What Project 2025 Means to Indian Country

Details

By Neely Bardwell and Leland Marmon

November 03, 2024

Native Vote 2024. While former President Donald Trump has disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s  Project 2025, his fingerprints seem to be all over it. An analysis of the 922-page agenda for the next presidential administration finds that of its 307 authors and contributors, more than half of them had served in the Trump administration or on his campaign or transition teams.

In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation has outlined their ongoing vision for the future of the United States from restructuring federal government offices to eliminating them entirely. Project 2025 intends to alter the government as a whole. 

Native News Online examined Project 2025 to determine its potential impact on Indian Country. While Indian Country is explicitly mentioned a few times, most reforms that would drastically damage tribal rights are found in the adjacent acts and offices, listed under broad categories. 

Project 2025 is led by two former Trump administration officials

In a post to his social media platform on July 5, Trump //truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/112734594514167050" style="text-decoration: none;">wrote, "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them." 

Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, serves as director of the project, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to Trump is now the project's associate director, and also led the creation of Project 2025.

Because of his previous relationships with the leaders of the project, Trump’s claim to a  non-relationship to Project 2025 is questionable.

The Heritage Foundation, who oversaw Project 2025, also created a "Mandate for Leadership" in 2015 before Trump's first term. Two years into his presidency, the foundation said that Trump had instituted 64 percent of its policy recommendations from that document.

The authors of many chapters are familiar names from the Trump administration, such as Russ Vought, who led the Office of Management and Budget, and former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller

Supporting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) will get you fired

If you work within the federal government in one of the many departments and agencies, Project 2025 recommends that support of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies should be grounds for termination. 

It states that the U.S. Agency for International Development staff and grantees that "engage in ideological agitation on behalf of the DEI agenda" should be terminated. Same rules go for the Treasury Department, saying the next administration should "treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment."

Project 2025 plans to gut protections through the 1964 Civil Rights Act

The plan is to eliminate ‘disparate impact’ as a standard of racial discrimination. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act “Prohibits Employment Discrimination Based On Race, Color, Religion, Sex And National Origin.” Disparate Impact is a legal theory that holds entities accountable for practices, decisions, or actions that have discriminatory effects on protected groups, even when there is no intent to discriminate. 

“Congress should: Eliminate disparate impact as a valid theory of discrimination for race and other bases under Title VII and other laws. Disparities do not (and should not legally) imply discrimination per se,” Project 2025 reads. 

Project 2025 wants to roll back climate protections

Project 2025 is calling to revoke the government’s view that carbon emissions harm public health, even as Native communities have warned otherwise. In 2020, tribes in New Mexico warned the EPA that its methane rollback for oil and gas wells would put their communities at further risk, as the region already had the highest concentration of methane emissions in the country. Project 2025 will reverse a 2009 scientific finding from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that says carbon dioxide emissions are a danger to public health. 

Project 2025’s authors and supporters believe the following actions listed in their Department of Interior section of the project will benefit Native communities across the nation.  

“End the war on fossil fuels and domestically available minerals and facilitate their development on lands owned by Indians and Indian nations. End federal mandates and subsidies of electric vehicles. Restore the right of tribal governments to enforce environmental regulation on their lands.”

On page 675, Project 2025 reads “climate-change research should be disbanded.”

Project 2025 doesn't plan to protect sacred sites

The project calls for the repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which established the basis for the protection of significant and historic lands such as the Grand Canyon and Bears Ears National Monument where tribal coalitions are fighting to preserve land after Trump’s action to revoke creation of the monument. The act was initially created to address the finding, and theft, of Native artifacts found on federal land.

Safety nets for farmers would be no more

Not even agriculture is safe from Project 2025, with it proposing ending “safety nets” such as the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs, which pay farmers of selected commodities when the prices of those commodities fall below a predetermined level. 

Nutrition assistance programs would be cut

Project 2025 calls to “reject efforts to create universal free school meals”, proposing the  reversal of the Biden Administration’s 2021 reforms that sought to increase SNAP disbursements to reflect the real-world costs of healthy food. On average, 41.2 million people in 21.6 million households received monthly SNAP benefits in the 2022 fiscal year. 

Department of the Interior

The proposal itself is massive and begs the question of feasibility, while implying an overwhelming amount of overreach into every branch of government. The Department of the Interior (DOI) is under threat, with proposals to dismantle, reorganize, and eliminate many of the offices it is responsible for. (p.536)

Environmental Protection Administration

Restructuring of the EPA intends to consolidate vital systems into the American Indian Office, a singular entity to be located in Oklahoma. Indian Country will immediately face challenges regarding long-standing protections for tribal lands, sacred sites, natural resources, and more, which have been safeguarded through federal stewardship, environmental regulation, protective acts, and treaties. 

“AIO should be significantly elevated as a stand-alone EPA Assistant Administrator office. … While designated a “headquarters” office with direct reporting to the Administrator, its location should be in the American West, closer to most tribal nations. This could include Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Dallas, Texas; or Denver, Colorado. The state of Oklahoma is considered the tribal center of America and is home to 39 federally recognized tribes, including the “Five Civilized Tribes.” (p. 440)

In their bullet point list of priorities for Indian Country, nearly all of them are specifically designed to combat green energy and favor private companies. This will be done by eliminating the loan programs that tribes rely on, as well as rolling back Biden's green infrastructure plans, exposing federal lands to fossil fuel and coal expansion.

A “Day One Executive Order” for the EPA is described in detail for an incoming conservative President; immediately stop all grants and legal proceedings, remove personnel, and rewrite all of the guidance documents meant to keep air and water clean. Additionally, this would prevent the gathering of genuine evidence for “causality of health effects” and “low-dose risk estimation.”(p. 423) Such changes would lead to higher levels of pollution and obstruct the collection of evidence linking it to illness. The danger of this is imminent and self-evident, considering the long history of tribes fighting for compensation and protection from damaging pollution, such radiation exposure. This was also the purpose behind the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest.

Education

Education is one of these core issues emphasized in the proposal as a whole.The mandate promotes policies such as school choice and privatization, which would remove up to 70% of education funding. Shifting resources to private institutions will further destabilize an already fragile educational infrastructure, leaving Native students with little to no alternatives. Alongside this, Project 2025 intends to “Eliminate the Head Start Program” (p.482), as well as title VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (p. 334 and 582)

Abortion access is not safe from Project 2025.

In the chapter that outlines recommendations for the Department of Health and Human Services, the changes calls for the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its 24-year-old approval of the widely used abortion pill mifepristone as well as reinstating stricter rules surrounding mifepristone's use, prohibiting its use after seven weeks instead of the current ten.  

Project 2025 also seeks to require the drug to be given in-person instead of through the mail by recommending the Justice Department enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that prohibits drugs, medicines or instruments used in abortions from being sent through the mail.

Conclusion

Dissolution of the abilities of the federal government is especially concerning for a federally managed community. While deregulation and decentralization is posited in Project 2025 as empowering tribes themselves, further analysis would show their intent is to undermine tribal protections, and make Indian Country vulnerable to further exploitation.