On Thursday morning, US President Donald Trump said he intends to use this week’s government shutdown to impose, through dictatorial means, mass layoffs and the destruction of social programs in line with the plans outlined in the far-right Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan.

Trump announced in a social media post that he would meet with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame,” to determine “which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”

What are the “Democrat Agencies” Trump refers to? While the Democrats long ago abandoned any genuine support for social programs, the New Deal programs such as Social Security, and the later “Great Society” programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, were passed under Democratic administrations. The elimination of these programs will throw tens of millions into poverty.

Project 2025 is a program of social counterrevolution years in the making. Anchored in the right-wing “unitary executive” theory of unchecked presidential power, it aims to usurp congressional control over the budget in order to “deconstruct the Administrative State,” i.e., to destroy agencies created by acts of Congress and enforce personal loyalty of government employees to the president.

This program, already partially implemented through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” and other measures, includes:

• Dismantling the Education Department and ending federal funding for low-income schools.
• Decimating regulatory enforcement powers over big business, including the gutting of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the effective termination of even the most limited climate change measures.
• Sharply limiting Medicaid benefits, shifting cost burdens to states and individuals, and allowing states to impose or increase premiums.
• Shifting Medicare recipients towards private Medicare Advantage plans.
• Lowering corporate taxes and income taxes for the wealthy.
• Dismantling civil rights protections, such as Title IX and federal consent decrees with local police departments notorious for violence.

Even if Social Security funding itself is not immediately touched in the shutdown, the layoffs and furloughs at the Social Security Administration will greatly limit accessibility to benefits.

Trump is carrying out a jobs massacre under the cover of the shutdown. On Thursday, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that firings could be “in the thousands.” This is likely a vast undercount. Permanent layoffs have been preceded by mass furloughs.

According to the New York Times, the largest planned furloughs, relative to the size of the workforce, are at the Environmental Protection Agency (89 percent), Education Department (87 percent), Commerce Department (81 percent), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (71 percent).

In April, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) warned that as many as 1 million jobs could be affected by Project 2025.

Project 2025 is deeply unpopular, as Trump indirectly admitted during the campaign by flatly denying any connection to it. It cannot be implemented through even the semblance of democratic norms.

Resistance to dictatorship must be centered in the working class, because the working class is its main target. The social content of Trump’s program is the destruction of millions of jobs, the lowering of life expectancy and the dismantling of programs won through decades of struggle on which tens of millions rely.

The trillions clawed from workers are to be redirected to war and financial swindling. Ominously, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the government is demanding a doubling of missile production for war with China. At the same time, federal mediators have intervened to end the two-month strike by Boeing defense workers.

The reforms of previous generations were not granted out of charity. They were concessions won by the working class when US capitalism, at the height of its industrial and political might, was prepared to dispense limited reforms in order to stave off the threat of social revolution.

Now, at a point of deepest decline, American capitalism is abandoning such concessions and resorting to more brutal methods. The policies of the Trump government are not the result of a deranged individual. They express a turning point in the forms of class rule in the United States.

Democracy has become incompatible with capitalism. This is why the Democrats, the other capitalist party in America, exclude any mention of fascism in their statements on the shutdown. Even their posturing over restoring Medicaid cuts will amount to nothing. Their overriding priority is to chloroform the population to the seriousness of what is happening, divert anger and prevent the eruption of social opposition, which they dread.

Tellingly, Trump concluded his statement Thursday by declaring, “They [Democrats] are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Here, Trump, in his own way, points to the political fact that the Democrats agree with the main elements of Trump’s domestic policy. Their differences with Trump center not on the assault on the working class or the destruction of democratic rights, but on issues of foreign policy, particularly the war against Russia.

But the working class cannot accept cuts that would reduce them to industrial slaves. The social interests of the working class make it the leading force in the fight against dictatorship. This, however, requires complete independence from the Democrats and their political satellites.

It also means independence from the union bureaucracy, which either aligns openly with Trump or confines itself to mealy-mouthed statements that commit to nothing. Trump has ripped up the collective bargaining rights of 1 million federal employees, and Trump’s ally Steve Bannon called teachers “terrorists.” But AFGE, the American Federation of Teachers, and the rest of the American union bureaucracy have done nothing to mobilize the country’s 14 million union members and the working class as a whole in defense of their own members.

The Trump administration is carrying out a historically unprecedented assault on the working class. The working class must answer with mass resistance. New organizations—rank-and-file committees—must be built in every workplace, school and neighborhood to lead the fight. These committees must become centers of resistance, including among government workers but uniting all sections of the working class and student youth in a common struggle against Trump’s dictatorship, against war and inequality, and for the defense of jobs, living standards and democratic rights.

The mobilization of the working class requires the combination of social and democratic demands, which have become inextricably linked together. The fight against dictatorship is impossible without the fight for equality.

In addition to the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights—the right to free speech, protection against unlawful search and seizure, and other basic democratic freedoms—workers must insist upon and fight for their inalienable social rights, which are essential to life in a functioning modern society.

The Socialist Equality Party first elaborated the concept of social rights in its 2010 program, “The Breakdown of Capitalism and the Fight for Socialism in the United States.” These include:

• The right to a job and a livable income

• The right to leisure

• The right to decent and affordable housing

• The right to utilities and transportation

• The right to high-quality healthcare

• The right to a secure retirement

• The right to education

• The right to a healthy and safe environment

• The right to culture

These rights, everywhere under assault, can be guaranteed only through the expropriation of the billionaires and the nationalization of major industries under workers’ control. Under the present circumstances, this is not only a social but also a democratic demand. The support of considerable sections of the ruling elite for Trump shows that the domination of society by the oligarchs and major corporations makes a democratic society impossible.

Genuine democracy is possible only when the majority, the working class, runs society in the interests of all, not private profit. That form of society is socialism.

The Socialist Equality Party is doing everything it can to help organize this resistance. Contact us today.