The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, better known as Project 2025, isn’t exactly new, but it’s been getting a lot more attention ever since “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” released an excellent episode highlighting how cartoonishly awful this blueprint for a theoretical Trump second term actually is. While the main goal may be to turn the U.S. into a Christofascist ethnostate, if you thought Project 2025 would ignore transportation policy, you would also be sorely mistaken.
Now, we want to be clear, we’re not saying that if Trump wins in November, his transportation policy will be the worst thing to come out of Project 2025. There are many, far-worse ideas in there, and if they’re implemented, removing bike lanes will probably be the last thing on the minds of the millions of Americans whose lives will be made objectively worse the day Trump takes office. Still, it’s important to look at what the Republican plan for 2025 has to say about transportation policy.
Conveniently, our friend the CityNerd recently dug through the hundreds and hundreds of pages of Project 2025 and put together a video outlining many of the most egregious plans the incoming Trump administration has for ruining transportation for decades. For example, they want to take away the Department of Transportation’s ability to provide grants that fund specific projects and instead have the DOT send checks directly to the states with no limits on how they can be spent. That doesn’t sound too terrible on its face until you remember that means money that would have been spent on urban improvements that improve millions of people’s quality of life will instead get spent on widening freeways and political pet projects.
It only gets worse from there, too. They don’t want the Federal Highway Administration to worry about any of that pesky pollution that cars produce even though garbage air quality affects everyone, even their Neo-Nazi supporters. They also want to get rid of a bunch of regulations that they say make new cars more expensive because used cars are less safe for occupants. The safety of people who aren’t in cars, however, doesn’t even remotely factor in, presumably because crossing the street is socialism or something.
They’re also mad that Vision Zero policies sometimes make driving less convenient because, again, the only people who matter to Republicans are the people driving cars. Also, wouldn’t you know it, they also hate the “anti-fossil fuel climate agenda,” even though, again, climate change hurts everyone regardless of their political party.
This is already getting long, and we’re barely halfway through, so why don’t you watch the whole video below? There’s no telling what the next couple of months will look like, but if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that a second Trump administration is going to make everything worse, and no one is safe. Unless you’re a billionaire, that is.