Rewiring Treasury and the Fed: A Blueprint for Financial Consolidation, Not the Public Interest
Project 2025's Treasury and Fed proposals—withdrawing from the IMF/World Bank, making budget-balance the Treasury's mission while cutting spending and not raising taxes, issuing 50-year bonds to lock in low rates, eliminating the Fed's dual mandate, and loading CFIUS with Pentagon co-chair authority—are all still on paper as of late 2025. They would dismantle full-employment policy, concentrate financial power, weaponize foreign aid as unilateral leverage, and leave workers and small businesses exposed to the next downturn.
None of these proposals have been implemented yet. But they represent a coherent vision: shrink the Treasury's redistributive and internationalist functions, subordinate the Fed to price stability alone, and shift CFIUS from a commerce-balancing body to a Pentagon-led security gate. Each move would have a known distributional consequence—making credit tighter for ordinary borrowers, reducing fiscal space for public investment, and turning foreign assistance into a tool for military leverage rather than development. The 50-year bond idea is particularly reckless: locking in low rates today assumes rates stay low, which is a bet taxpayers would lose if inflation persists or the economy recovers unevenly. And eliminating the dual mandate would codify a Fed that raises rates on any sign of wage growth, sacrificing the Black and brown workers who historically gain jobs last in a tight labor market. A progressive alternative would instead codify the Fed's full-employment duty in statute, require Treasury to report distributional impacts of debt management, and make CFIUS transparent by publishing penalty schedules and adding community and labor representatives to its reviews. The U.S. should lead at the World Bank and IMF not by leaving but by pushing them to cancel debts for climate-vulnerable nations and tax wealth hidden in offshore jurisdictions. Treasury's budget-balancing mission should be replaced with a full-employment target—the government's budget is not a household ledger; deficit spending that puts people to work and builds public goods is an investment, not a burden. And the greenfield CFIUS loophole should be closed for all state-owned enterprises, not just Chinese ones, with a public interest test that weighs job quality, union rights, and climate impact, not just national security defined by the Pentagon.
The humanitarian alternative
Strengthen the Fed's dual mandate with a full-employment target that accounts for racial and geographic disparities. Maintain U.S. leadership in the IMF and World Bank while pushing for reforms that prioritize sovereign debt relief and climate finance. Close the CFIUS greenfield loophole for Chinese SOEs, but balance DOD involvement with Treasury's lead to avoid politicization. Reject budget-balancing that relies on spending cuts; instead, raise revenue through progressive taxation of wealth and corporate income.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 24: Federal Reserve (pp 735-737)"— 702 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise withdraw from both the World Bank and the IMF and terminate its financial con- tribution to both institutions. If the U.S. is to provide economic assistance or humanitarian aid to other nations, it should do so unilaterally—not through the pass-throughs of international aid orga- nizations, non-governmental organizations, or other nations. These organizations and countries simply create expensive middle-men, while U.S. funds are intercepted before being distributed to those in need. Also, these foreign entities have interests that do not coincide with American national security and economic interests. FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY Treasury should make balancing the federal budget a mission-critical objective. The federal budget absorbs enormous resources from the economy, both in money taken from taxpayers and in money borrowed. The budget should be balanced by driving down federal spending while maintaining a strong national defense and not raising taxes. To reduce interest payments on the debt, Treasury should lock in current rel - atively low interest rates by issuing longer duration bonds, and even consider creating a …"