In what way are Americans less secure when survivors of violence are granted asylum here?
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Since so many Christian zealots helped write Project 2025, you’d think we’d see more of what the prophets, the law, the psalms and the apostles all urge: caring for fatherless children and widows in poverty. But reading what its 900 pages has to say about the poor, brought to my mind a verse from the Gospel of Mark 12:40: “They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.”
The tricky part, of course, is: Who exactly qualifies as “widows”? Who are the “orphans” we’re admonished to care for? I’d call eviction a way of “devouring houses,” a regular feature of American poverty married to private equity.
My question is really: Who are “we” as Americans?
If you’re the “legal” wife and “legitimate” child of a man who paid Social Security taxes and then died, you might qualify for Social Security Survivor Benefits. At least for now, Project 2025 doesn’t call those widow and orphan benefits into question. (Not yet.)
It does include Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds as “an issue of concern,” however, in need of “in depth” scrutiny—including benefit cuts, higher age eligibility and whatever else may be hatched in future in back rooms of The Heritage Foundation, the publishers of Project 2025.
In many places, Project 2025 asserts and implies that single moms, far from being widows, must be suspect if merely divorced, deserted or abused. Marriage is a virtue, they claim, but domestic violence is mentioned one time in all 900 pages—in the Chapter on Homeland Security, of all places. It’s found in their discussion of Asylum Reform, item three, on page 148, demanding clarification of Matter of A-B.
If that confuses, you’ll have to go to footnote 70 in Homeland Security to learn they’re talking about “legal” immigration.
Matter of A-B officially recognized domestic violence as a basis for asylum—and that is the issue Project 2025 wants clarified. Again.
Domestic Violence
In 2014, Ms. A-B of El Salvador applied for asylum in the U.S. after suffering repeated physical, emotional and sexual abuse from the man with whom she’d had three children. She’d married him in 1999, but because of his abuse, she divorced him and moved away in her own country with the children. He kept tracking them down, threatening and harassing.
She was initially denied but appealed and finally won U.S. asylum here. But then in 2018, Trump’s then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned that decision. In 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland used other case precedents to reinstate the validity of asylum based on sexual, domestic and gang violence.
This apparently is not the answer that Project 2025 found clear enough.
I’m all for transparency, but is Homeland Security the real issue here? In what way are Americans less secure when survivors of violence are granted asylum here? U.S. domestic violence is already a threat to national security, but not from survivors—from gun-toting perps who cherish violence as personal privilege. Domestic violence, by mostly male Americans already living here, accounts for nearly 70 deaths per month, and over 25 percent of all homicides every year.
Minimizing damage is one of the traits of abusers who inflict harm—perhaps the reason this and other terms like misogyny and the manosphere, are also never mentioned in this plan for America’s future. According to Project 2025, a mom without a man cannot be considered in the same way as a widow; more than likely she’s a welfare cheat. Unlike corporations, she must be heavily regulated.
If Papa can’t make enough money to support his kids or has merely disappeared or been jailed or finds kids that look like him inconvenient truth, American orphans in need can legitimately receive a modicum of help—but the devil is in the details. Project 2025 insists that in those limited cases, you must do it on the cheap. The way the Holy Bible never taught anyone.
What’s TANF? SNAP? WIC? The Scary Welfare State
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, is the welfare reform package that President Bill Clinton delivered in 1996. TANF replaced Aid for Needy Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).
Simply put, AFDC families, usually headed by women, most often white, received cash payments. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), at its peak in 1969, claimed that raising children in a family home was itself a serious job. Their 25,000 members were mostly Black women. Talking like tradwives, they only lacked husbands with an income, which AFDC, part of the 1935 Social Security Act, provided.
According to Project 2025, a mom without a man cannot be considered in the same way as a widow; more than likely she’s a welfare cheat. Unlike corporations, she must be heavily regulated.
On the 1976 campaign trail, Ronald Reagan began raising the image of a Black Chicago “welfare queen” with a Cadillac. He kept on taunting taxpayers about her cheating ways until he became president in 1980 and called on Congress for a welfare overhaul. In fact, the Chicago fraudster was a real woman, using the name Linda Taylor, and yes, she owned a Cadillac at the time she was arrested in 1974.
We know this from Josh Levin, author of The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth. Mixed race, Taylor reported being white, Mexican or Hawaiian to authorities. Levin wrote: “Linda Taylor… had as much in common with a typical welfare rule breaker as a bank robber does with someone who swipes a piece of penny candy.”
Her existence gave credence to a persistent stereotype of Black women in poverty.
