Democrats' Project 2029 Unveils Tech Crackdown Modeled Partly on European Rules

Democrats Are Building Their Own Project 2025

Turnabout is fair play. A group of Democratic policy veterans calling itself Project 2029 is assembling a governing blueprint for the next Democratic president, using the same playbook Republicans used with Project 2025.

Chad Maisel, a former Biden White House aide and Cory Booker staffer, runs the operation. He told Axios the group won't be strictly left-wing, but will pull ideas from across the Democratic Party. According to WUFT News, Maisel put it plainly: he wants a future Democratic president to have "a bookshelf full of really bold, transformational ideas" ready on day one.

The lesson, he said, came from watching Trump. Republicans got hammered for Project 2025 on the campaign trail, then quietly used it as a ready-made governing manual once in office. Democrats want the same head start.

First Up: Kids and Big Tech

The group's opening policy rollout, dubbed "Kids Over Clicks," targets social media and AI companies. According to Semafor, the plan calls for banning social media accounts for anyone under 16, narrowing Section 230 liability protections so platforms can be sued over AI-generated content and algorithmic promotion of illegal activity, stronger default privacy settings, bans on surveillance advertising, and bell-to-bell cellphone bans in schools.

Project 2029 is framing this as the current generation's "tobacco moment," a public health reckoning it thinks both parties can eventually get behind. Rishi Bharwani, U.S. director for Reset Tech and a contributor to the framework, told Semafor that kids' online safety is one of the rare high-profile issues not already "coded and claimed by one party."

He's not wrong that there's bipartisan appetite here. Evan Swarztrauber, a former FCC policy adviser now at CorePoint Strategies, told the New York Post that cracking down on social media and AI safety flaws has support on both sides of the aisle. Utah, Florida, and other red states have already passed their own age-verification and parental-consent laws. Australia banned social media for under-16s outright. This isn't some fringe idea.

The European Question

Reset Tech, the firm that co-authored the Kids Over Clicks agenda, received a $2 million grant in 2024 from George Soros's Open Society Foundations, according to the New York Post, earmarked specifically for pushing enforcement of the European Union's Digital Services Act. Reset Tech's CEO, Ben Scott, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton, called the DSA "nothing short of a paradigm shift in tech regulation" back in 2022.

The Post notes Project 2029 doesn't explicitly endorse the DSA or the EU's rules on policing misinformation with steep fines. The group's own materials only note that the EU is among several countries "implementing age restrictions for social media." Project 2029 says it's not proposing a European-style fining regime for speech.

But the money trail matters. The EU has slapped Meta, Google and Apple with more than $7 billion in fines over the past two years, according to the Post, and has separately gone after Elon Musk's X over alleged hate speech. The Trump administration has called the DSA a backdoor censorship tool and a disguised tariff on American companies. When the same policy shop cashing Soros checks to promote DSA enforcement in Europe is also writing the domestic playbook for the next Democratic nominee, voters are entitled to ask whose playbook this really is.

Beyond Kids: The "Annoyance Economy"

Project 2029 isn't stopping at children's safety. Maisel is working with Stanford economist Neale Mahoney on a second front: what they call the "annoyance economy," according to WUFT News. That means junk fees, subscription traps that are easy to sign up for and nearly impossible to cancel, robocalls, spam texts, and insurance claim runarounds. It's consumer-protection stuff that polls well regardless of party, and it echoes complaints the Federal Trade Commission has already pursued under both the Biden and Trump administrations over "click to cancel" rules.

The group says healthcare, housing, AI and border policy agendas are coming over the next year, with the full platform expected sometime in 2027, ahead of the 2028 primary.

The Political Risk

Silicon Valley broke hard for Trump in 2024, in part because tech leaders were fed up with what they saw as Democratic hostility paired with tolerance for European regulators fining American companies billions. Swarztrauber's warning to the Post is the sharper point: Democrats risk repeating that mistake if voters read Kids Over Clicks as an import of EU-style tech control rather than a homegrown child-safety fix.

Whether that read sticks depends on what Project 2029 actually puts in writing when its full agenda drops. So far, the group has released one policy area. The next test comes when it tackles AI regulation, an area where the line between "protecting kids" and "importing Brussels" will be much harder to hold.