Project 2025, or the “presidential transition project”, is a document created by The Heritage Foundation that outlines the goals of the far right to “reclaim the nation”.
While President-elect Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from The Heritage Foundation, Vice President-elect JD Vance praised the President of The Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, for his work on Project 2025.
Despite this attempt to distance himself, 140 individuals who worked for President Trump have been involved in Project 2025’s creation — including six of his former cabinet members.
Environmental protection and chemical regulation are two of the biggest areas Project 2025 would impact. The document seeks to repeal the Antiquities Act, which would prevent the president from ensuring the preservation of public lands and waters and would no longer classify them as national monuments.
If enacted, Project 2025 will alter countless aspects of life including current environmental protections and the future of environmental academia.
Dr. Monica Hubbard, an associate professor at the School of Public Service and Director of the Master of Environmental Management program shared her concerns for the future of environmental research with Project 2025 in the foreground.
Hubbard explained that climate change research suffered in 2016 under the Trump administration due to the elimination of climate change information in many agencies.
“As far as education, faculty and research it’s going to have a big impact, because if Project 2025 actually goes through what they’re going to do is pull research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), United States Department of Agriculture, any funding directly related to climate change will go away,” Hubbard said.
For students in the school of the environment at Boise State, this could mean limited resources. Project 2025 seeks to eliminate certain offices within The Department of Energy, such as the Weatherization Assistance Program. This could greatly impact the grants environmental researchers at Boise State receive.
The Biden and Harris presidency established the Legacy Wells project which sought to detect methane from gas and oil wells.
“One thing that will be interesting that the Biden administration put in has to do with legacy wells — natural gas and oil,” Hubbard said. “A big approach is trying to find these [wells] and then cap them. I could see them going through and trying to kill that, or if they can’t kill it through legislation, basically, don’t put resources into it.”
Project 2025 seeks to decrease regulations around chemical companies — something Hubbard said could be a major issue moving forward.
“Right now, the burden of proof to show that a chemical is hazardous doesn’t really lay on the manufacturer of the chemicals … There’s a process that chemical companies are required to go through the Environmental Protection Agency, and I think what they’re trying to do is change that, so it’s an easier process to get through, and so you don’t have to verify with data and everything,” Hubbard said.
Jennifer Pierce, a professor in the Department of Geosciences at Boise State said that Project 2025 could be detrimental to the current climate crisis.
Not only would Project 2025 remove agencies dedicated to climate change research, but Pierce explained the impact the policy would have on federal departments as a whole.
“What we need to think about is that these federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior [and] the National Weather Service,” Pierce said. “These are agencies that provide vital and life-saving information to the American people, things like hurricane preparedness and our clean air, our clean water. These are all protected by those agencies.”
Pierce went on to note how Project 2025 could affect access to clean air.
“[Project 2025] will recommend eliminating something called Endangerment Finding — that’s the legal mechanism that requires the Environmental Protection Agency to curb emissions and air pollutants for vehicles and power plants, this is under the Clean Air Act,” Pierce said. “The repercussions of Project 2025 will actually undermine our clean air in our country, which is the most fundamental thing people need to survive.”
After a series of wildfires from late summer to early fall, Pierce explained that Project 2025 could increase the likelihood of fires in the state of Idaho.
“If we do not address climate change, and at the same time we undermine the federal agencies, — the Bureau of Land Management, Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife, these are the agencies that fund the National Interagency Fire Center right here in Boise, Idaho … Undermining our ability to prevent wildfires, while at the same time not curbing carbon emissions will lead to bigger and more devastating wildfires in the state of Idaho that could be deadly,” Pierce said.
Amanda Thompson, an Environmental Studies major with a Climate Studies minor explained in an email to The Arbiter that there is a ticking time bomb on the climate crisis.
“Researchers have said that we have six years left to stop the climate crisis. With four of these years under Trump’s control, we can only expect the state of the climate to get worse,” Thompson said. “The Inflation Reduction Act is considered to be the largest climate solution in U.S. history, and Project 2025 is guaranteed to repeal it along with other agencies within the EPA and also eliminate government offices that do research on climate change.”
Project 2025 discusses “the perceived threat of climate change” — language that Thompson finds harmful.
“It’s harmful to use that language because the idea of climate change is already so unbelievably polarized and it’s super dangerous to use that kind of rhetoric when the science has been proven multiple times over that humans are warming the planet,” Thompson said. “The first step to creating change is learning that we are causing the problem and then learning ways we can all create and advocate for change, so by denying that it’s happening — it’s creating a dangerous narrative that we don’t have a problem.”
Project 2025 impacts many of the environmental protections that have been in place for decades. With language that downplays the current climate crisis and policy that seeks to diminish regulations, environmental researchers and activists across the nation worry about the plan’s implications.
