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The 887-page "Mandate for Leadership" recently put out by the Heritage Foundation and various ex-officials from the Trump administration is touted as a roadmap for running the government by the next conservative (i.e., Republican) administration. It is also a scary compilation of dozens of reasons why none of us should hope that a Republican administration gets voted in anytime soon.
One of the first things that a new Republican administration would do would be to “dismantle the administrative state,” i.e., fire as many professional civil service employees as possible and either not replace them or replace them with political appointees who could be dismissed at the whim of the President.
The avowed purpose of dismantling the administrative state would be to eliminate any independence which federal agencies might otherwise have from political pressure. So, for example, the Department of Justice would be stacked with political appointees who could tell prosecutors who to sue, who to prosecute and who not to prosecute, according to the political priorities of the administration. Some may recall that this happened in several instances under the Trump administration.
Another important purpose would be to downsize or eliminate departments whose activities, such as reporting on climate change, do not suit the political agenda of the new administration. For instance, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would be “downsized” and most of its climate research would be “disbanded” because the OAR is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism.”
Beyond dismantling large parts of the Federal government, the Mandate urges the adoption of multiple policies which are (a) unpopular, (b) inhumane, and (c) completely nonresponsive to the actual problems which confront the country.
For example, the administration would work to enact a nationwide abortion ban despite the fact that abortion bans are unpopular and have been voted down in every instance where they have been put to a vote – even in conservative states. The Mandate celebrates the decision overturning Roe v. Wade as “the greatest pro-family win in a generation” without explaining how forcing people to have children they do not want supports families.
The Mandate proposes banning “critical race theory,” which has become code language for anything approaching an honest account of U.S. racial history. The Mandate would have us pretend that racial and gender inequalities do not exist, even though contrary evidence is everywhere. The fact that the average net worth of black families is 70% lower than the net worth of white families, even after recent gains, is one but by no means the only example.
All references to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs would be eliminated by –
“deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion(“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
Senior military officers would be vetted to be sure that they are free of any “woke” beliefs and are aligned with the political views of the administration. “Woke” corporations who continue to operate DEI programs would be encouraged to discontinue them by denying them Federal contracts.
Transgender folks (drag queens?) would be banned from military service and would be treated as pornographers and child abusers:
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, . . . has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
The Mandate views climate change not as an existential threat but as a partisan political issue, stating at one point that “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” Starting from that premise, the Mandate would:
With respect to immigration, the Mandate would aim to eliminate or minimize all immigration, legal and illegal, regardless of adverse consequences for migrants and the U.S. economy. At one point, the Mandate says that “[i]llegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized.” Initiatives on immigration would, among other things:
The Mandate is littered with statements about the current state of affairs which are patently untrue, and which are cited to support policy initiatives which are the exact opposites of the policies that would make sense in current circumstances.
For example, the Mandate states that “the United States faces “precipitous economic decline,” whereas in fact, the U.S. economy is in good shape by most conventional measures, i.e., full employment, robust job and GDP growth, and lower inflation than almost anywhere else in the developed world.
The Mandate also states that current Federal deficits are the results of runaway spending by the Biden administration, whereas in fact those deficits have resulted mostly from tax cuts enacted by the Reagan, Bush, and Trump administrations.
Starting from these flawed premises, the Mandate proposes further tax cuts for wealthy taxpayers and corporations, advocates repeal of all tax measures passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, opposes funding for the IRS that would enable it to go after wealthy tax evaders, opposes third-party reporting requirements that would increase tax collections, and opposes international agreements that would provide for a global minimum tax on multinational corporations.
The Mandate goes on to suggest that a really good tax system would replace the income tax with a consumption tax, thereby shifting most tax burdens from the wealthy to the rest of us.
The Mandate is also full of measures that would marginalize or silence sources of politically inconvenient information. For example, the Mandate would suppress accurate information about U.S. racial history, defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and shut down current efforts to report on climate change and the social cost of carbon.
The Mandate also advocates U.S. withdrawal from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which it denounces as “a taxpayer-funded left-wing think tank”—likely because OECD publishes high-quality statistics and reports which compare the U.S. to other member countries and which, in many cases, are not flattering to the United States or U.S. conservatives.
The Mandate would also weaken environmental protection laws and regulations, abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, increase work requirements for various federal poverty programs, restrict the availability of free school lunches, and take various other measures which, collectively, would target the most vulnerable parts of the U.S. population – allegedly to prevent “waste, fraud, and abuse” and, more likely, to pay for the tax cuts proposed for the wealthiest U.S. citizens.
Many of us have wondered why Republican politicians spend much time on culture war issues and much less on the policies which they would use to govern if elected. The Mandate tells us the reason – these policies, including abortion bans, re-writing racial history, tax cuts for the wealthy, and others, are unpopular and unlikely to win elections.
For those of us who find these policies offensive, our task is to just be sure that voters who consider voting Republican know what they are voting for. If we do that, we need not worry about who will win the next election.
The above was written before the 2024 Presidential election. It now appears that the voters who elected Trump did not know what they were voting for and are finding out the hard way, one painful step at a time. This promises to be a very long four years.
JCT
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