A group dedicated to electing pro-science candidates has taken aim at six incumbent House Republicans, accusing them of hypocrisy by downplaying Project 2025 but taking money from backers of the conservative think tank behind the controversial transition blueprint for a second Trump administration.
“These [Make America Great Again] extremists took money from the funders of Project 2025 while claiming not to know anything about it, and now that they’ve been caught red handed, the question is if they’ll return the money and cut their ties to Project 2025,” said Erik Polyak, managing director of 314 Action, a political action committee named for the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi.
The group singled out Reps. David Schweikert (Ariz.), Mike Garcia (Calif.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (Iowa), Don Bacon (Neb.), Brandon Williams (N.Y.) and Lori Chavez-DeRemer (Ore.) in its statement.
The candidates, all of whom face 314 Action-backed Democratic candidates in November, each received somewhere between $9,000 and $127,000 in donations from people affiliated with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., for a total of more than $200,000, 314 Action said.
Heritage, one of the capital’s oldest and most influential conservative think tanks, was the primary organizer of Project 2025, a compendium of right-wing policy ideas and specific proposals intended to guide an incoming Donald Trump administration in its early days if he is elected in November.
Parts of the document were written by subject matter experts, many of whom served in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. But that lineage has not kept Trump from disavowing Project 2025, saying that he had little knowledge of the controversial road map and that it would not be a guide.
Polling has shown Democrats’ attacks on Project 2025 have been successful in tarnishing the document’s image and tying it to Trump. A post-debate poll in September conducted by YouGov found that 52% of respondents had at least a somewhat negative opinion of Project 2025 and almost half, 46%, said Trump or his advisers were involved in its creation.
Many GOP candidates have taken the same tack as Trump, disavowing knowledge of the report or support for its more extreme plans, which has drawn 314 Action’s ire.
It pointed to Bacon’s denial in a televised debate, when he criticized the document as “a Democratic bogeyman” and said he had not read it and did not plan to do so.
Bacon is in a tough race in his swing district in Omaha. Polls in late September put Bacon’s challenger, Tony Vargas, ahead by 3 to 6 percentage points among likely voters.
314 Action said Bacon received $25,678 from Heritage Foundation backers named as associates, executive associates or premier associates in the think tank’s 2023 annual report.
The group also cited Chavez-DeRemer, whose spokesperson, like Bacon, said on Oct. 2 that she had not read and did not plan to read Project 2025.
“This is a desperate attempt by Janelle Bynum and Hakeem Jeffries to mask their liberal extremism,” the spokesperson said of Chavez-DeRemer’s Democratic opponent and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
314 Action said Chavez-DeRemer had received more than $9,000 from three Heritage Foundation supporters.
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“We’re calling on Reps. Bacon, Chavez-DeRemer, Garcia, Millers-Meek, Schweikert, Williams to — once and for all — denounce Project 2025 and return tens of thousands of dollars in contributions. If they truly don’t stand with Project 2025 as they claim, now is the time to prove it to the American people,” Polyak said.
The group said Project 2025, if implemented, would clear the way for a nationwide ban on abortion, remove health insurance protections for pre-existing medical conditions and result in the elimination of the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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