JULY 19, 2024

9 MIN READ

What to Know about Project 2025’s Dangers to Science

Project 2025 would jeopardize federal scientists’ independence and undermine their influence

BY BEN GUARINO, ANDREA THOMPSON, TANYA LEWIS & LAUREN J. YOUNG

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. It would impose religious and conservative ideology on the federal civil service to such an extent that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has, dubiously, tried to distance himself from the plan. But in 2022 Trump said the Heritage Foundation—the think tank that authored Project 2025—would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” The project’s main document, a lengthy policy agenda, was published the following year.

Although Trump is not among its 34 authors, more than half are appointees and staff from his time as president; the words “Trump” and “Trump Administration” appear 300 times in its pages. At least 140 former Trump officials are involved in Project 2025, according to a CNN tally. It’s reasonable to expect that a second Trump presidency would follow many of the project’s recommendations.

Project 2025 presents a long-standing conservative vision of a smaller government and describes specific, detailed steps to achieve this goal. It would shrink some federal departments and agencies while eliminating others—dividing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into two weaker entities, for instance, and abolishing the Department of Education (ED) entirely.

What is even more unusual, and also mapped out in detail, is a plan to exert more presidential control over traditionally nonpartisan governmental workers—those Trump might describe as members of the “deep state,” or regulatory bureaucracy. For example, Project 2025 claims that the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other scientific institutions are “vulnerable to obstructionism” unless appointees at these agencies are “wholly in sync” with presidential policy. To that end, it would reclassify tens of thousands of civil service jobs as political positions that answer to the president.

“The independence of science is being attacked across the board in this document,” says Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists. “The importance of this science is that’s how we can ensure people’s health and the environment are being safeguarded.” (Cleetus notes that her comments address the policy agenda’s contents, not the upcoming presidential election.)

Career scientists who are now employed by the federal government are “terrified and polishing up their résumés,” says Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, or AFGE, a union that represents workers at the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the CDC and other agencies. If Project 2025 becomes reality, she says, “the very idea of scientific integrity will be flushed down the toilet.” The Heritage Foundation did not respond to Scientific American’s request for comment.

The policy handbook is not a light read. It is at turns wonkish, militant and sneering (and sometimes all three at once, such as when it calls for transforming federal institutions into “hard targets” for “woke culture warriors&rdquo. It tears down policies to curb climate change, even though a majority of Americans endorse climate action. And although there is broad support in the U.S. for laws that protect the relationships and rights of LGBTQ+ people, Project 2025 advocates for “a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage.” The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would become a “Department of Life” that would explicitly reject abortion and promote the heterosexual nuclear family structure as “ideal.” Below is a nonexhaustive list—Project 2025 is 922 pages long—of ways the agenda would warp scientific policies and processes that have long been integral to the country’s functioning.ABORTION
Project 2025 insists abortion should not be considered health care. It seeks to undo access to medication abortion, falsely stating that the involved drugs have complication rates four times higher than that of surgical abortion. In reality, studies have shown that mifepristone, one of two drugs used in almost all medication abortions in the U.S., is extremely safe and effective. Project 2025 argues that the Food and Drug Administration should “reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start.” But earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled unanimously to dismiss a case that challenged the FDA’s approval of mifepristone on these grounds (though the conservative-majority Court did leave the door open to future challenges). The Heritage Foundation’s plan seeks to have the FDA “stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws,” citing laws enacted as part of the Comstock Act, despite the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice has said such legislation does not apply to drugs that can be used to lawfully produce abortions.

Project 2025 also calls for the HHS to pressure each state to submit detailed reports of every abortion that is carried out within that state. And it would require the CDC to monitor and report abortion complications. That would include children being “born alive after an abortion”—a misleading phrase because the vast majority of abortions take place long before a fetus becomes viable and doctors are required by law to provide care once an infant is born.

AGRICULTURE
The Department of Agriculture’s current functions are as diverse and wide-reaching as providing loans for rural development and defending U.S. livestock from flesh-eating worms. The department has a crucial role in national nutrition: the USDA has overseen the country’s largest food assistance initiative, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), in its various forms since its World War II–era beginnings and reintroduction in 1961. Project 2025 would cut eligibility for SNAP benefits while moving the program to the HHS. And even though free school lunches have consistently been found to improve academic performance, the Heritage Foundation’s plan would restrict school meals provided through the USDA and repeal the dietary guidelines that those meals are based on.

Under Project 2025, the USDA’s scope would narrow to the efficient production of food, undoing the department’s current strategy to promote renewable energy and protect national forests and agricultural land from the climate crisis.

CLIMATE CHANGE
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.”

