Here’s what Democrats are planning for 2025 and beyond

The party quietly unveiled a massive 80-page platform. We decoded it for you.

Jul 21, 2024

Welcome to a Saturday night edition of Progress Report.

For all the chaos happening around who will lead the Democratic presidential ticket, there’s not all that much known about what the party — with or without Biden as the nominee — intend to do if the public hands them power once again. Good thing there’s a need with a newsletter to break it down for you!

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

Donate to Progress Report!

Did you know that Democrats released a draft of their official party platform last week? Really, they did! Uploaded to the internet with little fanfare, the 80-page document went almost entirely ignored by the media and supporters alike, lost in the furor over President Joe Biden’s future and the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump. The fact that it’s an 80-page policy document probably didn’t do much for its chances of being read and digested by the public, either.

The lack of attention afforded me the time to comb through all 80 pages to examine and analyze the platform, which will be officially ratified at the Democratic National Convention in August. It is equal parts review of the review of the past eight years and roadmap for the next four, contrasting Trump’s years in office with the accomplishments of Biden’s first term, which sets the context for the policies it proposes for another stretch of full Democraric control of government.

For as much attention as has been paid to Project 2025, Democrats haven’t really done anything to assert their own ideas and ideology during this election beyond a few key items. To see what the administration would prioritize next year, I pulled out every single new policy proposal in the platform. I left out any promises that solely consist of continuing current policies and initiatives, resulting in a list of just new ideas and plans.

My thoughts on the proposals, including which ones were most encouraging, which surprised me, which were disappointing, and which could and should change will be in the next issue (along with other news). The list of policies was edited only to make sense grammatically as excerpts. This the only place where this exists, as far as I know, so please feel free to share it.

Workers’ Rights

Pass the PRO Act.

Pass the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, guaranteeing public sector bargaining rights; and codify a right to organize for domestic workers, farm workers, and other unprotected laborers.

Strengthen enforcement and penalties for safety, wage, and other labor and employment violations.

Raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15-an-hour.

Make the SBA’s innovative Community Navigators program permanent, and include new lenders, new markets, and fairer taxes.

Further limit foreign ownership of U.S. farmland to protect our food supply and national security.

Continue to enforce and advance labor and environmental rules, for example promoting organizing rights and requiring overtime pay, and boosting protections against harmful pesticides and extreme heat.

Working class communities and families

Further expand public transit, connecting communities that have been cut off for too long.

Keep working to get more low-income families access to affordable banking as well, and to boost the supply of capital and loans by investing more in CDFIs.

Guarantee affordable, high-quality child care from birth until kindergarten, with most families paying just $10 a day — and make it free for low-income families.

Make the New Markets Tax Credit permanent, drawing new investment to low-income communities nationwide.

Provide $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and people selling their first homes, to help reduce housing costs for working families.

Restore the expanded Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit.

Taxes

Make billionaires pay a minimum income tax rate of 25 percent, raising $500 billion in 10 years.

End the preferential treatment for capital gains for millionaires, so they pay the same rate on investment income as on wages.

Put an end to abusive life insurance tax shelters, and stop billionaires from exploiting retirement tax incentives that are supposed to help middle-class families save.

Eliminate the “stepped-up basis” loophole for the wealthiest Americans, so they can’t avoid paying taxes on their wealth by passing it down to heirs.

Close the “carried interest” loophole, which wealthy fund managers have long used to halve tax rates on their own personal pay.

Increase our new stock buyback tax to 4 percent to discourage stock buybacks that benefit executives and wealthy shareholders, instead of workers and consumers.

Raise the corporate tax rate rate back to 28 percent.

Double the tax rate that American multinationals pay on foreign earnings to 21 percent; and end incentives, introduced by Trump, that encourage companies to shift jobs and operations overseas and book profits in low-tax countries.

Eliminate the so-called “like-kind exchange” loophole that allows wealthy real estate investors to avoid paying taxes on real estate profits, as long as they keep investing in real estate.

Health care

Make the health insurance premium tax credit permanent.

Expand Medicaid-like coverage to the 2.8 million uninsured low-income adults who live in states where Republicans still refuse the help.

Allow families go three years without having to resubmit Medicaid paperwork for children younger than six, reducing burdensome red tape.

Expand “no-surprise billing” to include costly ground ambulances.

