Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has been calling for the Democrats to develop a Project 48 (i.e., for the 48th President of the US who will be elected in 2028) in response to the Republican’s Project 2025. I agree on the imperative nature of doing such … months ago I offered my suggestions (see “Project for America’s Future” here on Information Bank).
California Congressman (and potential 2028 Democratic Presidential candidate) Ro Khanna appears to be the first out of the starting blocks in this regard, issuing the following policy statement this week. He backed it up with a speech to a DNC meeting today - both follow as do my comments. [Note. Khanna is my choice for Democratic Leader/Speaker in 2027.]
Ro Khanna (August 15, 2026)
On June 17, President Trump signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding with Iran. The agreement was intended to end hostilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and establish a framework for Iran’s economic recovery, reconstruction, and future investment.
The memorandum calls for developing a reconstruction and economic development plan of at least $300 billion for Iran, contingent on a final agreement. President Trump has said the United States will not directly finance the reconstruction, but his administration has committed to working with regional partners to develop the plan.
The Pentagon has spent billions on this war. Now the administration is laying the groundwork for a plan to mobilize at least $300 billion for Iran’s reconstruction. Meanwhile, many families here at home still struggle to afford rent, groceries, or a doctor’s visit.
If Washington can negotiate a 14-point agreement that includes a plan to rebuild Iran after a war President Trump chose to wage, we can write a 14-point plan to rebuild every American community.
Today, I am releasing my own 14-point plan, a plan for Team America. It puts the full strength of the United States government to work for the American people: creating jobs, slashing costs and stopping foreign wars.
Medicare for All: Healthcare for every American with no premiums, no deductibles and no denied claims, plus the cancellation of all medical debt.
Own a Home by 35: Create a Housing Guarantee that gives every American with at least seven years of work experience access to a federally backed, zero-down-payment mortgage with low interest rates to help them buy their first home. Modeled on the benefits available through the VA home loan program, this proposal would make homeownership attainable for working Americans. We must also ban Wall Street landlords and other large corporate investors from buying up single-family homes, driving up prices and putting homeownership further out of reach for working families.
Free Childcare: Ensure every family earning under $250,000 has access to the option of high-quality childcare, with childcare workers making at least $25 an hour. We should provide the option of family, friend and neighbor care, and also provide stay-at-home parents with a stipend.
A National Industrial Bank: Establish a National Industrial Bank to finance the construction of at least 100 new factories in deindustrialized towns and leverage private investment to strengthen American manufacturing. Prioritize small- and medium-sized manufacturers that commit to producing the goods we now import. The goal is to make America the world leader in chips, steel, ships and drones. This is the moment for a Marshall Plan for America — one that requires a national strategy and an institution dedicated to driving it. The China Development Bank has already invested nearly $1.5 trillion in Made in China initiatives.
Workers Over AI: Tax the machines instead of the workers and keep a human in the loop on your healthcare, your loans and the road. Today our tax code hits human labor harder than it hits the machines that replace it, and the economist Daron Acemoglu has shown that this imbalance pushes firms toward “so-so automation” that eliminates jobs without making the country any more productive. Taxing AI at least as much as workers, paired with stronger worker bargaining power, removes that thumb on the scale and heads off mass layoffs before they start.
Federal Jobs Program: One million living-wage national civil service jobs to rebuild our communities and our nation, a Works Progress Administration for our time and the boldest, most patriotic jobs agenda in a generation. At $60,000 per year, 1 million jobs would cost $60 billion annually. College or trade school graduates will staff our schools, parks and public projects and take on national moonshots from clean energy to quantum computing.
A $25 Minimum Wage and Worker Ownership: By 2032, raise the wage floor to a living wage and give workers a real share in the stock and profits they create. Over the past decade, top companies with UAW workers spent $530 million of their $563 billion in profits on stock buybacks and dividends for shareholders instead of the workers who earned them.
1,000 New Trade Schools and Tech Institutes: Invest $75 billion over 10 years to build and equip 1,000 new trade schools and technical training centers that teach trades like welding, mechanics and electrical work. Launch tech institutes in rural communities and factory towns in partnership with Silicon Valley companies that train workers to use AI and digital tools for small businesses and secure high-paying tech jobs.
Free Public College and Trade School: Pass the College for All Act to make public college and trade school free for families making under $150,000 and cancel up to $50,000 in student debt for working families. Establish a $60,000 salary floor for teachers and double federal public K-12 funding.
