Maybe this summer you’ve heard about Project 2025, the “Mandate for Leadership — The Conservative Promise”
It’s not much of a beach read. And it’s scarier than sharks.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, created Project 2025. Its “mandate for leadership” kicks in if Donald Trump wins the presidency.
Project 2025 is a blueprint for Trump zealots seeking to dismantle checks and balances and concentrate immense power in the executive branch while dousing everything with flammable politics. It would turn our government into a paradise for humorless white guys bearing horrible ideas to please big money interests.
CNN reports that at least 140 people who worked for Trump in various capacities helped write Project 2025, and more Trumpers worked for other conservative groups advising the project. It sets the table for Trump to carve up democracy and serve slices to his pals. Our collapse into an authoritarian state is gravy.
And yet, Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025.“ I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump said this month in a late-night post on Truth Social.
It could be the more voters learn about the project, the more unpopular it gets. But Trump is, as usual, lying. And Trump’s newly minted running mate J.D. “Weathervane” Vance is all in.
ADVERTISING
So many awful ideas are packed into 900-plus pages. Here’s one tucked on page 674.
“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the project recommends.
NOAA is home to the National Weather Service, the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office, The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service and the National Hurricane Center, to name a few.
Why mess with the weather? Did an unexpected rainstorm ruin their tiki torch parade?
“Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” the project claims. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”
Oh, OK. If we quit studying climate change, it will go away.
“This is an attack on the results of the science,” said Jerald Schnoor, co-director of the Center for Global & Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa. He said the project would censor the work of scientists who might threaten conservatives’ coal-fired, oil-soaked policy agenda. It would also deny researchers a free trove of weather and climate data collected by NOAA.
The recommendations argue the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”
Thomas Gilman is author of these recommendations. He served as chief financial officer in Trump’s Department of Commerce, a Cabinet-level agency that includes NOAA.
Gilman writes Americans already rely on weather predictions made by “more reliable” private companies, such as AccuWeather. Never mind that those private firms’ forecasts rely on free information provided to them by the weather service.
But the project’s author insists the free ride should be over. The weather service would “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
If you don’t like the weather in Iowa, wait five minutes and it will change. But will you pay $5 to find out how it’s going to change? How about $50?
So, who is going to issue watches and warnings saving lives when natural disasters strike? Will it be your local weather bureau or someone in Pennsylvania working at AccuWeather?
For the record, AccuWeather issued a statement opposing the recommendations.
More importantly, science and weather must not run afoul of the administration’s policies.
“Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area,” Gilman wrote.
Envision lackeys with Sharpies, aiming hurricanes at Alabama.
But Witold Krajewski, the retiring director of the Iowa Flood Center, argues that instead of breaking up agencies there should be stronger integration of different government functions.
He uses a flood event as an example.
The U.S. Geological Survey monitors flood levels. The National Weather Service forecasts flooding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency comes to the rescue. And the Army Corps of Engineers operates in a flood’s wake. One flood, four separate agencies.
“This is nonsense, just nonsense,” Krajewsk said of Project 2025. “It’s a very bad idea.”
But that’s what you get from so-called conservatives in the Trump era.
Fixing, more like wrecking, institutions that aren’t broken. Attacking any science that doesn’t fit their worldview. Doing the bidding of corporate donors at the expense of the common good. Creating a government where dissent is crushed. Replacing facts with misinformation.
Instead of being conservative, this is a radical agenda. It flies in the face of what our Founders wanted. And it wasn’t a king ruling by edict.
(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com
www.thegazette.com
It’s not much of a beach read. And it’s scarier than sharks.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, created Project 2025. Its “mandate for leadership” kicks in if Donald Trump wins the presidency.
Project 2025 is a blueprint for Trump zealots seeking to dismantle checks and balances and concentrate immense power in the executive branch while dousing everything with flammable politics. It would turn our government into a paradise for humorless white guys bearing horrible ideas to please big money interests.
CNN reports that at least 140 people who worked for Trump in various capacities helped write Project 2025, and more Trumpers worked for other conservative groups advising the project. It sets the table for Trump to carve up democracy and serve slices to his pals. Our collapse into an authoritarian state is gravy.
And yet, Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025.“ I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump said this month in a late-night post on Truth Social.
It could be the more voters learn about the project, the more unpopular it gets. But Trump is, as usual, lying. And Trump’s newly minted running mate J.D. “Weathervane” Vance is all in.
ADVERTISING
So many awful ideas are packed into 900-plus pages. Here’s one tucked on page 674.
“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the project recommends.
NOAA is home to the National Weather Service, the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office, The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service and the National Hurricane Center, to name a few.
Why mess with the weather? Did an unexpected rainstorm ruin their tiki torch parade?
“Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” the project claims. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”
Oh, OK. If we quit studying climate change, it will go away.
“This is an attack on the results of the science,” said Jerald Schnoor, co-director of the Center for Global & Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa. He said the project would censor the work of scientists who might threaten conservatives’ coal-fired, oil-soaked policy agenda. It would also deny researchers a free trove of weather and climate data collected by NOAA.
The recommendations argue the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”
Thomas Gilman is author of these recommendations. He served as chief financial officer in Trump’s Department of Commerce, a Cabinet-level agency that includes NOAA.
Gilman writes Americans already rely on weather predictions made by “more reliable” private companies, such as AccuWeather. Never mind that those private firms’ forecasts rely on free information provided to them by the weather service.
But the project’s author insists the free ride should be over. The weather service would “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
If you don’t like the weather in Iowa, wait five minutes and it will change. But will you pay $5 to find out how it’s going to change? How about $50?
So, who is going to issue watches and warnings saving lives when natural disasters strike? Will it be your local weather bureau or someone in Pennsylvania working at AccuWeather?
For the record, AccuWeather issued a statement opposing the recommendations.
More importantly, science and weather must not run afoul of the administration’s policies.
“Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area,” Gilman wrote.
Envision lackeys with Sharpies, aiming hurricanes at Alabama.
But Witold Krajewski, the retiring director of the Iowa Flood Center, argues that instead of breaking up agencies there should be stronger integration of different government functions.
He uses a flood event as an example.
The U.S. Geological Survey monitors flood levels. The National Weather Service forecasts flooding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency comes to the rescue. And the Army Corps of Engineers operates in a flood’s wake. One flood, four separate agencies.
“This is nonsense, just nonsense,” Krajewsk said of Project 2025. “It’s a very bad idea.”
But that’s what you get from so-called conservatives in the Trump era.
Fixing, more like wrecking, institutions that aren’t broken. Attacking any science that doesn’t fit their worldview. Doing the bidding of corporate donors at the expense of the common good. Creating a government where dissent is crushed. Replacing facts with misinformation.
Instead of being conservative, this is a radical agenda. It flies in the face of what our Founders wanted. And it wasn’t a king ruling by edict.
(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com
Opinion: Project 2025: Summer fun for Republican autocrats
FILE – Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, June 22, 2024, in Philadelphia. Trump …
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