A key function of the NWS is to provide ample warnings about tornadoes, floods, heat waves and other hazardous weather—notifications that, Morales notes, protect lives and property. As a result, under Project 2025, this single, authoritative warning system would likely be replaced with a patchwork of alerts from weather stations and private apps.

EDUCATION
In addition to dismantling the ED, Project 2025 would end student loan forgiveness. It would narrow Title IX protections, which prohibit discrimination in education, by focusing only on “biological sex recognized at birth” and removing considerations for gender identity and sexual orientation.

Project 2025 could also make it harder for U.S. schools to attract international students and for employers to hire them after their education. Visa holders make up a significant portion of master’s and Ph.D. students in the country’s engineering, health and science programs: among first-time, full-time master’s students, for instance, scholars on temporary visas exceeded U.S. citizens and permanent residents in 2022, according to National Science Foundation data. After graduation, many foreign students remain in the U.S. to work with an H-1B visa. But Project 2025 would eliminate the lowest qualifying wage levels for H-1B workers set by the Department of Labor—levels that are commonly applied to these individuals’ first jobs. This would effectively mean “excluding most foreign-born graduates from these job opportunities,” according to an assessment released by the Niskanen Center, a pro-immigration think tank.

ENVIRONMENT
The EPA’s role beyond climate-change-related programs would be stymied, too. Project 2025 would increase the extent to which environmental policymakers have to consider costs to industry. It also argues for lessening the consideration of “co-benefits”—instances when, for example, regulating one pollutant coincidentally reduces emissions of another. This calculus flies in the face of the intent behind the Clean Air Act of 1970; the authors of that law, who wanted to spur industrial innovation, emphasized that human health was more important than company profits. The Project 2025 recommendations would also limit what is considered a pollutant or a hazardous chemical—in particular, they make the call to “revisit the designation” of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) as hazardous chemicals. “If anything should be listed as a hazardous chemical, it should be PFAS,” says Maria Doa, senior director for chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund and a former EPA employee, who worked at the agency during the Trump administration. These compounds, found in many products from firefighting foam to cosmetics, are prevalent in U.S. drinking water and soils. They can take hundreds, even thousands, of years to break down in the environment, earning them the common name “forever chemicals.” And PFASs have been linked to numerous ailments, including various cancers, hypertension and immune dysfunction.

“Across the board, [the authors of the project are] looking at undermining things,” Doa says, especially “the expertise to properly characterize the risk presented by chemicals.” Project 2025 would cease funding for the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a database of chemical health hazards that is considered a gold standard: in addition to the EPA, state governments use it to set regulations. The plan also seeks to undermine the agency’s ability to assess people’s cumulative exposure to chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). For example, under Project 2025, if a given chemical was regulated under the Clean Water Act, its route of exposure couldn’t also be considered under TSCA—meaning the latter program would have an incomplete measure of the chemical’s cumulative impact. PFASs are “a perfect example” of where this becomes a problem, Doa says, because people are exposed to multiple types of these substances through water, soil and consumer products. Overall, the project is “trying to give the industry preeminence in this rather than looking at all of us,” she adds.

HEALTH CARE
The project’s restrictions to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would roll back Medicaid expansions, potentially leaving millions of people without medical coverage. The ACA currently expands Medicaid eligibility to adults with incomes at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line, and it helps states offset the costs through a matching rate program. But Project 2025 would cap federal grants and leave primary oversight to states. Experts predict that with less federal funding as an incentive, certain states may choose to roll back Medicaid and restrict eligibility criteria. And with fewer people qualifying for Medicaid, gaps in health care access would grow—as has already been seen in states that have not adopted expanded Medicaid.

Project 2025 aggressively attacks the federal programs and funding that increase health care access to LGBTQ+ families and single-parent households. It criticizes President Joe Biden’s administration for focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity” and, without evidence, claims these policies are “subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage.” The project would also undo the antidiscrimination rules that are now applied to all federal health care programs, including the ACA and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Removing those protections would greatly restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender people of all ages.

TECHNOLOGY
Much of Project 2025 is concerned with eliminations or reductions, such as cutting federal support for automakers that produce electric vehicles. But there is at least one thing its authors would like to see enlarged: the U.S. thermonuclear arsenal. This would be, as nuclear policy analyst Joe Cirincione wrote recently in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “the most dramatic build up of nuclear weapons since the start of the Reagan administration.”

Project 2025 advocates for a “readiness to test” nuclear weapons at the Nevada National Security Site, even though detonating an underground nuke would violate the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which the U.S. signed in 1996. Physicists in the U.S. still have ways to study nuclear weapons, however: they do it virtually through supercomputer simulations that remove the risks to experimenters’ health and the environment—and avoid inflaming geopolitical tensions.