Get Money Out of Politics: Pass my 5-Point Political Reform Plan to ban lobbyist and PAC money, ban congressional stock trading, impose a lifetime lobbying ban on former members, set term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court and enforce a binding Supreme Court code of ethics. Then finish the job with a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. A century ago, the threat of a state-led convention pushed Congress to pass the Seventeenth Amendment and give the people the direct election of senators, and we will do it again: 25 states have already passed resolutions urging a constitutional amendment concerning campaign spending, still short of the 34 needed to potentially force a convention, and I will drive the rest across the finish line.
No Foreign Wars, No Genocide: End the foreign wars and cut $1 trillion in wasteful spending at the Pentagon over 10 years. No aid to Israel or countries that violate human rights.
Release All the Epstein Files: Release every remaining page of the Epstein files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act that Massie and I passed while protecting the privacy and safety of survivors. Investigate those in the files who are accused of sex trafficking and rape. End the two-tiered justice system that lets oligarchs and the well-connected escape the law.
A Data Center Bill of Rights: Give communities the power to say no. We must prevent data centers built here from raising local power bills or draining local water supplies. And no data centers in residential communities or farmland.
Tax Billionaire Wealth: Pass the Khanna-Sanders Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act and make corporations finally pay their fair share. A 5% tax on the 938 billionaires who together hold $8.2 trillion would raise $4.4 trillion over ten years to help finance childcare, healthcare, housing and free public college for hundreds of millions of Americans.
We need a new national mission. Our governing elite have been so focused on foreign wars that they have lost sight of our challenges here at home. It is time for a national economic development initiative that makes the economic success of every American family our highest priority.
America has done it before. We did it when FDR mobilized America’s industrial power, when Eisenhower built the interstate highway system and when Kennedy called on us to go to the moon. That spirit is what inspired my parents to come here in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We were a nation on the march — a nation brimming with confidence and humming with activity.
Let us be that America. Let us be an America that makes prosperity possible in every corner of our nation and, in so doing, becomes history’s first cohesive multiracial democracy.
Ro Khanna (August 15, 2026)
I am a proud Democrat. But I did not come here just to celebrate the Democratic Party. I came to speak from my heart about living up to our values.
Our strongest tradition is the fight for economic democracy against oligarchy. It runs from Jefferson’s distrust of concentrated financial power, through Bryan’s defense of producers against Eastern capital, to FDR’s New Deal. It lives in Johnson’s Medicare and Medicaid. It lives in Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
This is the tradition that says our party fights for an economy that works for people who work, not just those who own the capital.
In the 1960s that tradition still had force. A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Dr. King built on FDR’s Four Freedoms with the Freedom Budget — a plan for full employment, decent wages, housing, and healthcare.
But the Freedom Budget was never enacted. Civil rights advanced. Economic rights were postponed.
Our party began losing its way in the 1970s, right around the time I was born. Stagflation fueled an anti-government fervor, and too many of us decided the only way to survive politically was to accommodate it — to accept the ideological overcorrection that government itself was the problem.
And accommodate we did.
We supported financial deregulation and backed free-trade deals that led to deindustrialization.
We urged people to leave their hometown for financial and tech centers.
Our economic center of gravity shifted toward affluent coastal professionals and away from the industrial and small-town working class.
We stopped being the party of main street and became the party of Wall Street.
We kept the language of justice while abandoning the project of economic democracy that Randolph and King put on the table.
A lot of people now say our party needs to be bold again. I agree. But calling for boldness without an agenda is just branding.
I am tired of the platitudes.
I am tired of the consultant crafted, focus-group-tested phrases about “affordability” and “renewing the American Dream,” delivered without the specific policies to make them real.
I did not come to Washington to do messaging. I came to fight for a real agenda.
Medicare for All.
Tax the billionaires.
No foreign wars.
When we fight on policy instead of platitudes, Trump’s coalition can crack. We saw it with the Epstein Files Act. I stood with survivors and worked with Thomas Massie to pass the most consequential legislation a Democrat has passed in Trump’s second term. It is the moment when Trump’s presidency began to unravel.
That is the kind of substantive politics I believe in.
I am from the economic patriotism wing of the Democratic Party — the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party.
We believe a national economic project is our path back from the wilderness years.
We see that America is at a breaking point, and that if we do not offer a new economic bargain, we will break.
We understand that those who have lost two elections to Trump are no experts on electability and have no standing to tell a new generation of Democrats that their ideas for justice are too radical.
We are for the working class over the Epstein class.
Our vision for this party is to deliver America’s next New Deal.
It means Medicare for All. No more excuses, no more half measures — free, universal health care for every American. Now.
It means free childcare for Americans. The $80 billion we have spent in Iran could have paid for it.
