Project 2025 Attacks Workers by Making it Easier for Employers to Dodge Paying Overtime

Fact Check: Donald Trump is linked to Project 2025 in several ways. Over 140 of his advisors and staff worked on the Heritage Foundation project. And Donald Trump himself told attendees at a Heritage Foundation conference, “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.“

Donald Trump has a decades-long history of screwing over workers. During his streak of business bankruptcies, he regularly failed to pay contractors for work they had performed, a practice that resulted in over 3,500 lawsuits against him.

He continued his trend as president by immediately issuing a rule that reduced the number of people eligible for overtime. The Economic Policy Institute estimates this cost over 8 million workers access to overtime. According to the AFL-CIO, the Obama-era rules Trump replaced would have extended overtime eligibility to 3.2 million more workers than the Trump administration’s rule.

Now, Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation want to make it easier for employers to manipulate overtime rules. The proposals include:

• Rolling back the Biden-Harris administration’s expansion of overtime eligibility
• Allowing employers to pick the time periods that constitute a week. In other words, the employer, not a legal standard, would decide how long and over what days a work week spans. From the document, “Congress should provide flexibility to employers and employees to calculate the overtime period over a longer number of weeks.”
• Making it easier for employers to pay time and a half by substituting paid time off for time and a half pay. Employers could then decide whether or when they allow employees to take banked pay, essentially eliminating time and a half.
• Allowing different overtime thresholds in different parts of the country

Donald Trump has also repeatedly said he would not support a bill to raise the minimum wage.

Donald Trump does not now and never has cared about workers. He has bragged about breaking up unions and not paying overtime. We don’t need a bitter old man with an itchy trigger finger deciding what to do with employee benefits.