The 922-page plan authored by The Heritage Foundation details what former President Donald Trump’s administration will do if he becomes president again. The agenda is sweeping and would change our nation as well as our commonwealth: raising taxes on working- and middle-class people; gutting Medicaid, veterans benefits and funding for schools; and replacing members of the civil service with Trump loyalists. These policy proposals are extreme and deeply unpopular, but they could be very real very soon and have profound impact on Virginia.

A majority of Virginians make less than $87,500 per year and are particularly in the crosshairs of the plan. Simply put, your income taxes are going to go up. At the same time, if you get health insurance through your job, your benefits and coverage will go down. As conceived, the plan calls for the federal government to tax health insurance and other related benefits. These “Trump taxes” would squeeze already tight middle-class family budgets.

The most vulnerable Virginians, many of whom rely on Medicaid and Medicare as a backstop for health care costs, would lose critical benefits or be kicked off their plans altogether. Project 2025 puts time limits and lifetime caps on Medicaid, which could kick 900,000 Virginians out of the program. If you’re on Medicare, prices are going up. Under the Biden-Harris administration, Medicare is finally able to negotiate prescription drug prices, saving seniors (including the 1.3 million Virginians on Medicare) $1.5 billion in prescription drug costs. Project 2025 would reverse this historic achievement.

Virginia has a significant military population. Sadly, your service to the country would not shield you from this plan, which calls for reducing spending on veterans, arguing that some conditions covered by the Veterans Administration are only “tenuously related” to military service and thus should not be the government’s responsibility. These cuts would be devastating for the 12% of Virginians who are veterans but they plan to go further, calling for ending “concurrent receipt of retirement and disability payments.”  The plan’s authors believe that honoring the debt to those who served our nation and came back with a disability is simply not worth the expense.

Project 2025 would also eliminate the Department of Education, moving programs to different departments and cutting others entirely. One program, known as Title I, provides funding to low-income schools, sending $277 million to Virginia in 2020 — funding that would be cut under Project 2025. This might only be the beginning. Trump has proposed cutting all federal funding to school districts with vaccine mandates — which includes every school in Virginia. The lack of federal funds in our schools would likely be offset by local taxes that would be passed onto all Virginians.

One throughline of Project 2025 is a deep skepticism of the nonpartisan federal civil service. Trump believes that federal employees should be loyal to him over the country. At the end of his term, Trump signed an executive order to give himself more control over positions that are currently nonpartisan and nonpolitical. This was reversed by President Joe Biden but will return under a second Trump term putting tens of thousands of civil service employees in Virginia at risk of losing their jobs. Even if you survive these cuts, Trump believes that government workers make too much money and have health insurance and retirement benefits that are too generous. The 140,000 federal employees who live in Virginia, would be directly affected by these cuts.

The authors of Project 2025 have a worldview that is fundamentally at odds with the values of Virginians. From the elimination of the civil service to higher taxes on the middle class, cuts to health care and education, and less funding for our nation’s veterans, the commonwealth cannot afford to participate in this draconian experiment that fundamentally changes who we are as Virginians and Americans.

Nick Rathod of Arlington is the director of the Virginian Peoples PAC.