Page 664 of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” states, “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 manifesto also calls for gutting or privatizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Flood Insurance Program, and federal disaster funding.
Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained the negative effect of this policy idea in a Sept. 22 interview with PBS.
“Attacking this agency, attacking the science that it’s doing is really damaging to the public,” Cleetus said. “They would like the private sector to run rampant and not be fettered by any kind of guardrails. And we all know that the climate crisis is accelerating, getting worse, having an impact on our economy as well as the environment.”
While he was president, Trump was involved in a controversy that may have sparked Project 2025’s hostility toward NOAA. In 2019, Trump claimed in a tweet that Hurricane Dorian was projected to hit Alabama. When the NOAA’s Twitter account swiftly corrected him and clarified that the storm was not projected to impact the state, Trump doubled down and showed reporters a map with the path extended into Alabama using a Sharpie marker.
Internal agency emails released after a Freedom of Information Act request by news outlets showed concern at NOAA over Trump’s falsehoods. One official, the NOAA’s deputy undersecretary for operations, described the altered map as “crazy.”
Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, which was conceived and developed by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. But his ties run deep, from the many staffers involved in drafting it to key architect Russell Vought’s hidden-camera admission that “There are people like me that have his trust that will be able to get it to him in whatever position we’re at. The relationships will be there. The trust level will be there.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has repeatedly criticized the project and highlighted Trump’s connections to the policy ideas and personalities behind it.
Harris’ official campaign site describes the project as “Donald Trump’s plans for total control over our daily lives.” The plan also calls for severe restrictions on reproductive freedom, replacing the entire federal civil service with Trump loyalists, and politicizing the Department of Justice.
Awareness of Project 2025 rose throughout the summer, and opinion polling has shown widespread rejection of the scheme.
In a September NBC poll of registered voters, 57% said they felt negatively about the plan, while only 4% had a positive response. Even 33% of Republicans polled said they had negative feelings about Project 2025 and only 7% of that subgroup felt positively about it.
NBC’s report noted “It was the least popular of all the subjects tested in the September NBC News poll — a battery that included socialism, capitalism, both presidential and vice presidential candidates, the Republican and Democratic parties, Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.”
