Indigenous vote 2024. Although former President Donald Trump has disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, his fingerprints appear to be all over it. An analysis of the 922-page agenda for the next presidential administration shows that of its 307 authors and contributors, more than half served in the Trump administration or on its 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 buildings to eliminating them entirely. Project 2025 is intended to change government as a whole.
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Native News Online examined Project 2025 to determine its potential impact on Indian Country. Although Indian Country is explicitly mentioned a few times, most of the reforms that would drastically harm tribal rights are found in neighboring laws and offices, listed in broad categories.
Project 2025 is led by two former Trump administration officials
In a post on his social media platform on July 5, Trump said //truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/112734594514167050” style=”text-decoration: none;”>wrote: “I don’t know anything about Project 2025. I have no idea who’s behind it. I don’t agree with some of the things they say and some of the things they say are absolutely ridiculous and horrible. Whatever they do, I wish them the best of luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Paul Dans, chief of staff in the Office of Personnel Management, serves as director of the project, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to Trump, is now deputy director of the project and also led the creation of Project 2025.
Because of his past relationships with the project’s leaders, Trump’s claim of non-relationship with Project 2025 is questionable.
The Heritage Foundation, which oversaw Project 2025, also created a “Mandate for Leadership” in 2015 before Trump’s first term. Two years into his presidency, the foundation said Trump derived 64 percent of his policy recommendations from that document.
The authors of many chapters include well-known names from the Trump administration, such as Russ Vought, who led the Office of Management and Budget, and former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller.
Supportive 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 for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies should be grounds for termination.
It states that U.S. Agency for International Development staff and grantees who “engage in ideological agitation on behalf of the DEI agenda” should be terminated. The same rules apply to the Treasury Department, which says the next administration “must treat participation in a critical race theory or DEI initiative without objection on constitutional or moral grounds as grounds per se for termination of employment.”
Project 2025 plans to provide protections through the Civil Rights Act of 1964
The plan is to eliminate “disparate impact” as a measure of racial discrimination. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “Prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.” Disparate Impact is a legal theory that holds entities responsible for practices, decisions, or actions that have discriminatory impacts on protected groups, even when there is no intent to discriminate.
“Congress should: eliminate disparate impact as a valid theory of discrimination on the basis of race and other bases under Title VII and other laws. Inequalities do not (and legally should not) necessarily imply discrimination,” Project 2025 reads.
Project 2025 aims to reverse climate protection
Project 2025 calls for a reversal of the government’s position that carbon emissions harm public health, even though indigenous communities have warned otherwise. In 2020, tribes in New Mexico warned the EPA that cutting methane for oil and gas wells would further endanger their communities, as the region already had the highest concentration of methane emissions in the country. Project 2025 will reverse a 2009 scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that says carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health.
The authors and proponents of Project 2025 believe that the following actions listed in their Department of the Interior section of the project will benefit indigenous communities across the country.
“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 for electric vehicles. Restore the right of tribal governments to enforce environmental regulations on their lands.”
On page 675, Project 2025 states that “climate change research must be disbanded.”
Project 2025 does not intend to protect sacred sites
The project calls for the repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which laid the groundwork for protecting important and historic areas such as the Grand Canyon and Bears Ears National Monument, where tribal coalitions are fighting to preserve land after Trump’s action for the erection of the monument. The law was initially created to address the discovery and theft of Indigenous artifacts on federal land.
There would no longer be any safety nets for farmers
Even agriculture isn’t safe from Project 2025, which proposes an end to “safety nets” like the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs, which pay farmers for selected commodities when prices of those commodities rise fall below a certain limit. predetermined level.
Nutrition assistance programs would be eliminated
Project 2025 calls for “rejecting efforts to create universal free school meals” and proposes the undoing of the Biden administration’s 2021 reforms, which aimed to increase SNAP payments to reduce the real cost of reflect healthy food. On average, 41.2 million people in 21.6 million households received monthly SNAP benefits in fiscal year 2022.
Ministry of the Interior
The proposal itself is enormous and raises the question of feasibility while implying an overwhelming degree of overreach for every branch of government. The Department of the Interior (DOI) is under threat, with proposals to dismantle, reorganize and eliminate many of the offices for which it is responsible. (p. 536)
Environmental Protection Administration
The EPA’s restructuring is intended to consolidate vital systems in the American Indian Officea unique entity that will be located in Oklahoma. Indian Country will immediately face challenges to the long-standing protections of tribal lands, sacred sites, natural resources and more, which are guaranteed by federal stewardship, environmental regulations, protective laws and treaties.
“AIO should be significantly expanded as a standalone EPA Assistant Administrator office. …Although designated as a “headquarters” reporting directly 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 list of priorities for Indian Country, almost 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 and rolling back Biden’s green infrastructure plans, which leave federal lands exposed to the expansion of fossil fuels and coal.
A “Day One Executive Order” for the EPA is detailed for an incoming conservative president; immediately stop all subsidies and legal proceedings, remove staff and rewrite all accompanying documents intended to keep air and water clean. Furthermore, this would prevent the collection of real evidence for the ‘causality of health effects’ and ‘risk assessment at low doses’. Such changes would lead to higher levels of pollution and hinder the collection of evidence linking it to disease. . The danger of this is imminent and self-evident, given the long history of tribes fighting for compensation and protection from harmful pollution, such as radiation exposure. This was also the goal behind the Dakota Access Pipeline protest.
Education
Education is one of these core themes highlighted in the proposal as a whole. The mandate promotes policies such as school choice and privatization, which would eliminate up to 70% of education funding. Shifting resources to private institutions will further destabilize an already fragile education infrastructure, leaving Indigenous students with few to no alternatives. In addition, Project 2025 plans to “eliminate the Head Start Program” (p. 482), as well as Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (p. 334 and 582)
Access to abortion is not safe as of Project 2025.
In the chapter outlining recommendations for the Department of Health and Human Services, the changes call on the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its 24-year-old approval of the widely used abortion pill mifepristone and to reinstate stricter rules around the use of mifepristone feed. banning its use after seven weeks instead of the current ten.
Project 2025 also seeks to require that the drug be administered in person rather than through the mail, by recommending that the Department of Justice enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that prohibits drugs, medicines or devices containing used in abortions are sent by post.
Conclusion
The dissolution of the federal government’s powers is especially troubling for a federally governed community. Although Project 2025 argues that deregulation and decentralization empower tribes themselves, further analysis would reveal that their intent is to undermine tribal protections and leave Indian Country vulnerable to further exploitation.
About the Author: “Levi \”Calm Before the Storm\” Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. Rickert was awarded the Best Column 2021 Native Media Award for the print category\/ online by the Native American Journalists Association. He is a member of the advisory board of the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association. He can be reached at levi@nativenewsonline.net.
Contact: levi@nativenewsonline.net