Keep using antitrust laws to stop hospital, insurance, and Big Pharma mergers that undermine competition and increase health care prices for consumers.

Expand the $2,000 out-of-pocket drug cost cap to cover every single American.

Add at least 50 drugs a year to the list of drug prices Medicare can negotiate, lowering prices for 500 drugs this decade.

Make a $2 cap on life-saving generic drugs mandatory for all Medicare beneficiaries.

Expand Big Pharma price gouging rebates, applying them when drugmakers overcharge not just Medicare, but private insurers as well.

Address the shortage of mental and behavioral health providers by recruiting and training more providers, ensuring culturally competent care, and extending workforce development and incentive programs.

Establish permanent funding for Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, which provide 24/7 crisis care and treatment for mental health and substance use disorders, regardless of individuals’ ability to pay.

Expand Medicare’s coverage for mental health care, applying the same parity protections to Medicare beneficiaries.

Create America’s first, full, national paid family and medical leave program, guaranteeing every American worker up to 12 weeks of paid time off to care for a new child or loved one to recover from an illness, in cases of domestic violence, or military deployment.

Competition and Antitrust Policy

Ban all junk fees across our economy.

Reform hiring and procurement processes across the government, to boost competition among our contractors and suppliers, too.

Wall Street Reform

Hold executives at all failed banks accountable, clawing back compensation and banning them from the industry.

Pass an updated Glass-Steagall Act, more clearly separating commercial and investment banking and expanding Volcker rule safeguards.

Housing

Expand rental assistance to a half-million new households, including to low-income veterans and young people aging out of foster care.

Provide $10,000 mortgage-relief tax credit to first-time homebuyers, and $25,000 in down-payment assistance to buyers from families where no one has ever before owned a home.

Crack down on corporate landlords who are gouging tenants, for example by capping the amount they can raise the rent each year (Biden has since proposed a 5% cap).

Funding to help build or renovate 2 million homes nationwide – by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit for developers to build affordable rental housing; and by introducing a new Neighborhood Homes Tax Credit, the first ever to focus on creating affordable housing not for renters, but for homeowners.

Create a Housing Innovation Fund, to help state and local governments find new ways to increase supply.

Education

Provide free, universal preschool for four-year olds.

Make trade school and community college free for every American.

Further expand Pell Grants to 7 million more students, and double the maximum award by 2029.

Subsidize tuition at all Minority Serving Institutions for anyone whose family earns less than $125,000 a year.

Recruit more new teachers, with the option for some to even start training in high school; and help school-support staff to advance in their own careers.

Tech Regulation

Pass bipartisan legislation to protect kids' privacy and to stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on kids and teenagers online, ban targeted advertising to children, and put stricter limits on the personal data these companies collect on all of us.

Pass bipartisan legislation to promote competition and privacy in the tech industry. Important policies include promoting interoperability between tech services and platforms, allowing users to control and transfer their data, and preventing large platforms from giving their own products and services an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

Reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields tech platforms from liability even when they host or disseminate violent or illegal content, to ensure that platforms take responsibility for the content they share.

Update and pass the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, protect student data privacy by ensuring what is collected in schools is only used for education, and update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to protect personal electronic information and safeguard location information.

Medicare and Social Security

Expand traditional Medicare coverage to include dental, vision, and hearing services, which are so key to health and quality of life, by making the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share.

Make Medicare permanently solvent by making the wealthy pay their fair share in Medicare taxes.

Amend federal bankruptcy laws to make sure no retirees ever run the risk of pension insolvency.

Voting Rights and Democracy

Pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act to fully secure the right to vote in every state, ensure fair congressional maps for every American, modernize and secure our elections, and curtail the corrupting influence of money in politics.

Pass the DISCLOSE Act, which will require advocacy groups that run ads to influence elections to disclose donors who contribute more than $10,000, and ban foreign entities from contributing to them.

Strengthen public financing with small-dollar matching for all federal candidates and crack down on foreign nationals who try to influence elections.

Keep super PACs wholly independent of campaigns and parties and pass a constitutional amendment that will ban all private financing from federal elections.

End “dark money” by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections.

Prohibit corporate PACs and lobbyists from donating to anyone they lobby.

Lobbying and Ethics

Create a federal ethics commission to strengthen good governance laws, like those requiring financial and lobbying disclosure.

Require all federal candidates to disclose at least 10 years of tax returns.

