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Why Project 2025 Remains a Threat to Our Livable Future
We all want clean water, safe, affordable food, a healthy environment, and a bright future we can share with future generations. But Project 2025 threatens all of these.
Jul 31, 2024
Amidst a perpetually churning news cycle, you may have seen a chilling phrase break through the din: “Project 2025.”
It looms like a bogeyman in everything from TikTok comments to headlines in major news outlets. And it refers to a 900-page wishlist and roadmap for a potential conservative president’s first months in office. The document was crafted by former Trump administration officials working with the Heritage Foundation (a think tank with a history of climate denial and funded by right-wing billionaires).
So what exactly is in Project 2025 that makes it so startling?
“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” said Project 2025’s director. Paul Dans, who on Tuesday announced he would be stepping down in August from the project. But Dans' comment alone clues you in on the gravity of its contents and its intentions. It is nothing less than a plan to completely overhaul the federal government, stripping away its ability to defend families from threats to public health and the environment.
Its deregulatory agenda will put our water at risk of pollution and contamination for the sake of corporate profits, and its agricultural policies will pull a resilient, affordable food system further from reach. Its plan for our energy system would push our planet even more toward climate chaos.
Moreover, Project 2025 is as meticulous as it is dangerous, detailing exactly how a right-wing president could carry out its plans. And while it details a heinous agenda on a wide range of issues, we’re going to focus on food, water, and climate.
Here’s what you need to know about Project 2025’s threat to our livable future.
Project 2025 Would Pave the Way for More Corporate Pollution
One key tenet of Project 2025 is dismantling and disempowering federal agencies. Its goal is to shift agencies’ focus from protecting our health and environment to paving more pathways for unchecked corporate abuse.
Notably, the plan recommends gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). On day one, it would downsize staff at a time when the agency is already severely understaffed and under-resourced. This has led to, for example, absurdly long reviews of chemicals that threaten our water, air, and health.
In other cases, the EPA has rubber-stamped potentially dangerous chemicals to speed up corporations’ path to profits. Project 2025 wants this trend to continue, as it advocates for speeding up reviews “to ensure the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers” — putting companies before public health.
It also aims to strip our waters of protections from polluters. Project 2025 would exclude much of our country’s wetlands and temporary waters from protection and narrow the kinds of water pollution regulated under the Clean Water Act. As communities across the country suffer pollution from factory farms and industrial plants, we need more water protections, not fewer.
Moreover, Project 2025 would have a new administration pause and revisit Biden’s recent Lead and Copper Rule Improvement and PFAS regulations, which are vital first steps in responding to our country’s lead-in-water and PFAS contamination crises. This would put the health of millions of people at continued risk.
It specifically targets a recent Biden rule that designates two PFAS as “hazardous substances” under CERCLA, jeopardizing efforts to force polluters to clean up their toxic mess. Project 2025 could allow corporations to get away with poisoning our water, and leave taxpayers to foot the bill.
Safe, Affordable, and Sustainable Food Is Under Attack
Project 2025 is expressly focused on deregulation and downsizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It views regulations as “a threat to farmers’ independence and food affordability” and advocates for removing “obstacles imposed on American farmers and individuals across the food supply chain.”
This completely ignores the essential role that regulations play in keeping our food safe and combating Big Ag’s takeover of our food system. Government programs are integral to supporting small and medium-sized farmers and building a food system that will be sustainable for generations of farmers to come.
But Project 2025 wants to cut these — from regulations on pesticide use and genetically modified food to conservation programs that help farmers manage their land sustainably.
It also brushes aside the role that our food system has in fostering a healthy environment, saying “environmental issues” are “ancillary” to agriculture. It would hamstring efforts to transform our food system to save our climate and environment while ensuring affordable, sustainable food for all.
