Last month, the United States elected a new president whose policy positions and appointments make it clear that he intends to be the Privatizer-in-Chief. While a CNN headline calls Trump’s master plan “a radical reformation” of the US government, it’s more like a radical decimation: What Trump doesn’t privatize, he will try to dismantle. It’s almost as though his team Googled the word “public” and used the search results as their target list.

That’s why I’m asking for your help. Our work feels more important than ever.

Project 2025, which was written by more than 140  staffers from Trump’s first term—some  returning for the next one—lays out the agenda succinctly. After railing against the supposed shortcomings of the “progressive system,” it states: “the only real solution is for the national government to do less: to decentralize and privatize as much as possible…”

What does that look like?

• Abolishing the Department of Education, a longtime rightwing talking point and promise of Trump’s campaigns, is just the start. Under the false label of “school choice,” Trump and his supporters in Congress are pushing for a radical ‘school voucher’ policy that will pour public money into private schools that are allowed to discriminate, will have fewer standards and requirements, and can teach intolerance, meanwhile draining public schools of funding.
• Trump signed an executive order in his first administration that set the stage for privatizing Medicare; for his new administration, he has named Mehmet Oz, who has advocated aggressively expanding the private Medicare Advantage, to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
• Project 2025 includes proposals to break up or downsize vital agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which it claims is “harmful to U.S. prosperity” because it has “become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It also calls for severely downsizing FEMA.
• Project 2025 also calls for fully commercializing National Weather Service, which provides, among other things, severe weather warnings for the entire nation for free. When those are turned over to a profit-making corporation anxious to make money, where will the corners be cut? Will the protections of a national alert system only be available to those who pay for it?
• And Project 2025, in a section written by the Department of Homeland Security deputy secretary during the first Trump administration, states the Federal Government could privatize the screening function of the Transportation Safety Administration, and “expect to save 15 percent–20 percent from the existing aviation screening budget, but savings could be significantly larger.” How safe would you feel flying under the care of a low-budget TSA?
  
• Trump will remove dedicated public servants who have made the health, safety, and welfare of Americans—at work, on the highways, in our kitchens—their top priority. Trump’s priority is to slash staff and trash programs that work. And on top of that, he’s filling his cabinet and staff with radical ideologues and loyalists apparently drawn from his Friends & Family list (including the possibly future-former-fiancée of Don Jr.).

Fighting against this radical privatization agenda is what In the Public Interest does. It’s who we are and who we’ve always been. And we’re going to need your help.

We typically send a year-end fundraising appeal. But this year is different. The threat is greater than ever before, and the work we do together is going to be more important than ever before.

We hope you’ll join us with a donation of any size.

Donald Cohen
Executive Director