Ensure tax dollars go to work for the American people, not for special interests, reestablish merit-based federal contracting and ban political appointees from interfering in grantmaking.

Strengthen laws that regulate lobbying by foreign governments and lower the threshold for registering as a federal lobbyist.

Energy, Environment, and Infrastructure

Improve and speed up the processes of environmental review and clean-energy permitting.

Find new ways of generating and storing energy, reducing emissions, and boosting climate resilience, launch an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Climate (ARPA-C), modeled on the defense research agency that’s behind breakthrough technologies like the internet and GPS, and the new ARPA-H that the Administration created to transform medicine.

Establish a new national lab for climate research and innovation, affiliated with an HBCU, to ensure the opportunities of the future are available to everyone, and built by everyone.

Extending Buy Clean and Buy America standards, requiring federal projects to use low-carbon, American-made cement, steel, and other materials; and providing credits for private companies to do the same, creating more American jobs

Double funding to repair and expand public transit.

Electrify our ports and waterways, prioritizing progress towards a goal of zero-emissions freight.

Require that low-carbon materials and clean power be used in all new federal buildings by 2030, and invest in upgrading VA hospitals, federal offices, and K-12 public school and community college buildings.

Pass the bipartisan Disaster Resilience Tax Credit, to help low- and middle-income families and small businesses invest in preparing for and easing the impact of storms, heat, floods, and other natural disasters.

Increase protections for America’s Arctic, and ensure clean water for all Americans by protecting rivers and wetlands.

Protect our oceans by working to designate new marine sanctuaries, and protect coastal communities from climate impacts.

Fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, partnering with state and local governments; and work to reduce threats to iconic old growth forests.

Work through the Multilateral Development Bank to elevate climate and clean energy priorities within the global development finance system.

Build on our leadership in innovative debt-for-nature swaps, which have helped countries from Barbados to Gabon to restructure over $2 billion in debt so far, unlocking hundreds of millions of dollars for nature and climate investments.

Public safety and guns

Establish universal background checks.

Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Require safe storage for guns.

End the gun industry’s immunity from liability, so gunmakers can no longer escape accountability.

Pass a national red flag law to prevent tragedies by keeping weapons out of dangerous hands.

Increase funding to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) for enforcement and prosecution, and to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for firearm background checks.

Fund gun violence research across the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as community violence interventions.

Pass the Safer America Plan, which calls on Congress to invest $37 billion to support law enforcement and crime prevention.

Create a new Violent Crime Reduction and Prevention Fund to give federal, state, local, and Tribal law enforcement the resources they need to fight crime, including to hire more agents, prosecutors, and forensic specialists.

Give communities the tools to crack down on gun crime, retail crime, and carjacking.

Pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. And, end racial profiling and religious discrimination in law enforcement.

Criminal justice reform

Take action to expunge federal marijuana-only convictions.

Combat drug trafficking and expand the use of drug courts, interventions, and diversion for people with substance use disorders.

Fund a new Accelerating Justice System Reform grant program to provide jurisdictions with critical resources to foster community trust and safety, reduce inequity and justice system involvement, and alleviate burdens on police.

Expand access to public defenders and step up civil rights enforcement, including by boosting funding for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and hiring 50 new Assistant U.S. Attorneys.

Ensure young people get a second chance after leaving the justice system, automatically seal and expunge juvenile records.

Keep children and teens safe and out of the justice system, invest in after-school programs, community centers, and summer jobs.

End state-level use of private prisons and detention centers, and restrict state and local practices like solitary confinement, chokeholds, and restraints on pregnant inmates.

Guarantee access to medical care in prison and eliminate profiteering from diversion, bail, electronic monitoring, commissaries, and reentry programs.

Support rehabilitation and education, including college programs, for inmates in prison and after their release.

Boost access to transitional housing, mental health and substance use treatment.

Limit re-incarcerating people federally to only serious violations of supervised release.

Expand “ban the box” so returning citizens can more easily find work, protect their right to vote, and protect their right to public services.

Reproductive Freedom and Women’s Rights

Pass national legislation to make Roe the law of the land again.

Strengthen access to contraception so every woman who needs it is able to get and afford it.

Protect a woman’s right to access IVF.

Repeal the Hyde Amendment.

Continue to support access to FDA-approved medication abortion, appoint leaders at the FDA who respect science and appoint judges who uphold fundamental freedoms.

