The Project 2025 Budget in Congress

This post is republished from SciLight, an independent science policy publication on Substack.

“The House Republican campaign committee argues its candidates have nothing to do with Project 2025, and the attacks are concocted by Democrats to shift attention from their own border and inflation policies.” Or at least that’s the story they told Lisa Mascaro for her recent story for the Associated Press on Project 2025.

Yet, their actions speak louder than words, and the currently pending House spending bills confirm that conservative members of Congress are all in on Project 2025. Specifically, I reviewed the nearly 500 “poison pill riders” that have been crammed into those measures, and I found over 300 that were aimed at advancing specific recommendations contained in Project 2025’s comprehensive policy blueprint, Mandate for Leadership.

Not familiar with the concept of “poison pill riders”? Let’s back up for a minute and do a little world building.

Congressional legislation basically falls into one of two buckets. The first, authorizing legislation, is what creates new programs. Think, the Clean Air Act, Dodd-Frank, and so on. The second are appropriations bills. These are when Congress decides to literally put their money where their mouth is and pay for the programs they have previously created. Appropriations are a big deal, because when they don’t pass, that’s what causes the government shutdowns we hear about every year. That’s what makes them the paradigmatic “must-pass legislation.” And yes, our budgeting process is currently set up so that Congress has to go through this ritual every (fiscal) year.

Critically, Congress has made these two buckets of legislation completely bifurcated. You can’t pay for things through authorization bills. And you can’t make new policy through spending bills – there’s an elaborate set of institutional rules that Congress has imposed upon itself to guard against that.

But, as we all know, Congress isn’t very good at passing authorization bills these days. That makes cramming substantive policy measures into spending bills so tempting. Hence, poison pill riders.

Poison pill riders have become especially popular with conservative lawmakers in the last few decades. Recall that the current 12 appropriations contain nearly 500 of them. The formula they have landed upon is to add “limitations” provisions to appropriations bills to skirt requirements against substantive policymaking. The way these work is that a lawmaker tucks in short amendments barring agencies from using appropriated funds to implement a program or take certain kinds of actions that a lawmaker opposes. Others condition the use of appropriated funds upon the agency taking certain kinds of actions that are not required by law.

In either case, the effect is to amend the underlying authorizing statute, but to do so in a way that is dressed in the garb of appropriations language.

And what makes these “poison pills”? They’re designed to force other lawmakers to accept them against their will. It used to be that lawmakers weren’t even aware of them – most take up a line or two in 1000-page-long-plus legislation. Nowadays we’re better at sussing them out. Even then, though, the goal is to turn the appropriations process into a form of legislative hostage-taking: Lawmakers risk a government shutdown if they vote against appropriations bills they would otherwise support but for the poison pill riders.

So, it’s no surprise that conservative lawmakers are resorting to such a fundamentally anti-democratic budgeting gimmick to try to ram through the Project 2025 policy agenda. Indeed, this is of a piece with Project 2025, which is itself aimed at short-circuiting our constitutional order to institute an authoritarian Christian nationalist regime. None of these things would pass through the regular order legislative process; as conservative lawmakers know, the controversial recommendations of Project 2025 all poll deeply underwater.

So, what are some of these Project 2025 riders? Nearly every appropriations bill (each bill is divided to specific components of the government, such as the military or health-related agencies) contains a rider barring funded agencies from hanging a gay pride flag. Fully consistent with Project 2025’s goal of erasing the very notion of the LGBTQ+ community from any and all official executive branch documents.

Another common rider would bar agencies from using funding to taking any kind of punitive action against someone who engaged in homophobic discrimination – so long as that homophobic discrimination was based on a sincerely held religious belief. A startling first step towards Project 2025’s Christian national vision.

Other riders are much more specific to the agency. For instance, the appropriations bill for Homeland Security would grant the agency unfettered authority to reprogram funding to target immigration enforcement. Another would reverse a policy that limits immigration enforcement activities in certain protected areas, such as schools and churches.

The Energy and Water spending bill contains riders that would deny funding for the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative as well as implementing several energy efficiency regulations.

Aggressive anti-immigration policy and rejection of the need for a just and effective response to the climate crisis are, of course, major themes of Project 2025.

So, conservative lawmakers can disavow Project 2025 all they want. But, as these poison pill riders demonstrate, Project 2025 has become a perfect encapsulation of the modern conservative movement. And conservative lawmakers will not disavow that any time soon.