Decoding Trump's Project 2025, Part 7

How Trump would end overtime for workers, allow wholesale discrimination, raise food prices, and crash the economy

We’re now in the home stretch not only of the election but of Decoding Project 2025 and our march through the 885-page blueprint for fascism and making America weak again.

Totally ok again in Trump’s world, as long as the company can claim a “religious” motivation.

A labor of hate

The last part of the document concerns the economy, starting with workers but also having major ramifications for social and economic justice overall. It should come as no surprise that the Trumpers are anti-worker and anti-labor — but even as jaded as I might be about such things, I never thought I’d see a major party run a platform to demolish overtime for workers.

This is part of a general demolition of workers’ rights: they want to take every legal requirement for the workplace and turn it into what they term a negotiable default. That’s policy-speak for letting large companies exert their size and power advantages to run roughshod over workers — as they were able to do before any federal labor laws existed.

What those laws and regulations do is to say “here are some non-negotiables, a floor for the workers, items that are locked in, and then you can negotiate on top of that.”

One of them is the simple notion that work beyond a 40-hour work week, in a broad range of occupations, is legally required to be counted as overtime and paid at a 1.5x rate (i.e. “time and a half”). If that suddenly becomes negotiable again, what do you think is going to happen?

The whole point of legal protection for workers is that when it comes to “negotiations” between a large corporation and its workers, the corporation is going to win — unless the law steps in to make the situation more fair.

Donald Trump would end that.

Yet another massive change would come in how the law treats discrimination. Right now, discrimination can be proven in two ways: proof of discriminatory intent, or proof of disparate impact. This makes a world of sense. Not every case of discrimination involves a smoking gun of racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, etc. A boss’s or company’s intent can be difficult to prove. But if the outcome of a company’s policies is to systematically discriminate against women, for example, firing them at higher rates, promoting them at lower rates, paying them much less than men for doing the same work, then that disparate impact is something for which those women can sue.

Again, Donald Trump would end that. Under Project 2025, the only cases that could be brought would be ones in which there is evidence of discriminatory intent — giving employers a green light to discriminate with impunity, as long as they keep their discriminatory thoughts to themselves. And when it comes to homophobia, well, Trump would give a complete green light to that, as it specifically calls for companies to be able to discriminate against LGBTQ+ Americans.

Then the document goes even further, stating that “religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs, general nondiscrimination laws notwithstanding.”

General discrimination laws notwithstanding! This says that as long as any employer can claim a “religious” motivation, they can discriminate as much as they want, and the law cannot touch them. This allows a complete circumvention of the law. And this position, once established, would allow for those same companies to discriminate against customers too.

This is the right-wing dream: to claim “religion” as a rationale for bringing back segregation and institutionalized Apartheid-style racism — along with homophobia, sexism, everything.

And if we need more proof of this: Project 2025 would also completely gut the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the EEOC) and turn it away from its longstanding mission to fight race and gender discrimination.

Meanwhile, they also want to eliminate the H-2A visa, which is used for seasonal or temporary farm workers. This would do more to jack up food prices for all Americans than any of the inflationary pressures of earlier this decade — it would make much of the US agricultural industry entirely untenable, and it would be absolutely devastating to working families, who would quickly find themselves unable to afford basic groceries.

This is once again a place where more traditional Republicans have been routed and driven from their own bastions. A free-market conservative approach to the economy might not be worker-friendly, but it certainly wants employers to have the ability to hire workers without friction.

Yet in Trump’s Republican Party, capitalism yields to racism — because that’s where their votes are. Employers want more workers? Tough, because the base wants to deport every Latino they can find. Free-marketeers believe free trade is better for the economy? Tough, because the political optics are better to say we’re slapping tariffs on “foreign goods,” especially ones from China. Xenophobia is driving their economic policy.

Shredding the economy

There is a curious thing in right-wing discourse, where they have long had a death wish for the Department of Commerce.

This may seem odd on first glance. Aren’t Republicans always going on and on about how they’re the champions of the free market, superior stewards of the economy, and better for business?

What if that is all completely wrong? What if it’s all just a smoke screen for a vivisection of the American economy and government — tearing it apart piece by piece for the sole benefit of a new superclass of American oligarchs?

Wanting to destroy Commerce is the tell, and Project 2025 gives even more of the game away — because Commerce is the umbrella agency for a host of key offices that are extremely valuable. Here are just two examples:

• They want to destroy the Patent and Trademark Office. Legally, this is absolute insanity. Economically, it would be utter chaos. When it comes to corruption, though, this makes total sense: they don’t actually want the functions of the PTO to go away; they want to own them. Suddenly there would be a patents.com — owned by Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or Jeff Bezos, perhaps — that would instantly be a multi-billion dollar company, a giant private monopoly with higher fees, predatory practices, and zero accountability.

• They want to privatize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service (NWS). This was something they tried to do in Trump’s presidency before, as chronicled in Michael Lewis’s must-read book, The Fifth Risk. Trump’s head of NOAA was none other than Barry Lee Myers, the head of Accuweather — which views NOAA and NWS as competitors. Never mind that over 80% of weather data comes from NOAA/NWS and that it’s more accurate. Myers wants to be The Weather Oligarch. They want to take these valuable government agencies that are pillars of the American economy and society, and own and exploit them.

Another key subsidiary of Commerce is the Census Bureau, and once again we can see the dark hand of racism and ethnic cleansing in the Trump proposals. Here, they literally aim for “Command and Control” over the Census — which is enshrined in the original Constitution and is supposed to be a non-partisan data collection effort. They want to seize full control of it in time for the 2030 Census, after they tried and failed to do so in time for 2020.

Why? Here’s the giveaway: they want to “actively engage with conservative groups and voices to promote response to the decennial census.”

This is code for doing everything they can to increase the count in deep-red counties and to undercount the more blue, more diverse parts of the country, especially in large metropolitan areas.

And why do they want that? Because the Census drives congressional representation — and the allocation of federal funds. Skewing the Census count could literally swing seats in the House and the Electoral College, while then driving more federal dollars to right-wing districts (because while they pretend to hate federal funding, they lap it up like pigs at a trough every chance they get, and then brag to their constituents that they landed funding even when they voted against it in Washington).

If we consider this alongside their plans for detention and deportation of millions of immigrants (including legal immigrants and naturalized citizens), it’s clear that the Trumpers want to engage in wholesale manipulation of the definition of “American” so they can cobble together a fake majority, any way they can.

Also, reading these items together, I’m actually surprised that the Trumpers haven’t already thought about privatizing the Census. Perhaps they have yet to find the wannabe oligarch who wants to own it.

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That’s it for now. But we have one more installment left to go — more on the wrecking ball Trump would take to the economy, along with some final remarks, slated for Monday.

And in the meantime, if you haven’t already, go to vote.org and make sure that you’re registered to vote and that you know where your polling place is. Republican election administrators love shifting up or decreasing the number of poll sites, just to confuse people and make it less likely that they’ll vote, especially if you live in an especially Democratic-leaning area.

And of course, if you can still vote early, or vote by mail — do it! Don’t wait until Election Day and then suddenly have a time crunch and be unable to vote. Get it out of the way today.