Reading Project 2025, part 5: changing energy, health, human services, and HUD

How might a likely second Trump administration impact higher education?  How can academics plan for and anticipate that major event, should it occur?

This week we continue our reading of Project 2025, a key document in understanding the near- and medium-term future of American politics.  This is an online, open, and distributed reading and anyone can participate. Here’s a post explaining how it works.  You can find all of our Project 2025 posts here.

In today’s post I’ll summarize this week’s reading, which continues under the header we’ve been working through for two weeks, “The General Welfare,” found on pages 417-516.    I’ll draw out the bits which bear directly on higher education. Next I’ll add some reflections and then several discussion questions.  At the end I’ll add some more resources.  Please join in with comments below – for examples of that, you can see good comments at the end of our first post.

Last week’s post, focused on Department of Education policy recommendations, elicited good conversation.  On Medium, Rob Vanwey argued that Project 2025’s education plan would reduce American research and teaching.

Summary overview

With this section the book turns to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),  the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Mandy M. Gunasekara begins her chapter on the EPA she once led by emphasizing what she sees as “the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states.” To this end, she would push some federal functions to states and local governments (“the primary role in making choices about the environment belongs to the people who live in it”) while adding political appointees to federal offices.

Gunasekara is strongly against climate action and the decarbonization agenda.  Here’s one sample passage:

Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.

Along those lines she would reduce support for electric vehicles and cut many climate regulations.  She also targets climate justice, calling for “eliminating the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.”

There is some of Project 2025’s dislike of nonprofits in this chapter. For example, the text recommends this push away from both the federal government and nonprofits: “To the extent that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)18 remains in place, ensure to the maximum extent possible that grants and funding are provided to state regulatory entities and not to nonprofits.”

The next chapter addresses the Department of Health and Human Services. Roger Severino, who once led its Office of Civil Rights, begins by drawing our attention to that division’s scope: “For good or ill, HHS activities personally impact the lives of more Americans than do those of any other federal agency.”  He later observes that “Medicare and Medicaid touch more American lives than does any other federal program.”

Severino charges HHS with being too concerned with social justice (in terms of race and gender), which he sees as leading to a life expectancy drop,

This chapter repeatedly makes clearly pro life, anti-LGBTQ+, and pro-nuclear family observations and recommendations.  For example, “From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth…Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.”  And “The Office of the Secretary should eliminate the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.” (489) The Centers for Disease Control plays a role here, as Severino would split CDC in two, then have one of the new entities gather detailed, national data about abortions.(455) He would withdraw federal approval for mifepristone and instruct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to end fetal tissue work, while cutting Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. (459-460; 471-2) A conservative administration should end regulations supporting same-sex couples from adopting children. (477)

On gender fluidity this chapter recalls the book’s introduction:

Radical actors inside and outside government are promoting harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of “gender identity” and bases a person’s worth on his or her race, sex, or other identities. This destructive dogma, under the guise of “equity,” threatens American’s fundamental liberties as well as the health and well-being of children and adults alike.

Accordingly, Severino urges the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to undo pro-trans coverage support. (474) Interestingly, he backs more support for doulas. (486-7)

Severino specifically criticizes the Biden administration along these lines:

family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.

And “NIH has been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.”

The chapter is openly for government support of religion: “how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?”  Later, it asks for an HHS unit to “Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.”

Severino is very skeptical of drug companies, calling for more generics, yet also urging relaxation of some FDA rules.  He wants to reduce pharma influence on government work – for example,

The CDC and NIH Foundations, whose boards are populated with pharmaceutical company executives, need to be decommissioned. Private donations to these foundations—a majority of them from pharmaceutical companies—should not be permitted to influence government decisions about research funding or public health policy.

He wants to reform Medicare and Medicaid in great detail.  It looks to me that the plan is to make it harder for people to enroll for Medicaid,  easier for state governments to deny care, and for both services to reflect private insurance more closely, but I’m not sure, not having a good grasp on the regulations here. (cf 465-7)

Severino would flat out end Head Start.(482)

The third chapter is much, much shorter than the other two.  In it Ben Carson, Jr. very quickly takes on the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Many of the points echo themes we’ve seen through Project 2025, just situated in the HUD context.  There’s a characterization of China as leading global opponent, which means HUD should watch for”foreign ownership of real estate in both rental and ownership markets of single-family and multifamily housing, with trillions worth of real estate secured across HUD’s portfolio.”  Anti-anti-racism means ending Biden-era housing equity work, as opposition to climate change entails “[r]epeal[ing] climate change initiatives,” which are unspecified.

