By Helena Cross
Project 2025 is being hailed by its backers as a blueprint for revitalizing American governance, but a closer look reveals a darker reality. The impact of Project 2025 on US economy is not one of broad-based prosperity, but of intensified inequality, weakened protections, and the quiet consolidation of corporate power. Stripping away regulatory guardrails may boost short-term profits for certain industries, yet history shows that such moves often shift risks onto workers, consumers, and taxpayers—costs that are both hidden and devastating.
Deregulation’s False Promise
Supporters of Project 2025 argue that dismantling regulations will unleash economic growth. This is not a new argument; it echoes the deregulation waves of the 1980s and 2000s. Yet research consistently shows that while select corporations see windfalls, the broader economy bears mounting costs in the form of financial instability, environmental damage, and public health crises. According to a Brookings Institution analysis, deregulation historically contributes to systemic risks—most notably the 2008 financial crash, where lax oversight allowed unsustainable speculation to spiral into collapse.
When the protections that safeguard air quality, workplace safety, or financial stability are weakened, the bill eventually comes due. Those bills are not paid by the corporations who profit upfront, but by ordinary households in the form of medical costs, job losses, and taxpayer-funded bailouts. The impact of Project 2025 on US economy is therefore best measured not in GDP growth projections, but in the redistribution of risk and burden from boardrooms to kitchen tables.
Labor Markets Under Strain
A major economic consequence of deregulation is its corrosive effect on workers. Project 2025 proposes sweeping cuts to labor protections, weakening unions, and rolling back wage standards under the banner of “flexibility.” This is not flexibility for workers, but for employers seeking to reduce costs. A report by the Economic Policy Institute shows that union decline has been a central factor in wage stagnation over the past four decades, with inequality rising most sharply in periods when labor protections were eroded.
The gig economy is often held up as a success story of deregulation, but its lessons are sobering. Platforms that thrived by sidestepping labor laws created precarious jobs lacking benefits or security. If Project 2025 replicates this model across industries, the American middle class faces further erosion. Workers may technically be “employed,” but their livelihoods will remain fragile—dependent on fluctuating hours, algorithmic scheduling, and absent safety nets.
Deregulation and Public Health Costs
Another hidden cost lies in the health of communities. Project 2025 calls for rolling back environmental and safety regulations, a move with profound economic consequences. The Environmental Protection Agency has documented how clean air and water protections yield enormous net benefits, measured in reduced hospitalizations, increased productivity, and longer lifespans.
If these protections are stripped away, the short-term “savings” for industries like energy or chemicals will translate into long-term losses for the public. Elevated healthcare expenditures, lost workdays, and environmental cleanup costs will weigh heavily on the economy. As with climate change, deregulation externalizes costs—private gain, public loss.
Inequality as a Growth Trap
The impact of Project 2025 on US economy is inseparable from its impact on inequality. When deregulation allows corporations and elites to capture outsized gains, the result is a hollowing-out of the consumer base that drives sustainable growth. The International Monetary Fund has found that societies with high inequality experience weaker and more volatile growth, as wealth concentration dampens demand and fuels political instability.
Project 2025’s emphasis on dismantling social programs compounds the problem. Cutting support for healthcare, housing, and education reduces upward mobility, locking entire segments of the population into cycles of precarity. This does not just harm individuals—it undercuts national competitiveness by failing to cultivate the human capital necessary for innovation and productivity.
Deregulation and Financial Fragility
Financial deregulation looms large in Project 2025, with proposals to weaken oversight of banks, fintech, and investment funds. The memory of 2008 is not far behind: when oversight fails, speculative excess thrives. The impact of Project 2025 on US economy could include another generation-defining crash. The Financial Stability Oversight Council exists precisely to monitor systemic risk, but Project 2025 envisions curtailing its authority.
Unchecked speculation may drive temporary growth in asset markets, but the collapse of bubbles always reverberates downward. Ordinary Americans lose homes, pensions, and savings, while elites receive bailouts. Project 2025 risks replaying this cycle, only faster and with higher stakes in an economy increasingly tethered to digital finance and algorithmic trading.
Corporate Power and the Public Sphere
Perhaps the most profound consequence of Project 2025 is its quiet transfer of sovereignty. By stripping the state of regulatory authority, it effectively cedes governance to corporations. The present author has previously examined this dynamic in her analysis of Boardroom Borders, where multinational corporations increasingly function as shadow states, dictating the terms of labor, trade, and even environmental standards. Project 2025 accelerates this shift, placing vital decisions about collective welfare in the hands of private entities accountable only to shareholders.
This raises not only economic risks, but democratic ones. As inequality grows and public institutions weaken, citizens may find that their voices matter less than the lobbying budgets of corporations. A hollowed-out state becomes fertile ground for instability, populist backlash, and the erosion of civic trust.
What Future Does Project 2025 Build?
The backers of Project 2025 promise freedom and growth, but the fine print suggests a different trajectory: freedom for corporations at the expense of workers, growth in profits but not in shared prosperity. The impact of Project 2025 on US economy will be measured not in stock indexes, but in widening inequality, weakened protections, and the shifting of burdens from the powerful to the vulnerable.
Economies thrive when they balance innovation with stability, freedom with fairness, and profit with protection. Deregulation without guardrails tips this balance toward fragility and injustice. As history warns us, the true costs of such a project are always greater than they first appear—and they are always paid by those with the least power to resist.
