The Heritage Foundation — lead organizer of Project 2025, a sprawling effort to provide policy and staffing for a second Trump administration — recently promoted an apprenticeship program that opens up workers to increased exploitation. Heritage also criticized President Joe Biden for ensuring that most federal infrastructure contracting projects are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

In an article headlined, “Harris, Walz Policy Records Undermine Pro-Worker Rhetoric,” Heritage argues for a return to Trump-era apprenticeship policies that left new workers vulnerable by creating a two-tier workforce, and it disparages unions as detrimental to the working class. The result is standard-fare for the conservative think tank, which regularly attacks unions and promotes anti-worker policies like so-called right-to-work laws, which starve unions of funds by denying them the ability to collect fees from all the workers they represent. 

As head of Project 2025, Heritage has waged an all-out campaign against unions and the entire working class. The effort’s policybook — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — calls for the dismantling of New Deal-era wins for organized labor by carving out state-level exceptions to the National Labor Relations Act. It would also eviscerate overtime regulations and open the door to increased child labor exploitation.

The new article furthers Heritage’s broadside against organized labor, even while masquerading as being pro-worker. Heritage criticizes what it characterizes as “the Biden-Harris Administration’s multi-front assault against apprenticeship programs,” specifically the administration’s cancellation of “new Industry Recognized Apprenticeship Programs,” or IRAPS, “that were training people in high-demand areas like nursing and technology, which now face significant workforce shortages.”

In fact, IRAPs were a Trump-era policy that created a new class of apprenticeship programs that were controlled and overseen by employers — rather than the Department of Labor — and loosened standards meant to protect workers. As the progressive think tank The Roosevelt Institute wrote in response to the Trump-era rule, IRAPs are “likely to lead to a proliferation of programs that are lower-quality,” and could allow employers to exploit “loopholes in minimum wage laws.”

On Labor further noted that corporations that adopted these second-tier apprenticeship programs were “exempted from stepwise wage increases, prevailing wage requirements, and equal-opportunity employment.” 

Politico reported at the time that union leaders worried that the new programs would “create a supply of cheap labor for developers, undercutting high-skilled construction workers who rely on prevailing-wage jobs to make ends meet.”

The Biden administration rescinded the IRAP program and reverted to its long-established predecessor, known as the Registered Apprenticeship Program. In contrast to the Trump-era policy, Bloomberg reported that one union which represents about a quarter of a million apprentices and similarly situated workers supported the new Biden rule and in fact wanted it to go even further in its worker protections.

The Heritage article also criticizes Biden and Harris for their “labor agreements on government contracts” which “almost exclude non-union workers from federal contract jobs.” In fact, the Biden administration issued an executive order in December 2023 mandating that most large-scale federal construction projects be governed by collective bargaining agreements. Non-union firms would be allowed to apply for contracts, but the decision was seen as a major win for organized labor. Progressive think tank the Economic Policy Institute estimated that Biden’s executive order would improve working conditions for roughly 200,000 federal contractors, both union and nonunion. 

This new salvo from Heritage is just the latest example of right-wing media pretending to endorse a pro-worker agenda, only to advance policies that benefit employers at the expense of labor.