ANALYSIS: Project 2025 and Consequences on Criminal Justice System

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WASHINGTON, DC — The Brennan Center for Justice released an analysis by Brianna Seid last week focusing on the immediate impact of Project 2025 under conservative federal administration, highlighting concerns on the politicization of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), death penalty, reproductive rights and local law enforcement.

“By politicizing the Justice Department, interfering with prosecutorial discretion, and expanding federal influence over local jurisdictions, Project 2025’s justice system recommendations would mark a shift toward draconian policies that research has shown do not make communities safer,” the story reads.

Seid declared these policy proposals would “drastically reshape criminal justice policy,” breaking down her analysis into sections after observing the consequences found within the DOJ, the Constitution interpretations, and local law enforcement.

According to the DOJ’s website cited by the Brennan Center, the DOJ’s mission is “to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe, and to protect civil rights,” noting that, in the past, the DOJ “pursued these goals while attempting to address inequities” via their independent investigations into prison conditions and initiatives to reduce “unnecessary incarceration.”

“The rule of law is essential to a functioning democracy because it ensures that laws are applied equally and impartially,” Seid explained, adding, “It has historically worked with the White House to achieve specific policy goals, but the department’s investigations and prosecutions must be independent from politics.”

Seid argued the proposals in Project 2025 “prioritize political agendas over the independence and impartiality of law enforcement” and “undermine the rule of law,” warning that this would pose risks to “democratic norms, civil liberties, and public trust.”

According to the piece, Pam Bondi, Trump’s choice for attorney general, “avoided direct questions about Trump’s pledge to prosecute specific adversaries.”

Project 2025 would undo many of the customs and norms that were observed diligently after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, as, according to Seid, Trump’s previous administration had already “breached” these policies.

Seid stated that it “has been the general practice of the White House to issue a memo limiting contacts between department personnel and the White House” so that the President and staff “should not be given advance notice” about criminal or civil enforcement.

However, the observed policy that is meant to ensure that laws are not arbitrarily changed or applied based on “political whims” of the ruling party will now be “reexamined” under Project 2025, according to Seid.

Project 2025 will consequently allow the president to “exert more control over individual prosecutors and investigators” as Trump promised in his campaign to prosecute his rivals, Seid argued in her analysis.

“Political appointees like the attorney general could be removed if they refuse to pursue politically motivated investigations, undermining trust in the justice system’s impartiality,” Seid wrote.

Seid highlighted several executive orders Trump has already signed in tandem with Project 2025’s objectives, which include: “two executive orders tasking the attorney general to conduct investigations into the previous administration” and one order directing an expansion of national capital punishment.

Consequently, both the N.Y. Times and Brennan Center noted that a shift in investigation motivations will lead to expert civil servants, with decades of experience and serving both parties, being removed and replaced by individuals who share political goals.

“They could be replaced with ideological loyalists who lack key institutional knowledge that is essential for the daily operation of many law enforcement agencies,” Seid warned. “Dismissals and transfers of top justice department officials has already begun, and as part of the administration’s federal hiring freeze.”

Project 2025 also advocates for further direct federal control over local administration in situations of disagreements with local policies and practices and for the DOJ to intervene with the locally-elected prosecutors (DAs), writes Seid.

Seid reported Project 2025’s motto to “restore law and order” has justified their policies of rolling back local law discretion in favor of increasing federal law enforcement presence in jurisdictions that involve local policies.

“A prime rationale for these removals and the Project 2025 proposal is the false claim that criminal justice reform and subsequent rises in violent crime are linked, even though there is no data to support that assertion and violent crime is actually now falling,” Seid explained.

“Historically,” Seid continued in her analysis, the justification for removing local DAs who refuse to prosecute criminal offenses under harsh jurisdiction to uphold the “equal protection of the laws” is a strategy the DOJ has used to “investigate and reform serious patterns and practices of excessive force, biased policing, and other unconstitutional practices.”

Seid brought up Project 2025 claims of cases being handled by local DAs have “rule of law deficiencies,” or the argument that these decisions don’t “follow” the rule of law. However, the pretense set forth by the policy, according to Seid, referred to “low level marijuana or shoplifting offenses.”

“Choosing to prosecute a case that local law enforcement has already decided is not in the interest of their community is not only wasteful, but given the federal system’s high conviction rates and oftentimes more severe sentencing schemes, also could increase the federal prison population,” the Brennan Center story said.

Most alarmingly for Seid, Project 2025 seeks to remove federal oversight of the criminal justice system by eliminating “all existing DOJ consent decrees.”

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, consent decrees are thought of as a “legally binding performance improvement plan” as a court-enforced settlement agreed to by “all parties and approved by a court.”

These court decrees are “legal tools” that are used in everything, according to Vera, and are used to “compel a jurisdiction to reform its jail system or police department,” and it typically “arises from a DOJ investigation into a pattern of misconduct.”

“There are nearly 30 active consent decrees involving law enforcement and jail systems,” Seid explained. “Project 2025 seeks to remove these orders, drastically reducing the oversight of local law enforcement practices.

“President Trump has already included Project 2025 policies in other areas,” Seid warned, forecasting the odds of Project 2025 policy implementation to be extremely high.

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  • Vy Tran

    Vy Tran is a 4th-year student at UCLA pursuing a B.A. in Political Science--Comparative Politics and a planned minor in Professional Writing. Her academic interests include political theory, creative writing, copyediting, entertainment law, and criminal psychology. She has a passion for the analytical essay form, delving deep into correlational and description research for various topics, such as constituency psychology, East-Asian foreign relations, and narrative theory within transformative literature. When not advocating for awareness against the American carceral state, Vy constantly navigates the Internet for the next wave of pop culture trends and resurgences. That, or she opens a blank Google doc to start writing a new romance fiction on a whim, with an açaí bowl by her side.

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