Carson keeps going.  Immigration?  “The Office of the Secretary should recommence proposed regulation put forward under the Trump Administration that would prohibit noncitizens, including all mixed-status families, from living in all federally assisted housing.” Devolving federal power?  “Local welfare organizations, not the federal government, should step up to provide welfare for the housing of noncitizens.”  Supporting the nuclear family?  “Where admissible in regulatory action, HUD should implement reforms reducing the implicit anti-marriage bias in housing assistance programs.”  More political appointees in charge?  Of course.

What might these three chapters’ contents mean for higher education?

Reducing EPA research will impact some academic researchers, including faculty, stufents, and staff.  Cutting EPA grants would do more, with calls to “[r]epeal Inflation Reduction Act programs providing grants for environmental science activities” or this assertion: “grant funds produce little to no meaningful improvements in the environment and public health and instead fund questionably relevant projects at elite, private academic institutions that invariably produce radical environmental research.” As part of this crack down on EPA research we see the request for “a Science Adviser reporting directly to the Administrator in addition to a substantial investment (no fewer than six senior political appointees) charged with overseeing and reforming EPA research and science activities.”   Assuming that’s a political appointee, which should see further negative effects on academic work.

A push for transparency might make more federal data accessible to academic uses.  One passage actually uses the language of open source: “True transparency will be a defining characteristic of a conservative EPA. This will be reflected in all agency work, including the establishment of opensource [sic] science, to build not only transparency and awareness among the public, but also trust.”

On the HHS side, Severino issues a range of research restrictions, particularly along lines of gender and race.  Additionally, his chapter wants to shift some research support from the federal to state governments: “Congress should consider block granting NIH’s grants budget to states to fund their own scientific research.” (462)

The proposed HHS and HUD changes might increase the amount of human needs colleges and universities may be called upon to assist.  Faculty, staff, and students with less medical care, being more likely to be housing insecure, losing access to abortion and gender-affirming care, and more, may turn to our campuses for assistance.

Reflections

Project 2025’s culture war theme really comes through in these chapters. The authors critique and seek to undo Biden administration policies about race, gender, sexuality, climate change, and abortion. It’s noteworthy to see one chapter openly call for the government to express religious points of view.

We continue to see a mixed approached to federal power, wanting to reduce it through shifting functions to the states or localities, while at the same time seeking to increase federal authority and actions.  For example, Severino wants to devolve federal medical oversight (“States should be the primary regulators of the medical profession”) while also arguing for the federal government to extensively surveill abortion practices.

We also see the book’s preference for some science and technology.  The HHS chapter, for instance, wants to “[r]educe [Medicare and Medicaid] waste, fraud, and abuse, including through the use of artificial intelligence for their detection.” (463). The same section also hopes for this: “Each state should be induced to implement a high-tech, easy-to-use application to centralize child support payments.” (479)

Questions

1. How might academic institutions – and individual academics – respond to the humanitarian fallout from this section?
2. How would the policy changes expressed in this week’s chapters impact your professional and personal lives?
3. Do you see Trump as likely to attempt what this week’s reading describes?
4. How might the world change if these global policies take effect?
5. If you oppose what these three chapters call for, what opposition strategy and tactics would best resist it?
6. Having read this far, what do you anticipate from the rest of the book?

Resources

None to add this time.

…and that’s it for this week’s reading.  For next Monday, August 26, we’ll steadfastly continue with “The General Welfare,” advancing to pages 517-617.

Please do comment in the boxes below this post.  If you’d prefer to share your reactions on other platforms, tag me or otherwise let me know about those comments so I can include them in our next post.  If you want to respond but are worried about what people could make of your reactions, feel free to contact me here without the web knowing.

Comment away!  And on to the next tranche of Project 2025.

PS: my apologies if this week’s installment is sketchy, but I’ve had an extremely busy week.  Hope to catch up with the next one.