Don't Call It Project 2029 If It's Not A Fighting Document

When Donald Trump took office, dusted off Project 2025—the governing playbook he’d disclaimed throughout the election—and handed implementation to Elon Musk, et al., it became clear to me Democrats would need an analog. Before the next election, someone or some entity would have to assemble a plan, with buy-in across the left, that would serve two main purposes: rebuild from the Trump wreckage, and establish an equal right to implement a lightning-strike agenda.

This was by no means some stroke of brilliance. Many people with an interest in liberal politics had some version of the same idea. The ones most closely networked with funders and politicians went on to establish actual organizations or working groups, which they pitched to donors more or less on these grounds.

These liberals, all veteran Democratic operatives, have begun offering glimpses of their work, and I’m of two minds. First, generously: As the saying goes, there’s no bad ideas in a brainstorm. Ideas are good. Ideas that start out bad can become good. Ideas that seem unresponsive to the needs of today can become urgent—or they might just be worthy apart from any particular salience, easily slotted into some future appropriation bill without fanfare.

Second, more importantly: We are not—at this rate—getting a Project 2029 that serves anything like the purposes Project 2025 was meant to serve. We’re getting competing factional agendas, from a familiar universe of people, all of whom want jobs in or influence over the next administration. And so they’re devising policy ideas meant for popular consumption, rather than governing stratagems for fixing the American state.

This is an error of conception. It doesn’t discredit any particular idea let alone the whole suite. It just means that if liberals or progressives thought party operatives were hard at work on a blueprint for the first several months of the next Democratic administration—a series of steps that any Dem president could execute to put the country back on an even keel—they’re going to be terribly disappointed. Unless something changes.

The post-Trump era will not be a blank canvas for policy makers. To be clear, it will demand a great deal of legislating, bureaucratic deftness, technical knowhow, and creativity. Assembling a new government will need to be undertaken with an eye toward avoiding obvious pitfalls, which will of course place policy expertise at a premium.

But the governing machinery all these operatives expect to be awaiting them will be broken. The challenge will be to get a new apparatus up and running quickly, which will in turn require blowing through obstacles—the procedural ones that have been there all along, and the landmines that will be strewn about by saboteurs.

A hodgepodge of detailed policy objectives is not responsive to that challenge. Not even if the policies tick all the right interest-group and message-testing boxes.

Here, via The Bulwark, is a snapshot of what the group that calls itself Project 2029 has cooking:

Utility Monopolies: America’s electric grid still runs on a century-old monopoly model that leaves 150 million households with no choice in who provides their power and tens of billions of dollars in potential savings locked behind outdated laws. Our proposal outlines how the next President should break these monopolies open, letting competition drive down bills, speed up delivery, and unleash a new wave of cleaner, cheaper energy for families and businesses.

Child Care: Families today are caught in the “Child Care Catch-22.” With child care costs taking up nearly 10 to 20 percent of the average family’s already stretched take-home pay, families can’t afford to pay for child care while they work. And because parents with young kids are managing other costs like saving for a home or paying student debt, many can’t afford to stay home and not work. Our proposal outlines how the next President can ensure that every family has the time, financial support, and high-quality care options they want, giving parents back the power of choice on how to support their young children.

Kids Over Clicks: Parents today are raising kids in a digital environment engineered to hook them and the consequences, from a worsening youth mental health crisis to a new wave of harm from AI chatbots, are no longer in dispute. Just as America sets minimum ages for drinking and gambling, it’s time to set real guardrails around the products targeting kids online. Our proposal would protect children from the most harmful features of social media an