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The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank based in Washington DC, released Project 2025, a policy guidebook and staffing list, in April 2023, as a blueprint for what it hoped would be a second Trump presidency. Trump, however, disavowed the initiative during his 2024 presidential campaign, saying that he had no knowledge of it, after there was public backlash over the publication’s sweeping Republican policy proposals, such as banning abortion, overhauling the federal government and slashing funding for climate science.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to Nature’s request for comment. Taylor Rodgers, a White House spokesperson, said: “No one cared about Project 2025 when they elected president Trump in November 2024, and they don’t care now. President Trump is implementing the America First agenda he campaigned on to free up wasteful DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] spending for cutting-edge scientific research, roll back radical climate regulations and restore America’s energy dominance.” But policy watchers expect that the president’s upcoming budget request to the US government will contain massive cuts to science agencies.

Here, Nature examines science-related policies from Project 2025 that have already come to pass, and which ones might be on the horizon.

The Heritage Foundation has been publishing policy recommendations since 1981, often timing them for a new presidency. At the start of Trump’s first term in 2017, the foundation listed hundreds of priorities, such as opening up sites for off-shore oil drilling. According to the foundation, after a year in office, Trump had followed through on 64% of them.

Compared with previous guidebooks, Project 2025 advises more-extreme actions. For instance, whereas the 2017 version advised the president to “rein in the administrative state”, Project 2025 advocates that the president “dismantle the administrative state”, which employs more than two million federal workers. And its proposals don’t apply only to the federal government: Project 2025 also aims to reform the US education system, including universities. The goal, its authors write, is to “defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America”.