Make the Equal Rights Amendment the law of the land.

Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act and end pay inequity not just in the federal workforce, but throughout the economy with penalties for companies that discriminate against women.

Violence against women

Strengthen Violence Against Women Act; keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers; and expand housing and legal services for survivors.

Work with schools to implement and enforce Title IX and end sexual harassment and assault in our nation’s schools.

Eliminate the rape kit backlog.

Strengthen legal protections for and support survivors of deepfake image-based sexual abuse building on the federal civil cause of action established under the president’s reauthorization of VAWA in 2022.

LGBTQI+ Rights

Pass the Equality Act to codify protections for LGBTQI+ Americans.

Prohibit employment discrimination in the federal government, including contractors, and make federally-funded seniors programs LGBTQI+ inclusive.

Expand mental health and suicide prevention services for LGBTQI+ people.

Media

Strengthen media ownership rules and direct federal antitrust agencies to investigate media mergers, pushing back on the potentially harmful effects of corporate consolidation.

Appoint an independent media professional to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

DC, Puerto Rico, and Territories

Support statehood for D.C., which its residents overwhelmingly support.

Work to end its unequal treatment by the federal government, and fight to provide equal access for Puerto Rico to federal programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and the CTC.

When disaster does strike, speed access to recovery funds to help rebuild.

Help restructure Puerto Rico’s debt to relieve its debt burden, and work to dissolve the Financial Oversight and Management Board.

Border and Immigration

Pass legislation that is consistent with our values as a nation. Legislation must secure the border, reform the asylum system, expand legal immigration; and keep families together by supporting a pathway for long-term undocumented individuals, improving the work authorization process, and securing the future of the DACA program.

Provide the resources and authorities that we need to secure the border. This includes additional border patrol agents, immigration judges, asylum officers, cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop the flow of fentanyl, and funding for cities and states that are sheltering migrants.

Pass legislation to reform our asylum system modeled after the bipartisan Senate deal so that we can quickly identify and provide protection to those who are fleeing persecution and ensure it is not used as an alternative to legal immigration by others.

Fund a sufficient number of asylum officers and immigration judges to facilitate timely decisions. In addition, asylum seekers—especially the most vulnerable, including unaccompanied children—should have access to legal counsel.

Deploy more cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect fentanyl at our ports of entry.

Leverage all resources of the federal government to stop tech platforms from being used for criminal conduct, including sales of dangerous drugs like fentanyl.

Pass the U.S. Citizenship Act, which would permanently increase family-sponsored and employment-based immigration. The bipartisan border legislation would increase the number of immigrant visas that are available by 250,000 over 5 years.

Legislation should also include provisions to ensure that children who came as dependents on their parents’ temporary visas can remain in the United States with their families, even after turning 21, provisions to streamline applications of at-risk Afghan allies to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, and a process for Afghan evacuees to have their status adjusted to lawful permanent resident.

Extend work authorization to those who utilize lawful visa pathways so that families can more quickly get on the path to economic self-sufficiency. This includes K-1, K-2, and K-3 nonimmigrant visa holders (fiancés, spouses, children of U.S. citizens), and the spouses and children of high-skilled temporary visa holders.

Explore opportunities to identify or create work permits for immigrants, long-term undocumented residents, and legally processed asylum seekers in our country.

Pass legislation to provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, farmworkers, careworkers, and other long-term undocumented individuals who contribute to this country, by paying taxes and contributing to their local economies.

Veterans

Strengthen VA care by fully funding inpatient and outpatient care and long-term care, and by upgrading medical facility infrastructure.

Improve and increase access to mental health care, expand suicide prevention, and invest in opioid overdose prevention and treatment.

Foreign Policy

Continue to stand with Ukraine to stop Putin’s atrocities and constrain Russia’s threat to allied nations and America’s vital interests.

Help Ukraine recover economically and support ongoing efforts to strengthen Ukraine’s democracy and deepen its political and economic relationship with European and transatlantic institutions.

Remain focused on actions at home and abroad to outcompete China. continue to stand up to unfair economic practices, restrict the PRC’s access to advanced technologies that could be used to harm American interests, and reshore supply chains for materials and technologies critical for the 21st century.

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting
Financing new projects and paying new reporters
Access to upcoming chats and live notes

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!