Project 2025’s Anti Science Agenda Would Cost Lives

Project 2025 is your one-way ticket to the 19th century, the wondrous age of Robber Barons, Polio, massive child mortality, and women who knew their place.

PBS News Hour:

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump again vowed to shut down the Education Department and endorsed a Louisiana law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. He has also pledged to cut funding to schools with vaccine requirements.

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• Dr. Paul Offit:Before vaccines, diphtheria was the most common killer of teenagers. Before vaccines, pertussis, or whooping cough, killed 8,000 people, mostly children, every year. Polio before vaccines would cause 30,000 people, mostly children, to be paralyzed every year and kill as many as 1,500.Rubella, or German measles, when it infected pregnant women, would cause 20,000 cases of birth defects every year. Is that what we want? Do we want to go back to that time, before vaccines saved our lives and prevented all this suffering and hospitalization and death?
• Laura Barron-Lopez:Bottom line, you’re concerned that even just the rhetoric could lead to an uptick in deaths amongst children when it comes to measles, correct?
• Dr. Paul Offit:Right.I think what happened over the last few years, with the masking mandates and with the vaccine mandates is, we leaned into this libertarian left hook. And now for the last few years, every year, there’s been hundreds of pieces of legislation pushing back on mandates. And so we have been pushing and pushing and pushing, to the point that now we’re starting to see measles again.And, in 2022, there was a case of polio in Rockland County, New York, in an area where the immunization rates were only 30 percent. This is a man who never left this country. So these are not diseases that you want to see come back.

Scientific American:

Project 2025, the sweeping right-wing blueprint for a new kind of U.S. presidency, would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology and education.

Across multiple departments and agencies, including the EPA, the Department of Energy and NOAA, the project would jettison much of the federal government’s climate science apparatus; it dismissively refers to such programs as “climate alarmism.” This move would significantly hinder researchers’ ability to understand climate change’s many impacts on our daily lives. It would stifle information on how to adapt society and infrastructure to threats such as increased flooding and more frequent and extreme heat waves, all of which have been conclusively linked to rising global temperatures. Cutting DOE research into renewable energy, battery storage and other technology—while increasing fossil fuel extraction on federal lands—would make reining in greenhouse gas emissions enough to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord all but impossible.

“Any attempt to reverse policies, any attempt to slow down this transition to clean energy, is putting us at greater risk” from climate change’s severe impacts, Cleetus says. She notes that the 2025 scheme targets the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding—a bedrock of climate policy that identifies heat-trapping pollutants as a public health threat. But distorting or burying science does not change the reality of the climate crisis. “Science will not bend to political will,” Cleetus adds, “but what will happen is that people will suffer.”

To oversee and reform research at the EPA, Project 2025 would install a “science adviser” who would report directly to the presidential administration, as well as multiple new senior political appointees. “It’s pretty alarming, and it would be completely new for us,” says Joyce Howell, a Philadelphia-based EPA attorney speaking in her capacity as executive vice president of AFGE Council 238, a union of employees of the agency.

The plan would eliminate the National Weather Service’s role as a forecaster, relegating the agency to only collecting data—which private companies could use to create their own forecasts. This has been a goal in some conservative circles for many years; in 2005 then senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania introduced a bill to codify such a change into law. John Morales, a former NWS meteorologist who now works as a consultant, expressed his “alarm” at such proposals. “The U.S. economy grows as a result of our robust research, innovation, forecasts and warnings” from the NWS and NOAA, he says. These proposals “just make absolutely no sense.”