Sounds terrible, but is it?

• The 922-page document doesn’t lack for modesty, as a wish list of policy reforms that would touch every part of government from the Justice Department to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
• The project is led by the Heritage Foundation and melds the work of some 400 scholars and analysts from an eclectic mix of center-right groups.
• Most of the Democratic panic-mongering has focused on the project’s aim to rein in the administrative state. That includes civil service reform that would make it easier to remove some government workers, and potentially revisiting the independent status of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission. The latter isn’t going to happen, but getting firmer presidential control over the bureaucracy would improve accountability. The federal government has become so vast that Presidents have difficulty even knowing what is going on in the executive branch. Americans don’t want to be ruled by a permanent governing class that doesn’t answer to voters.
• Some items on this menu are also standard conservative fare.
  • The document calls for an 18% corporate tax rate (now 21%), describing that levy as “the most damaging tax” in the U.S. system that falls heavily on workers. A mountain of economic literature backs that up.
  • The blueprint suggests tying more welfare programs with work;
  • de-regulating health insurance markets;
  • expanding Medicare Advantage plans that seniors like;
  • ending sugar subsidies;
  • revving up U.S. energy production.
  • That all sounds good to us.
• Democrats are suggesting the project would gut Social Security, though in fact it bows to Mr. Trump’s preference not to touch the retirement program, which is headed for bankruptcy without reform. No project can profess to care about the rising national debt, as Heritage does, without fixing a program that was 22% of the federal budget in 2023.
• At times the paper takes no position. For example: The blueprint features competing essays on trade policy.

• The document mentions abortion nearly 200 times, but Mr. Trump wants to neutralize that issue.