In fact, Black, white and Latina mothers each now head roughly a third of our poorest American households, where thee average family size is three people. But to inspire mothers’ “personal responsibility,” TANF’s biggest change was newly sending federal money to states in “block grants” and limiting cash assistance to five years. This gave greater flexibility to states for rules of eligibility and types of programs. As a result, monthly cash benefits vary greatly, from $1,098 in New Hampshire for a family of three, to $240 in Louisiana.
The Center for Budget and Public Policy published a map that shows these state differences, as well as how few poor families in a state actually receive benefits under TANF. New Hampshire assists 46 percent of its poor families; Texas helps 6 percent; Louisiana helps 4 percent. So, what are states doing with the rest of their federal money?
It creates a plethora of middle-class program administration jobs. But some states use sneaky tactics. Five years ago, citizens of Tennessee discovered their leaders had allowed anti-poverty federal money to pile up, unspent, creating a $730 million surplus. Only now are they starting to spend it on community grants, but still not cash for the poor.
Texas provides another illustration of the spirit of TANF: Originally called “The TANF Grandparent Payment,” a $1,000 grant provided help for relatives caring for “orphans” in their family. But it could only be given once, regardless of any new crisis, including the arrival of any new orphans. How many desperate grannies didn’t read the fine print?
Project 2025 has no Christian qualms about any of this. It instead seeks to increase “transparent” reports from states that track and audit the outcomes of how they spend TANF funds. This, along with a plethora of rules and exceptions for states, increases administrative costs, reducing funds available for benefits.
Roughly stated, TANF requires states to engage half of single parent families to work 30 hours a week, or 20 hours for moms who have kids under age 6. Two-parent families must work at least 35 hours a week. This has been a boon for employers like Walmart and McDonald’s, who pay the minimum and rarely hire for 40 hours a week. Consider that they might have been mandated by TANF to do so.
Instead, under TANF, childcare and Medicaid and food stamps for parents who must work is provided at tax-payer expense. Yet Project 2025 shows no curiosity about what GAO’s 2020 survey showed about corporate employers benefitting from a steady stream of desperate, subsidized workers.
I searched for “more pay” and “bigger paychecks” in Project 2025’s 900 pages, but those terms were nowhere to be found. Still, work requirements set all things right, according to them. For instance, they praised one Trump initiative to increase “program integrity and reduce fraud, waste and abuse,” ensuring disqualification from SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), or food stamps, if you’d only received a pamphlet from TANF about SNAP, which some states allowed. “Woke” states, probably.
Now Imagine This
Project 2025 scolds us for not making “marriage, healthy family formation and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy our priorities for TANF.” They claim that “these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways.” Which ways exactly are never mentioned, even in footnotes.
Still, they demand that “CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) should require explicit measurement of these goals.”
Um … how exactly is “healthy family formation” defined? What are its components? No details or exceptions provided.
And are they really proposing that mothers on TANF and SNAP and Medicaid get bonus points for reporting to the authorities their “not having sex”? Exactly how many “not having sex” nights will count? How will authorities verify, since a welfare queen can’t be trusted to tell the truth? She’ll probably just get pregnant and then want a nine-month abortion at our expense!
Here’s more to imagine: In the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture chapter, Project 2025 promotes moving the USDA Food and Nutrition Service that oversees SNAP and WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children)—and the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines, the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs and others—all be moved to the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS). The place where TANF dwells.
These are all means-tested programs, but because these two “silos” are administered separately, Project 2025 fears that “the effectiveness and size of the welfare state remains largely hidden.” It has the details down on pages 299-302 for rules to tighten and surveille.
But imagine how such a massive move would disrupt services and state administrations.
On page 302, Project 2025 also wants to return to “the original purpose of school meals,” which today, they claim, more resembles “entitlement programs.” Who knew?
“In 2018, school lunch programs had wasted nearly $2 billion in taxpayer resources through payments provided to ineligible recipients”—largely due, according to them, to the USDA not “regularly assess[ing] the programs’ fraud risks.”
Picture a lineup of 8-year-old middle-class criminals.
Also, because of a 2010 rule on “community” poverty rates, the school breakfast program “now wastes nearly $200 million annually,” due to “left-of-center Members of Congress and President Biden’s Administration,” who “nonetheless proposed further expansions to extend federal school meals to include every K-12 student—regardless of need.”
Reform requires pages of more rules, but in a nutshell, I’ll summarize the message: “You mothers, get back to the kitchen! Flip those pancakes! Buy tin-lunchboxes and pack them with little bags of registered-brand-name snacks your kids demand! And then get to work for your quota of hours if you expect to keep your benefits and that job that pays less than you and your family can live on.”
Providing the nation’s kids with decent food, the better to grow their brains and aid their learning? Wasteful!
What a future Project 2025 envisions. It’s enough to turn us all into cat ladies.
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