly, there is no record of dissent to use as a basis for challenging or correct the decision. The Executive becomes functionally stupid in areas regarding technology.
This desire for control is resented in the section DOD technology. It is too long to quote, but there is a focus on moving prototypes to production/battlefields quicker and speeding up sales to “trusted allies”. Speeding up sales is achieved in part by cutting Congress out of the loop (“End informal congressional notification.”). If you combine the desire to move fast to get thing son the battlefield quicker with the desire to put the military more directly under the control of the President and the desire to cut out the Legislature form some of these decisions is, again, a recipe for functional stupidity.
I am a military brat — I am perfectly capable of believing that the military moves too slowly in some of these areas. But the solution is not to limit independence of the people involved and the knowledge that the Congress possess. That way lies echo chambers and terrible decisions. Openness, respect for expert opinions, and collaboration with Congress are the only way to ensure that DOD technology actually serves its purpose.
The right-wing echo chamber, the false belief that the 2020 election was stolen, seems to drive at least one item in the cyber security section and the FEMA section:
End USCYBERCOM’s participation in federal efforts to “fortify” U.S. elections to eliminate the perception that DOD is engaging in partisan politics
…
e. Yet CISA has rapidly expanded its scope into lanes where it does not belong, the most recent and most glaring example being censorship of so-called misinformation and disinformation.
Protecting election systems and investigating foreign election disinformation, which is what I have to assume they are referring to, is not partisan politics. It is fundamental to a functioning democracy. You only curtail those activities if you A) don’t care about the integrity of election equipment and thus accurate elections B) hope to benefit from foreign interference in elections. Conservative pressure has already closed one renowned disinformation research center and Project 2025 plans on neutering the government in that area entirely.
This is getting long, and I am not even 20% of the way through the document. I will be back to discuss more of the project’s impact, especially on climate technology. But I hope you can see a couple of important points form this discussion. First, the government has a great deal of influence on technology and technology companies. Second, Project 2025 would likely be a disaster for technology as it relates to the needs of the country. Its focus on conservative grievance mongering would lesson our ability to understand foreign interference and secure election machinery. And its insistence on centralizing power in the office of the President would effectively end independent input, whether from experts or Congress, making the President, functionally, a moron when it comes ot technology. And, of course, it would punish technology platforms that do not toe its bigoted anti-LGBT+ line.
Project 2025 gets a lot of attention for its authoritarianism and push toward Christian nationalism. It is important, however, to remember just how deeply these plans would change our relationship to other parts of our lives, such as technology.
