Recent reporting byReutersshows that conservatives like Robert Bowes – former senior Trump administration official and failed regulatory agency nominee – are planning to roll back a number of consumer protections and policies first put in place after the Great Recession to prevent another recession spurred by a collapse of the banking industry. As Reuters notes, many of the plans under consideration would “pare protections for small-scale investors and borrowers and allow companies to raise money with less scrutiny.”
Stephen Moore, a senior Heritage Foundation staffer and one of the authors of Project 2025, apparently thinks it is a good idea to slash “the Internal Revenue Service’s budget and terminate employees who have participated in diversity initiatives.” Moore also told Reuters “he’d like to see ‘less of the regulators sticking their fingers in all these financial transactions,especially in areas like banking regulation,’ singling out bank capital requirements in particular.” In other words, he wants less scrutiny of the very banks that caused the Great Recession while making it easier for people to cheat on their taxes.
For years, the right-wing agenda has been committed to serving the interests of big banks and monied interests while trying to roll back consumer protections, including by abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). But now Project 2025 shows how they might advance their anti-consumer agenda. Chapter 25 of the “Mandate for Leadership” explicitly calls for Congress to abolish the CFPB. But absent congressional action, Project 2025 has put forward a few different proposals that could lead to abolishing an agency that has provided$19 billion in reliefto Americans in just a decade of existence.
At the heart of the anti-CFPB crusade is Robert Bowes, the author of Project 2025's chapter on dismantling the agency whose controversial background includes a stint in the Trump administration. Bowes profitedfrom trading and bets that resulted in apparent conflicts of interest. Now, he’s aligning with payday lenders to push for the dissolution of the CFPB, calling for ending the agency’s anti-discrimination policies and espousing "anarcho-capitalist" views. Notably, Bowes peddled conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection and the2020 election, and shareddiscriminatory remarks against judicial nominees. One thing is clear: Bowes poses a significant threat to the future of the CFPB.
Project 2025’s plans for the Executive Office of the President (EOP), authored by Russ Vought, appear to embrace the radical “unitary executive theory” that would vastly expand the president’s power with regard to independent federal agencies, including CFPB. The“Mandate for Leadership” states that the “President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.” Their remedy to this supposed problem uses the language of the Unitary Executive Theory and says the president should “limit, control” the executive branch and exercise “self-denial” to limit the scope of the government.
To drive home this point even further, the playbook for the DOJ by Project 2025 suggests the next conservative president to ask the Supreme Court to overturnHumphrey’s Executor v. United States, a New Deal-era precedent that provides protections for independent agencies. If this relatively obscure precedent were overturned, it could give the president the ability to fire the heads of independent agencies, like CFPB, at will.
While Project 2025 has laid out a number of different paths to get there, the end result they are seeking is to abolish or effectively gut the ability of agencies like CFPB to actually carry out their mission of protecting consumers and preventing Wall Street from causing another economic collapse.
A major accomplishment of [Project 2025] thus far is a 900+-page policy roadmap called the "Mandate for Leadership," readymade for a Republican president to enact upon taking office. And that roadmap calls for a "campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions" of the Comstock Act "against providers and distributors of abortion pills."... It's worth noting that while Project 2025 focuses specifically on the shipping of abortion pills, Comstock refers to banning the mailing of anything used in abortions. That means the DOJ could enforce the law much more broadly than pills, and effectively end abortion in the U.S., says David Cohen, law professor at Drexel University.
Whatever “moderating” claims Republicans make about leaving abortion to the states, leading conservative groups, such as those who are part of the Heritage Foundation–helmed Project 2025, are openly advocating that Republicans institute a national abortion ban by reviving enforcement of the Comstock Act—a national abortion ban that these groups argue is already on the books. If that happened, it would be like the Arizona ban had gone federal, but worse.
Project 2025 would force climate science rejection on the Departments of Energy, Commerce, Defense and Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center and more. It would reorganize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, to squash “climate alarmism.” In a blow to national security, it would block the Pentagon from considering climate issues in its planning, at a time when climate crises are destabilizing influences in many countries and could lead to unrest and war.
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