The project additionally proposes chopping up several agencies. It called for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the nation’s oceans, weather, climate and fisheries science agency, to be “dismantled.”
NOAA is home to the National Weather Service (which the plan says should henceforth focus on commercial operations), as well as the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (which the plan says should be “downsized,” with much of its climate research “disbanded”).
The plan would also eliminate offices within the Energy Department that focus on renewable energy, climate technology and energy technology research. And the Energy Department chapter further calls for a “whole-of-government assessment and consolidation of science,” including “a review of all the federal science agencies.”
In addition, with the help of Congress, Project 2025 seeks to eliminate energy efficiency standards for household appliances. Such standards have been a target of congressional Republicans, who have made multiple efforts to block or roll back Biden administration restrictions on appliances.
Former President Trump has also blasted regulations requiring more efficient lightbulbs, showerheads and a range of other items.
Trump has sought to distance himself from the project in the wake of the leader of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that put it together, controversially calling for a “bloodless” revolution.
Below, Vox has a P2025 primer:
2) Longtime conservative priorities: The vast majority of Project 2025’s policy plan is focused on longstanding conservative priorities — with some tweaking and elisions for the Trump era. Though some are indeed quite extreme, they’re not all that new or specifically tied to Trump.
There are far too many to list here, but just as a flavor:
- Education: Eliminate the Department of Education, give every parent a voucher-like option they could use to send their child to private school, zero out federal funding to low-income schools over the next decade, greatly cut “wasteful” school meal programs, and end Biden’s student loan forgiveness programs
- Energy and environment: Deprioritize fighting climate change, repeal Biden’s clean energy subsidies, further unleash oil and natural gas production, roll back various environmental regulations
- Health care: Majorly cut and overhaul Medicaid, roll back the recent law banning surprise medical billing
- Immigration: Deny loan access to students at “schools that provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens,” ban non-citizens from living in federally assisted housing (even if they live with a citizen), reinstate and expand the horseback-mounted Border Patrol
On a few issues — trade, antitrust, the Export-Import Bank — the plan states that the conservative movement is divided, and lays out the thinking of two different sides on each issue. On the question of Social Security and Medicare, which Heritage has long supported overhauling but Trump does not, the document is basically silent.
3) A hardline religious-right agenda: There are also parts of Project 2025 that, while not exactly surprising for conservatives, are quite extreme in ways that are politically problematic for Trump. The plan calls for:
- Revoking FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which is used in about half of US abortions (“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” the document states)
- Using an old law known as the Comstock Act to prosecute people who send abortion pills through the mail
- Ending the mandate for insurance to cover the “week-after” contraceptive pill Ella (which the document argues is a “potential abortifacient”)
- Crack down on “abortion tourism” in liberal states by requiring states to report where women seeking abortions live and cutting federal funds if they refuse
- Ending subsidies for stem cell or fetal cell research
As Project 2025 has captured the attention of progressives, various lists purporting to lay out what’s in it have spread online. Some of these lists are largely accurate, but others contain exaggerations and falsehoods.
Contrary to some online claims, Project 2025 itself does not call for ending no-fault divorce, a complete ban on abortions without exceptions, a ban on contraceptives, raising the retirement age, teaching Christian beliefs in public schools, ending marriage equality, banning Muslims from entering the country, or abolishing the FDA and EPA.
Now, various Heritage Foundation experts and allied groups who signed onto the project have indeed called for many of these things at various points and hope to work toward such goals. Here are Heritage links in support of raising the retirement age and a nationwide abortion “heartbeat” ban. (Trump, of course, called for “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” during his 2016 campaign. He also called for abolishing the EPA.) But such proposals are not in the document itself.
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The Vox piece points to this viral list as being “largely accurate.”
First item on the list “..replace them with unqualified far-right..” Obviously Project 2025 does not say that.
We know that for the Heritage foundation, and JD Vance, as well as Trump, the first qualification is loyalty. The 2025 document says, for instance, that NOAA officials must be “wholly in sync” with the President.
“…scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/07/noaa-project-2025-weather/678987/