Why We Rise
The Danger
Project 2025 is a nearly 900-page governing blueprint — the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership,” written to be handed to a friendly administration and enacted. Below is what it would do to the earth, its animals, and its people, drawn from its own words.
Children & family
Threaten IVF
The conception-and-personhood framework has been analyzed as potentially restricting IVF and other embryo-related reproductive care.
Cut Medicaid
Proposes financing caps and block grants; independent analyses estimate millions of people could lose coverage or benefits.
End Head Start
Would eliminate the federal Head Start program: early education, nutrition, health, and childcare for low-income children.
Put children in dangerous jobs
Recommends changing hazard rules to let teenagers work in "dangerous jobs." More injuries and deaths among adolescents.
Weaken workplace safety
Cuts labor-department enforcement and exempts some employers from OSHA penalties. Weaker deterrence against unsafe workplaces.
Restrict abortion and contraception
Defines life as beginning at conception; would restrict abortion including medication abortion, pull some emergency contraceptives from preventive-care rules, and move to reverse the approval of mifepristone.
Violent Immigration Policy
Task Force Level Threat is High
Immigration is a civil matter. The separation of families, wrongful deportations, incarcerations, and deaths by ICE continue to surge. The United States is currently keeping human babies and children in prisons. They are abducting pregnant mothers, youth, working fathers, grandparents, asylum seekers, and killing civilians. There must be a total over haul of our immigration policy now. Humanity is at stake. This will affect generations to come.
Water & drinking water
Weaken clean-water enforcement
Cutting the enforcement office would make the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act harder to enforce. More pollution of rivers, groundwater, and drinking water.
Skip the environmental review
Proposes gutting NEPA, including limiting or ending court review of whether a review was adequate. Fewer chances to catch contamination before a project is approved.
Toxic chemicals & pesticides
Abandon the precautionary approach
Says the EPA should judge chemicals on "risk-based" rather than precautionary grounds and approve new ones faster. Chemicals with uncertain long-term harm face fewer restrictions.
Tilt the rules toward more pesticides
Argues the Endangered Species Act over-restricts pesticides and that their farm benefit should weigh more. More exposure for pollinators, birds, water, farm workers, and nearby families.
Weaken protection from forever chemicals
Independent analysis flags the proposed EPA changes as undermining protections on lead, PFAS ("forever chemicals"), soot, and drinking water.
Air & human health
Shrink the EPA
Says the agency's mission should be "greatly circumscribed," consolidating or cutting offices. Weaker enforcement and more exposure to dirty air and water.
End the enforcement office
Would eliminate the EPA's stand-alone Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. Less federal muscle against companies that break pollution laws.
Close the environmental-justice office
Would disband the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. Less help for the communities most exposed to industrial pollution.
Loosen limits on toxic air
Proposes limiting the EPA's Clean Air Act authority and easing cross-state and haze pollution rules. Weaker controls on pollutants tied to cancer, asthma, and early death.
Wild horses & burros
Round up more wild horses
Endorses the BLM increasing roundups of wild horses and burros and expanding the facilities that hold them.
Sell them off
Endorses expanded adoptions and sales of horses removed from the wild.
Let the government "dispose" of them
Says Congress should pass a law letting the BLM humanely dispose of wild horses and burros. The plan does not name a single method, but it explicitly asks to change the law to permit disposal. This is the clearest line where Project 2025 turns on the animals themselves.
Endangered species
Delist the grizzly bear
Directs the administration to strip Greater Yellowstone grizzlies of federal protection and defend the decision in court.
Delist the gray wolf
Calls for removing gray wolves in the lower 48 states from the Endangered Species Act.
Hand wildlife to the states
Would cede sage-grouse jurisdiction to western states and weaken critical-habitat rules. Weaker, patchier protection for species already under pressure.
Say the law should not slow development
Says the Endangered Species Act should be changed so it cannot interfere with economic development. Less ability to stop destruction of essential habitat.
Defund the wildlife science
Would abolish the USGS Biological Resources Division and lean on university research instead. Less independent, long-term monitoring of wildlife.
Oceans & marine life
Weaken protection for whales and dolphins
Calls for modifying Marine Mammal Protection Act regulations, describing existing protections as a burden.
Exempt fishing from review
Proposes a NEPA exemption for fisheries actions. Less environmental review of decisions affecting marine ecosystems and fish populations.
Abandon 30 by 30
Would withdraw the initiative to conserve 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters. Fewer federal mechanisms to protect habitat.
Migratory birds
Roll back bird protections
Names the Migratory Bird Treaty Act among the rules to roll back. Less protection for migratory birds from activities that kill or injure them.
Forests & public lands
Log the old forests
Says Oregon's O&C lands should be managed for "permanent forest production," with timber sold, cut, and removed. The policy grew out of opposition to spotted-owl protections: habitat loss, erosion, and carbon release.
Open public land to extraction
Calls for an "energy dominance" agenda expanding oil, gas, coal, and mineral development on federal land.
Oil, gas, coal & mining
Drill the Arctic Refuge
Calls for reinstating leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and expanding Alaska's Willow project from three to five drilling pads. More disturbance of Arctic habitat, water, and permafrost.
Open the Petroleum Reserve
Would open most of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve to leasing and development.
Build a 211-mile mining road
Calls for immediate approval of the Ambler Road across public land to reach mines. Fragmented habitat and industrial access through wild country.
Maximize offshore drilling
Calls for offshore oil and gas leasing "to the maximum extent permitted." Greater risk of spills and coastal and marine damage.
Protect coal, cut the inspectors
Says Interior should protect the coal industry's ability to produce, while reducing the number of field coal-reclamation inspectors. More pollution with less oversight.
Climate & the atmosphere
Gut federal climate science
Proposes disbanding much of NOAA's climate research and limiting the role of climate science in policy. Less capacity to predict and respond to extreme weather, drought, wildfire, and sea-level rise.
Stop measuring the pollution
Would eliminate the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program for unregulated sources and revisit the finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health. Fewer tools to see or curb climate pollution.
Roll back clean-vehicle standards
Would weaken vehicle emissions standards and revoke California's authority to set stronger ones. A slower shift off fossil fuels and higher emissions.
Make fossil fuels the mission
Makes expanding oil and gas on public lands and waters a central Interior Department priority. More emissions, habitat loss, spills, and dirtier air and water.
These are effects supported by Project 2025’s own text and by environmental, public-health, and animal-welfare analysis. Project 2025 is a blueprint, not law: some parts would need Congress, and its authors argue some policies help people or the land. We name the harms the document itself makes possible. Primary source: the Mandate for Leadership, the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project.
The Through-Line
One direction, over and over.
Read it category by category and the same instruction repeats: take more, protect less.
- More drilling, mining, and logging on public land.
- Less climate science, less pollution monitoring, less enforcement.
- Fewer protected species, and less of the habitat they need.
- More roundups of wild horses, and legal cover to dispose of them.
- Less care for children, workers, and the sick.
That is the danger. That is why we wear white and show up.