Additionally, Project 2025 cruelly threatens to yank food access from poor and low-income families across the country. Notably, it calls for limiting access to SNAP benefits — formerly known as food stamps — which help feed more than 40 million people in the U.S. It also calls for restricting the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which specifically helps children and families. Cutting these programs will allow more people to go hungry.
Our food system is already in crisis, driven by agricultural corporations cutting corners, playing dirty, raising prices, and crowding out small farmers. The answer is not deregulation that invites Big Ag to get bigger at the expense of the rest of us. Yet that’s exactly what Project 2025 advocates for.
Project 2025 Puts a Livable Climate in Jeopardy
Finally, some of the most disturbing parts of Project 2025 are its fervent promises to let the fossil fuel industry run rampant on our health, climate, and environment.
We know that ending fossil fuel use and production is key to securing a livable climate and defending our health against pollution. Yet Project 2025 calls for a rapid expansion of drilling, fracking, and gas exports.
Its authors propose restoring coal mining on public lands and opening more of them to oil and gas leasing. They also recommend speeding up drilling permits, allowing fossil fuel corporations to more easily ravage our shared public lands for profit.
Notably, Project 2025 recommends clearing the way for the planet-wrecking liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry to balloon. Exporting even more LNG could lock in not only the U.S. into decades of more fossil fuels, but also the entire world.
At the same time, the authors of Project 2025 suggest dismantling several offices at the Department of Energy that are key to federal research, development, and deployment of renewable energy. They also push for stopping efforts to grow the country’s power grid to accommodate new solar and wind energy. Instead, they call for focusing on improving grid “reliability” by expanding fossil fuels and slowing clean energy.
This is a laughable idea. Research shows our grid does not need fossil fuels to be reliable; in fact, in disasters, fossil-fueled energy is more vulnerable to outages.
We know that renewables make our energy more affordable, more resilient, and less dangerous to our health, safety, and climate. Yet Project 2025 has no interest in ensuring these benefits. Instead, it’s fighting for the status quo of dirty energy and corporate power.
Project 2025 Proposes a Dark Future — But We Can Fight It Together
We all want clean water, safe, affordable food, a healthy environment, and a bright future we can share with future generations. But Project 2025 threatens all of these. At a time of so many intertwining crises, it promises to hamstring the federal government’s ability to protect people, sacrificing us for the sake of corporate profits.
But while Project 2025 represents some of the most poisonous paths our government could go down, we have the antidote. Food & Water Watch has shown again and again that when it comes to making meaningful change and fighting corporate power, the key to winning is two-fold: calling for bold action and organizing people power to fight for it.
By coming together, we can fight for the future we need and deserve. We can protect our food and our water, end fossil fuels, and win a livable future for everyone.
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The Ultraprocessed Foods Corporations Cram Down Our Children's Throats
UPFs make up two-thirds of the calories consumed by children and teenagers in the United States.
May 13, 2024
About forty-five years ago, at a social gathering, I asked an executive of a Minneapolis-based large food processing company if he fed heavily sugared cereals to his children. He smiled as he shook his head. Smart person. His and other major companies producing what is now called Ultraprocessed Foods (UPFs) had scientists and labs. They knew that ever higher doses of sugars, fats, and salts were being poured into nutritionally stripped foods and deceptively promoted to youngsters on kiddy television. They profitably ignored the serious damage they were causing!
These companies’ marketeers succeeded in getting these children, as my mother would say, to turn their tongues against their brains. The children were also shown how to nag their parents into buying junk food and drink. In fact, Madison Avenue advertising firms would give high ratings for ads “with a high nag factor.”
It was about 1980 when obesity rates started rising at alarming rates. Now about 30% of adults are obese, another 35% are overweight. Recently, a Goldman Sachs study estimated that by 2028 up to 70 million Americans will be taking the new weight-loss drugs, whose longer-term effects are yet to be known. Their apparent present success in suppressing extra food intake is already worrying the fast-food chains like McDonald’s that thrive on selling huge cheeseburgers.
