Scientific American reports:

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”). 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. [Continue reading…]