October 29, 2024
HuffPost: Pro-Science Group Asks GOP Candidates To Return Donations Over Ties To Project 2025
“Candidates downplayed the blueprint for a Trump administration even as they received money from supporters of the Heritage Foundation, which organized the plan.”
Key sections:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
“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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