It was also about 1980 when the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) staff and its leader, Dr. Michael Jacobson, were appearing in the mass media and on major national talk shows. They graphically showed the public the large amounts of fat, sugar, and salt that were in the hot dogs, potato chips, and soft drinks they consumed. Millions of Americans started changing their food purchases toward multi-grained breads and more fresh fruits and vegetables. Many people became vegetarians. But most consumers remained wedded to misleadingly promoted and greatly diluted UPFs, short on nutrition and long on harm to their health.
During recent decades there has been an increase in peer-reviewed scientific studies showing that certain foods you can easily buy in the markets can increase your life expectancy while others reduce your longevity. Long-time medical and science reporter/author Jean Carper boiled down these findings into a highly usable new little book titled, “100 Life or Death Foods: A Scientific Guide to Which Foods Prolong Life or Kill You Prematurely.” (See my recent column New Book: Choosing Regular Food to Extend Longevity, April 12, 2024).
On May 8, 2024 – the New York Times defined Ultraprocessed Foods (UPFs) as “using industrial methods and ingredients you wouldn’t typically find in grocery stores – like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and concentrated proteins like soy isolate. They often contain additives like flavorings, colorings or emulsifiers to make them appear more attractive and palatable. Think sodas and energy drinks, chips, candies, flavored yogurts, margarine, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausages, lunch meats, boxed macaroni and cheese, infant formulas and most packaged breads, plant milks, meat substitutes and breakfast cereals.”
The Times continued: “In a large review of studies that was published in 2024, scientists reported that consuming UPFs was associated with 32 health problems, with the most convincing evidence for heart disease-related deaths, Type 2 diabetes and common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.” Caution, not all UPFs are associated with these problems.
UPFs make up two-thirds of the calories consumed by children and teenagers in the United States. Still, the giant food companies are getting away with little regulation, especially for their heaviest advertising that pushes their profitable ultraprocessed foods. Have you ever seen TV ads for fresh carrots, radishes, celery, lentils, spinach, kale and asparagus? Unlikely. The mass merchandising ads go for foods, described by a report in the journal BMJ, as “designed by manufacturers to achieve a certain ‘bliss point,’ which causes us to crave and overeat them. They also tend to be low in nutrients, such as fiber, vitamins and minerals.”
We are behind other governments in our official dietary guidelines. Canada and Mexico recommend avoiding or limiting UPFs while the U.S. guidelines make no mention of them. Such is the dominance of giant agribusiness corporations over the indentured U.S. Department of Agriculture and the mostly bought members of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees.
This corporate interference also extends to constantly putting such UPFs into school lunch programs.
Absent taking over the 535 members of corporate Congress by 250 million eligible voters, we are left with parents and their children availing themselves of publications such as CSPI’s Nutrition Action newsletter to become smart buyers and consumers of safer, healthier, nutritious food. If you can, add a home garden to your food supply.
Some of these simple recipes, often called a Mediterranean diet, are in my “Ralph Nader and Family Cookbook,” (2020) with an introduction on how my mother educated us very early on to want to eat nutritious foods prepared to be delicious as well. She baked her own bread, cooked “from scratch” and avoided processed foods with unknown ingredients, such as hot dogs.
Our snacks were fresh fruits and vegetables, including chickpeas, munched while walking to school. For a sweet taste, we were treated to honey and maple syrup. We were taught not to whine because it wasn’t smart and didn’t get us anywhere.
Parents are protectors of their children. They have to be especially on guard to protect their children from pervasive direct mass marketing, using influencers, peer groups, and abduction of their youngsters into the Internet Gulag. The earlier in their child’s life that parents do their job, the easier it will be. Children so liberated can become active allies of Mom and Dad, showcasing their special knowledge. (See, “You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination, and Intellect of Tweens” by Dr. Claire Nader).