A decent life requires good jobs in the communities people actually live in. That is why we need a national industrial development bank that rebuilds places hollowed out — Johnstown, Milwaukee, Bessemer, and towns across the steel and textile corridors. If China can invest $1.5 trillion through its development banks, America can invest here at home. Let’s build a thousand trade schools and tech centers so families in every region can build modern wealth.
Here is another simple idea. Hard working Americans should be able to buy a home. That’s why I’ve proposed A Home by 35. Work seven years and you earn the right to buy a house with zero down payment and a low-interest loan, the same promise we’ve long made to veterans.
How do we pay for all this? Tax the billionaires. All 989 of them!
That’s not the 1 percent or the .1 percent or even the .01 percent. It’s the .001 percent. They have a net worth equal to roughly 22 percent of our GDP. A 5 percent tax on them would raise 4 trillion dollars!
Some say that my call to tax billionaires is class warfare.
I have news for them: The billionaires have already been waging a class war.
They are decimating unions, outsourcing jobs, and putting the cost of homes out of reach. America is in a five-decade class war. It is time to get off the sidelines and show whose side we are on.
I should not be one of the only federally elected California Democrats supporting a ballot measure to tax billionaires so poor people have healthcare. We should be fighting for poor kids, not billionaires.
Nearly 100 billionaires live in or near my district. They ran a million-dollar candidate against me because I supported the tax. I won 63 to 6.
If I can be for a billionaire tax in the heart of Silicon Valley, how is this a hard vote for 434 other members?
The same class fight is now playing out with artificial intelligence. This is not complicated. We must be on the side of workers. A party against oligarchy stands with Teamsters over Tesla, truck drivers over Big Tech.
Just like planes have pilots, trucks should have drivers.
Tax agentic AI and robots more than human workers. Stop data centers in residential communities. Protect workers from being fired with collective bargaining rights. Democrats must put workers first in the age of AI.
And when we say we stand with workers, that includes our friends and neighbors who prepare our food, build our homes, and care for our children.
That is why we must abolish ICE. It is a cruel, rogue agency that murdered Lorenzo Salgado. Replace ICE with an immigration agency grounded in justice. When they shot at Lorenzo, a construction worker, a 52-year-old father with three polite, well-raised children, they shot the American dream.
The skeptics will say we cannot pass this agenda because of money in politics. They have a point. Our party must lead the fight to get money out of politics. No super PAC spending in Democratic primaries, none, not now, not in 2028.
We also cannot rebuild an economy for the many while the powerful remain unaccountable.
There is no reconciliation in America without accountability. The bankers who caused the great financial crash in 2008 belonged in jail. The officials who lied us into the Iraq war needed investigation. The Justice Department should never have delayed the January 6 cases that let Trump return to power. When we take back the House and Senate, we subpoena, we investigate, and we prosecute. We hold accountable the powerful who stole from this nation, who DOGEd this nation, and who killed innocent people on the streets of this nation.
Accountability does not stop at our borders. October 7 was a horrific terrorist attack and must be condemned unequivocally. But Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza, and we should have the courage to say so. I saw the apartheid system in the West Bank when I was detained there. Zero aid to Israel. No military sales of weapons used to kill civilians. If our party cannot stand for these principles, it will never convince a generation that watched the horrors of Gaza on their phones that we mean what we say about justice.
Fortunately, America has a remarkable capacity for self-correction.
I believe in this country. My grandfather fought for justice and went to jail twice as part of Gandhi’s independence movement. Today his grandson serves in Congress, representing the most economically consequential district in the world.
I was born in Philadelphia in our bicentennial year. Teachers and little league coaches believed in me. My mother believed so much in America that she would stay up late into the night with notecards making sure I learned every word of the English language. My father would rise before dawn to work, and still be present at every game, even though I could barely hit the ball. All they asked of me was hard work and that I show up. This country gave me and my family a chance to succeed. I want a country where every American has the same chances this country gave me.
That requires a Democratic Party ready to reclaim its moral purpose and to stand against oligarchy and for economic democracy. A party ready to lead the future with America’s next New Deal.
Let us be the party that calls on Americans to be bigger. Let us build an agenda that heals the divides — between those who own capital and those who live by their labor, between the coasts and the factory towns, between the America that feels seen and the America that feels forgotten.
This is the time for our generation of Democrats to answer history’s call. You and I have our moment to write this next chapter so that one day they will say we saved the country and did our part to build a more perfect union.
As I mentioned above, I’ve been a vocal advocate of a Democratic Party response to Project 2025 for months now. To give the Party and/or anyone willing to listen a jumping off point, I crafted “A Project For America’s Future” posted elsewhere here on Information Bank.
