Project 2029 in 5 Minutes

The Problem in One Sentence

The American system isn’t broken — it’s been captured. Too many institutions now serve the people who run them instead of the people they were built for.

The Philosophy: Rational National Self-Interest

Project 2029 is not Left or Right. It is a framework for asking one question about every policy: does this make the nation stronger, or does it make insiders richer?

We hold the individual as sovereign. Government exists to maintain the conditions under which free people can thrive — fair competition, honest rules, functioning institutions, and a foundation that prevents small problems from becoming national emergencies.

We call this “Investing in Our Foundation.” A rational society invests in its people and infrastructure the same way a family maintains its home: not because it’s charity, but because neglect is more expensive than prevention.

Healthcare is Our Foundation. A nation where citizens go bankrupt from a hospital visit is not strong. It is fragile.
Education is Our Foundation. A modern economy runs on skilled people. Free Pre-K and public college are investments in national productivity, not handouts.
Justice is Our Foundation. When insiders can ignore rules that apply to everyone else, the trust that holds markets and democracy together erodes.

The framework’s enemy is not any political party. It is extraction — the practice of using institutional power to take wealth without creating value. Extraction shows up as defense contractors billing $2 trillion for a fighter jet that doesn’t work on schedule, as pharmaceutical companies charging 10x what other countries pay for the same drug, as landlords using zoning laws to restrict housing supply, and as politicians drawing districts to choose their voters instead of the reverse.

Wherever extraction exists, the framework corrects it. Wherever markets work fairly, the framework stays out of the way.

What It Proposes

Twelve Acts of Reconstruction

A legislative agenda to permanently strengthen American governance. Not executive orders — laws that outlast any president.

Economic Foundation:

Federal Job Guarantee at $25/hr with benefits. Not welfare — a permanent employment floor that eliminates involuntary unemployment, stabilizes communities, and makes every other reform politically sustainable. If you don’t like your guaranteed job, you’re free to find a better one. That’s the point.
Progressive tax reform. Close loopholes that let billionaires pay lower effective rates than teachers. Restore IRS enforcement capacity so the law applies equally. Nobody is proposing confiscatory rates — just honest ones.
Antitrust enforcement. Break up monopolies and monopsonies that extract from consumers and suppress wages. Competition is the engine of capitalism. Monopoly is its cancer.

Healthcare:

Public health insurance option. Not single-payer — a public option that competes alongside private insurance. If private insurers offer better value, they win. If the public option is more efficient, consumers benefit. Let the market decide — with an actual competitor in it.
Drug price negotiation. Allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, as every other developed nation does. End the legal prohibition on competition.

Education:

Universal Pre-K and free public college. The workforce of 2040 is in kindergarten today. This is national competitiveness investment, not a gift.
K-12 funding equity. A child’s education quality should not be determined by their zip code’s property tax base.

Democratic Reform:

Ranked-choice voting. End the spoiler effect. Let voters rank preferences so third-party and independent candidates are viable without “wasting” votes.
Campaign finance reform. Transparency, small-donor matching, and an end to dark money. The candidate with the best ideas should win, not the one with the richest backers.

Institutional Integrity:

Structural sanitation. End the revolving door between regulators and the industries they regulate. Strengthen Inspectors General. Protect whistleblowers. Ensure no branch of government can operate without accountability.
Judicial transparency. Require the Supreme Court to publish written reasoning for all substantive decisions. Ethics standards with enforcement. No more unsigned, unexplained orders on matters of national importance.

Criminal Justice:

Abolish private prisons. Incarceration should never be a profit center. When corporations profit from locking people up, the incentive is to lock up more people — not to reduce crime.
Sentencing and bail reform. Evidence-based sentencing. End cash bail that punishes poverty. Invest in rehabilitation that actually reduces recidivism.
Law enforcement professionalization. National training standards, psychological screening, use-of-force protocols, and a public accountability database.

Housing:

End institutional speculation in residential housing. Houses are homes, not hedge fund assets. Restrict bulk institutional purchasing, require beneficial ownership transparency, and reform zoning to allow more housing supply.

Trade:

Fair competition, not isolation. Blanket tariffs are a tax on consumers. Ignoring foreign unfair practices is naive. The framework enforces rules against distortions from both directions — domestic rent-seeking and foreign dumping — with mandatory cost-benefit analysis for every tariff.

Energy and Environment:

Honest costs, fair competition. We are not anti-any-energy-source. We are anti-externalizing-your-costs-onto-others. Carbon pricing internalizes the real cost of pollution. If an energy source can compete while paying its full environmental costs, it has every right to exist.

Defense:

Accountability before increases. The Pentagon has never passed a financial audit. It cannot account for 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets. The framework demands a clean audit before any budget increase — and rejects the proposed $1.5 trillion budget as unjustifiable while basic accountability is absent. This is not pacifism. It is the same standard we apply to every other institution.
Strategic realignment. 750 military bases in 80+ countries — most designed for a Cold War that ended 35 years ago. Review, realign, and close what no longer serves a modern strategic purpose.

The Fiscal Case

This is not a wish list. It’s been modeled:

	Conservative Estimate	Optimistic Estimate
Annual revenue and savings	$1.055 trillion	$1.735 trillion
Annual costs	$1.29 trillion	$840 billion
Net annual impact	-$235B deficit (86% below current)	+$895B surplus

The worst-case scenario is a deficit 86% smaller than what we run today. The best case is a surplus approaching $900 billion. The programs pay for themselves because they reduce the systemic costs of the problems they prevent.

Emergency Stabilization (Days 1-180)

Before any new laws pass, the framework uses existing executive authority to restore enforcement of laws already on the books:

Restore antitrust enforcement at DOJ and FTC
Restore IRS audit capacity for high-income non-compliance
Restore EPA enforcement of existing environmental law
Open healthcare enrollment and drug price transparency
Launch government-wide transparency initiatives

These are not new powers. They are existing powers that have been deliberately weakened through regulatory capture.

Local Action: It Starts in Your Neighborhood

Project 2029 is not waiting for a presidential election. Over 500,000 local offices in the United States — School Boards, City Councils, County Commissions, Sheriffs — go uncontested every cycle.

The Local Candidate Toolkit provides everything a first-time candidate needs: filing guidance, campaign budgets, door-knocking scripts, Day 1 transparency packages, and a 100-day implementation scoreboard.

If you can make local government transparent — where the budgets are small and the officials live down the street — you prove that the model works. Project 2029 begins in your neighborhood.

What This Is NOT

Not socialism. The framework preserves private enterprise, private insurance, and market competition. It corrects distortions — it does not replace markets.
Not partisan. The framework opposes extraction regardless of which party benefits. Republican rent-seeking and Democratic rent-seeking are the same problem.
Not utopian. Every proposal has legal authority analysis, fiscal modeling, risk assessment, and international precedent from countries where it already works.
Not executive overreach. Success is defined by laws passed and institutions strengthened — not executive orders signed. Executive actions are temporary stabilization measures while legislation is developed.

Go Deeper

We The People Edition — The full framework in plain language (~30,000 words, ~45 min read)
Technical Edition — Complete legal analysis, fiscal modeling, and implementation timelines (~180,000 words across 10 sections)
Local Candidate Toolkit — Ready to run for local office? Start here.

Project 2029 is a living document, updated regularly with new research and community feedback.

Last updated: April 2026