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GOP Farm Bill Blueprint 'Puts Big Ag's Profits Over Everyone Else'
"America's farmers and consumers need forward-looking policies that build a sustainable, resilient, and fair food system," said one campaigner.
May 01, 2024
As Democratic and Republican leaders on Wednesday unveiled competing visions for the next Farm Bill, green groups sounded the alarm about the GOP proposal that "slashes nutrition programs and climate-focused conservation funding in order to boost commodity crop production."
U.S. House Committee on Agriculture Chair Glenn "GT" Thompson (R-Pa.) put out a "title-by-title overview" of priorities and announced plans for a legislative markup on May 23 while Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) released the Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act, which includes over 100 bipartisan bills.
"The contrast between the House and Senate farm bill proposals could not be clearer," asserted Environmental Working Group senior vice president for government affairs Scott Faber. "The Senate framework would ensure that farmers are rewarded when they take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the House framework would not."
"At a time when farmer demand for climate-smart funding is growing, Congress should ensure that support for farmers offering to reduce nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer, and methane emissions from animals and their waste, is the Department of Agriculture's top priority," Faber said. "Unless farmers are provided the tools to reduce nitrous oxide and methane emissions from agriculture, farming will soon be the nation's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions."
Friends of the Earth senior program manager Chloe Waterman declared that "House Republicans have proposed a dead-on-arrival Farm Bill framework that puts Big Ag's profits over everyone else: communities, family farmers, consumers, states and local rule, farmed animals, and the planet."
"Senate Democrats are off to a much better start than the House, but they have also fallen short by failing to shift subsidies and other support away from factory farming and pesticide-intensive commodities toward diversified, regenerative, and climate-friendly farming systems," she added. "We are particularly concerned that millions of dollars intended for climate mitigation will continue to be funneled to factory farms, including to support greenwashed factory farm gas."
Both Waterman's organization and Food and Water Watch spotlighted the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act, which aims to prevent state and local policies designed to protect animal welfare, farm workers, and food safety—like California's Proposition 12, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld last year. The Republican bill is opposed by more than 200 members of Congress and over 150 advocacy groups.
"Despicable ploys to undermine critical consumer and animal welfare protections must be dead on arrival," Food & Water Watch senior food policy analyst Rebecca Wolf said in a Wednesday statement blasting the House GOP's priorities.
"America's farmers and consumers need forward-looking policies that build a sustainable, resilient, and fair food system," she stressed. "Instead, House leadership seems poised to take us backwards, trading state-level gains for a few more bucks in the pockets of corporate donors. Congress must move beyond partisan bickering, and get to work on a Farm Bill that cuts handouts to Big Ag and factory farms."
As green groups slammed the GOP's agricultural proposals for the Farm Bill, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) called out the Republican scheme to attack food stamps.
Stabenow's bill "would protect and strengthen the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), our nation's most important and effective anti-hunger program," noted Ty Jones Cox, CBPP's vice president for food assistance.
Meanwhile, Thompson's plan "would put a healthy diet out of reach in the future for millions of families with low incomes by cutting future benefits for all SNAP participants and eroding the adequacy of SNAP benefits over time," she warned.
As Jones Cox detailed:
Thompson's proposal would prevent SNAP benefits from keeping pace with the cost of a healthy, realistic diet over time, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would result in a roughly $30 billion cut to SNAP over the next decade. The proposal would do this by freezing the cost of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Thrifty Food Plan (the basis for SNAP benefit levels) outside of inflation adjustments, even if nutrition guidelines or other factors change the cost of an adequate diet. The Thompson proposal's modest benefit improvements do not outweigh the harm to the tens of millions of SNAP participants—including children, older adults, and people with disabilities—who would receive less food assistance in the future because of this policy.
"Stabenow's proposal rejects the false premise that improvements in SNAP must come at the expense of food assistance for low-income families who count on SNAP to put food on the table," she concluded. "The Senate framework, which rejects harmful benefit cuts, should be the basis for farm bill negotiations moving forward."
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