To encourage everyone to think long and hard about what platform the Party needs for 2028 (although I would have hoped they would have had one for 2026), here’s my comments on Congressman Khanna’’s Plan.
Several days ago, I read an article (which I’m desperately trying to find) that explained that rural voters/conservatives are on opposite sides of many issues from progressives/urban residents because the rural/conservative voters don’t believe that the Democrats can/will deliver on their grandiose plans. Plus they have more to lose if the proposals fail. That’s a point well taken … so any candidate who puts forth a plan needs to consider/demonstrate how they will deliver on it.
Having worked for a member of Congress, 3 state legislatures, a federal & a state intergovernmental relations agency, and professional associations for state legislators, county officials, and municipal officials, I believe that the Democrats need more than just a plan for a new President and/or Congress. The plan needs to set an agenda for the federal. state, and local governments working collaboratively. The federal government is not always the best agent for service delivery … the government that governs best is the one closest to the people. And as we’ve learned from the Trump Administration, putting all of our eggs into the federal basket hasn’t worked out well lately …. so let’s give everyone skin in the game!!!!
From my perspective as an independent voter, I continue to be frustrated that the Democrats don’t zero in like a laser on all of the changes in employment/labor/occupational safety laws that I think are DESPERATELY needed in the US. Plus the agencies need the financial/personnel resources to do their jobs!. That’s why my Project for America’s Future has a lengthy list of changes in that regard. The upside of which is that governors/state legislators and local officials can start tackling those items NOW (or at least after the November 3 election). There needs to be forward progress as soon as possible.
With regard to #3, Democrats need to commit to overhaul completely the unemployment and worker’s compensation systems in this country. I was STUNNED that they missed the biggest takeaway from the pandemic (i.e., the complete inadequacy of the current unemployment compensation system - both as to its administration and the financial support it provides). I’d be even bolder and suggest that they fold into that a complete overhaul of the disability insurance program funded by the federal government).
Elected officials/candidates need to rethink their obsession with home ownership. Programs to help people buy homes ignore the fact that many of the people who buy a home (a) Will not have the financial resources to maintain it, (b) Can’t afford to insure it given the rising cost of property/casualty insurance - and that assumes they can even find a company willing to sell them a policy, and (c ) end up trapped when there is a change in their employment circumstances. They can’t move to a new location for a new job because they can’t sell their house or even rent it. Does the focus on home ownership really serve the best interests of the home buyer and the nation as a whole?
Whatever Project 2028 plan Democrats put forward must have an extensive anti-corruption component that tackles all of problems we’ve seen with the Executive Branch, Congress and the Supreme Court. I have a 7 part anti-corruption series on Information Bank & that’s just the start. Democratic Governors/Attorneys General/State Legislators need to take a look at the situation in their states and fix what’s broken there too.
The focus on childcare misses the fact that in 2030, there will be more people over 65 in the US than under 18. Ask anyone with a parent/spouse over 65 what they fear the most … it’s the cost of long-term care for that person and/or the burden of caregiving. As I mention in my “Project for America’s Future” the nation needs to focus on caregiving generally - not just for a given subset of the population.
Having been an aspiring entrepreneur and a person who grew up on a farm in the Midwest, I am mindful of the fact that for many rural entrepreneurs/small business people, what’s most important is top flight service from the US Postal Service and high speed Internet. In most cases, the federal government is failing rural business owners and entrepreneurs miserably in this regard.
Tax reform needs to be comprehensive. Instead of focusing just on taxing the billionaires, we need a top down, comprehensive redo of federal AND state tax codes. Elected officials need to STOP giving tax credits, deductions, and exemptions to businesses as an economic development tool. This just ends up robbing Peter to pay Paul (and the CEOs with $100 million+ compensation packages laugh all the way to the bank).
If we want to ensure that communities can establish the rules of the road for siting of data centers or other enterprises, all current laws that have been preempted/powers taken away at the behest of Republican Governors & state legislatures must be repealed. This means that we need to get the National Guard out of Washington, DC too!
Need I mention that the Congress MUST pass comprehensive immigration reform ASAP!
Finally, the Trump Administration (especially through DOGE) has gutted the federal government. There is so much damage to repair that it’s prudent to use this as an opportunity to rethink/restructure the executive branch. As I point out in “Project for America’s Future,” it’s time for another National Performance Review and/or Hoover Commission. Let’s be bold in our vision about how best to deliver services/provide for a safety net/ensure the protection of individual liberties.
On a final note, if any aspiring presidential candidate (or Governor) wants to hire me to run their policy shop, I’m IMMEDIATELY available!
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