Art by Alondra Moreno Santana
In 2022, the Heritage Foundation launched Project 2025 in anticipation of a second Trump presidency. Outlined in the initiative’s policy guide, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, is a roadmap for reshaping federal agencies, with sweeping changes that threaten to alter the scientific landscape for years to come. The proposal directly challenges scientific consensus on gender identity, climate change, and public health, framing these issues as ideological rather than empirical.
A core focus of Project 2025 is combatting what its authors call “woke” science. The document quotes Roger Severino, a key figure behind the project, urging the next Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to dismantle transgender healthcare policies: “[HHS] must immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism.”
While Project 2025 suggests a restrictive agenda on gender that frames the idea of gender identity as an “ideology” rather than a scientific reality, scientists have long agreed that sex and gender constitute different yet equally valid aspects of identity. An article published in the NIH’s National Library of Medicine stresses the importance of properly distinguishing between sex and gender, defining sex “as a construct based on genetics” and gender as “someone’s personal and deeply felt internal sense of the self, which may or may not correspond with the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.” Project 2025’s rejection of the lived realities of those who do not conform to conservative gender expectations encourages a harmful new set of “biological realities” that reduce gender identity to a symptom of “wokeness” and disregard the longstanding opinions of scientists across the nation.
Beyond gender identity, the document also targets gender diversity in STEM, calling for the NIH to end diversity quotas for conference panelists and for the CDC to stop collecting gender identity data. These policies contradict the NIH’s stance, which stresses that differentiating between sex and gender is critical for addressing health disparities.
Project 2025 also aims to reframe climate change as a political issue instead of a scientific one by placing congressional regulations on the EPA and abolishing the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. The proposed downsizing of the EPA favors economic benefit in certain high-polluting sectors of the energy industry over long-term environmental health, a common theme across Project 2025’s policies, that even extends to the repeal of spending bills that subsidize renewable energy developers. Instead of focusing on sustainable energy alternatives, Project 2025 proposes plans to increase fossil fuel consumption by supporting the Willow pipeline project, an oil drilling effort in Alaska that seeks to increase the number of drilling pads from three to five. This operation will destroy natural habitats in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ignoring the science behind the importance of climate-conscious energy resources.
The outlined politicization of climate change signifies a larger shift of authority from scientists to policymakers. But policymakers are not scientists, and this oppressive agenda plans to undo COVID-19 health policies enacted under the Biden administration and disempower the role of science in the response to future health crises. Project 2025 seeks to end vaccine mandates for Medicaid- and Medicare–funded hospitals and prohibit mask mandates in healthcare facilities, citing unnamed randomized controlled trials that claim masks are ineffective. However, organizations like the Mayo Clinic have consistently emphasized the opposite: “Wearing a face mask slows how quickly the virus that causes COVID-19 spreads.”
Perhaps most tellingly, the document asserts that “CDC guidance must be prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character,” further undermining the role of scientists in shaping public health policy. This move suggests an effort not just to weaken scientific agencies but to remove their role in governmental decision-making.
Project 2025 represents more than just a policy shift—it is a systematic effort to erode the role of science in government. By disregarding gender research, climate science, and public health expertise, the initiative seeks to reshape federal agencies in ways that could have lasting consequences for science, policy, and society. If implemented, these proposals could fundamentally alter how the US approaches scientific inquiry and evidence-based policymaking for decades to come.