Schumer takes shot at Project 2025's mention of possible cuts to Northport VA

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has zeroed in on a plan that he contends would slash services at the Northport VA Hospital, as he attacked the conservative policy book Project 2025 as “a pile of corroded ideas.”

The possible service cuts in Northport are found deep inside the 920-page book released last year by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank founded in the Reagan era. Democrats are using the project’s proposals to cast Republicans as extremists, even as former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump seeks to distance himself from the effort.

In a Senate floor speech on Thursday, Schumer (D-N.Y.) held up a photo of the Northport hospital and said he was “sounding the alarm.” He argued that a section of Project 2025 calls for revisiting a plan scuttled by the Senate in 2022 that would have overhauled VA hospital services across the country, including a proposal to close Northport's emergency room and shift some services to other facilities in the region.

Steve Groves, the co-author of the policy book, in a statement to Newsday accused Schumer of being a "liar."

"Project 2025 does not call to 'defund the Northport VA on Long Island,' as alleged by Sen. Schumer," Groves said.

Schumer told Newsday that he took the recommendations in the book seriously, noting that it was written by a number of former Trump administration officials, including the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

“When Trump gets into office, he lets the hard right govern," Schumer told Newsday after the Senate speech. “So I think that the fear of this happening is very real.”

The policy book — which calls for banning the abortion pill mifepristone, abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, overhauling the federal workforce to staff government agencies with partisan appointees and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal workforce — has become a focal point of this year’s presidential election, as Democratic leaders repeatedly point to the book to argue that Trump and Republican candidates are pursuing a far-right agenda.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, at a campaign stop last month said Project 2025 represents "the latest attack in Donald Trump's full-on assault on reproductive freedom."

President Joe Biden, before dropping out of the presidential race last month, said the project "should scare every single American," and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) last month called the plan "dangerous, dastardly and diabolical."

Trump distances himself

Trump said in a social media post last month that he knows “nothing about Project 2025” and “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

On Tuesday, the former Trump administration official who headed Project 2025, Paul Dans, announced his departure from the initiative, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said he would take the lead.

“Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue,” Roberts said in a statement put out by Heritage.

Schumer and Democrats contend Trump only came out against the project once Democrats started to publicly raise concerns about the proposals.

“They were proud of Project 2025 until it was revealed that it had so many bad things in it,” Schumer said from the Senate floor.

In his floor speech, Schumer referred to a section in the book focused on the Veterans Administration that calls for the next administration to “reimagine the health care footprint in some locales.” The section notes the work of the Veterans Administration Asset and Infrastructure Review Commission, which in 2022 recommended Northport’s emergency room be shuttered and suggested medical and surgical services be shifted to other VA clinics in Queens, the Bronx and Connecticut.

Schumer led the effort in 2022 to kill the so-called “AIR” proposals in the Senate, arguing in part that veterans on Long Island should not be forced to travel long distances for services, and he put pressure on the White House to also reject the recommendations.

While the policy book does not explicitly name Northport, Schumer's office contends the mention of the "AIR" proposals signifies the group's desire to return to the panel's recommendations to cut services.

"Those here in this [Senate] chamber know exactly what AIR was — a hard-right plan to defund the VA system," Schumer said. "We bipartisanly said no way — and we saved our VA hospitals."

In 2018, the Heritage Foundation said on its website that Trump had adopted “nearly two-thirds” of the policy recommendations it laid out in 2016.

“With approximately 70 former Heritage employees working for the Trump transition team or as part of the administration, the policy recommendations have served as guidelines for reducing the size and scope of the federal government through specific and detailed actions,” the group wrote on its website.

Wasn't campaign issue last election

Nick Beauchamp, a professor of political science at Northeastern University, said Heritage typically has issued policy recommendations in the run-up to each presidential election, typically under the title “Mandate for Leadership,” but the Project 2025 effort has been more scrutinized because it was released much earlier than the past policy guidebooks.

“It wasn't turned into a campaign issue last time around because usually Heritage publishes these things during the campaign,” Beauchamp said in a phone interview. “They didn’t leave as much time for the specifics to be turned into campaign fodder.”

Democrats likely will continue raising Project 2025 as an issue because they believe they have found a “winning” issue to motivate Democratic voters, said Republican campaign strategist Michael Dawidziak of Bayport.

“Democrats clearly see this as a huge issue for them, if they can first, get people to know what it is, what it says, and then tie Trump to it,” Dawidziak told Newsday.

Dawidziak, who worked on the late George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, said Trump must balance not turning off moderate swing voters who tend to be turned off by extreme positions on either side of the aisle, while not alienating his base supporters who may agree with the Project 2025 proposals.

“He’s got to be very careful that he's not being saddled with a view that his base loves, but that might make moderate voters uncomfortable,” Dawidziak said.

By Laura Figueroa Hernandez

laura.figueroa@newsday.com@Laura_Figueroa

Laura Figueroa Hernandez is the White House correspondent and previously covered New York City politics and government. She joined Newsday in 2012 after covering state and local politics for The Miami Herald.