A Look Back at Project 2025’s Plans for Science

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, released in 2023, was widely considered a policy blueprint for President Donald Trump’s second term, though Trump frequently denied that the document would play a role in his decisions. Looking back on the first year of the second Trump administration, the White House has pursued some of the science policy ideas presented in Project 2025, such as overhauling climate and energy programs and cutting science budgets. In some cases, the administration has gone several steps beyond the report’s recommendations; in others, it has directly contradicted them.

Mirroring the blueprint

National Climate Assessment: Project 2025 proposes to “reshape” the U.S. Global Change and Research Program; the administration completely cut federal funding for the program in April. USGCRP coordinates climate change research across agencies and produces the National Climate Assessment. The administration also dismissed the authors of the sixth NCA, which was in progress last year.

The administration has interviewed candidates for USGCRP and has asked four scientists and one economist, all of whom have expressed skepticism about leading climate change impact assessments, to serve as authors of the next NCA, E&E News reported in December. That group earlier authored a report for DOE that argued that warming induced by carbon dioxide “might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that excessively aggressive mitigation strategies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”

Department of Energy: Project 2025 proposes eliminating many of the Department of Energy’s offices focused on energy technology development and programs focused on climate change. Of the five offices that the document calls to eliminate or reform, four have seen changes under DOE’s reorganization announced in November. These include the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which will “be wound down” but transfer some elements to the new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, according to an internal DOE email obtained by E&E News. The Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, which Project 2025 proposes eliminating, appears unchanged in the reorganization chart.

OCED and the Grid Deployment Office, which has also been wound down and partially transferred to the new Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation office, saw billions in grant cancellations last year. In the announcements, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the canceled projects “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”

Visas: Project 2025 proposes “transforming” the H-1B visa program into “an elite mechanism exclusively to bring in the ‘best and brightest’ at the highest wages.” It does not specify how that transformation should be achieved. The administration imposed a $100,000 fee on new petitions for H-1B visas, saying the higher costs will discourage companies from replacing, rather than supplementing the domestic workforce “with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.” The fee is currently being contested in court, though a lower court upheld it.

Return on investment: Both Project 2025 and the administration have advocated for increasing the “return on investment” of science funding, but through different means. Project 2025 proposes reviving an initiative at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that aimed to “dramatically increase returns from the more than $150 billion per year of U.S. federal investment in research and development.”

The current administration has not moved on that initiative, but NIST issued a broad funding solicitation in September for awards related to various CHIPS R&D programs that states that awardees may be required to issue royalties or otherwise share revenue with the Commerce Department.

Over the past year, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has expressed a desire to increase taxpayers’ return on investment from federally funded research, including by having the U.S. government take as much as half the profit from university patents.

Missile defense: Project 2025 recommends that the Department of Defense develop advanced missile defense technologies, including space-based systems. Trump issued an executive order soon after taking office that pushes for the creation of a missile defense shield capable of protecting the U.S. against “any foreign aerial attack,” now known as Golden Dome. Congressional appropriators have repeatedly requested details on Golden Dome from the Department of Defense, writing in the appropriations bill report for DOD that the department has not provided complete budgetary details and justification as directed in the reconciliation megabill that passed in July and appropriated nearly $25 billion for the initiative.

Congress pushing back

Budget cuts: The president’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 mirrored Project 2025 proposals to cut research on climate change and renewable technologies at DOE and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The budget request proposed cutting biological and environmental research within DOE’s Office of Science by more than 50% and pulling funding for most programs within the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which is NOAA’s research arm. Congress approved the transfer of some OAR programs to the National Weather Service but continued to fund its remaining programs.

Indirect costs: In line with Project 2025, the administration moved to reduce indirect cost rates for university research grants to be comparable to the rates offered by private organizations. Indirect costs cover research-adjacent expenses such as equipment and facilities maintenance, IT services, and administrative support. The administration’s caps were swiftly blocked in court, and congressional appropriators have since rejected the proposed budget cuts and changes to the current indirect cost rate system. In reaction to those provisions becoming law, DOE announced that it would withdraw its caps.

NOAA: Project 2025 calls NOAA “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and refers to OAR as “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism.” It adds that 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 administration does not appear to have pursued such dramatic changes at NOAA, though the agency suffered staffing shortages last summer due to layoffs and early retirements, with a subsequent push to re-hire around 20% of the lost employees.

In contrast, the administration has announced its intent to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, an R&D center in Colorado funded by the National Science Foundation. The announcement calls NCAR “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” mirroring the language about NOAA in Project 2025. NSF has since issued a request for input from public and private entities to take over NCAR programs and infrastructure. Congress declined to add language to its 2026 funding bills to continue funding and operating NCAR.

Going further

The Trump administration’s widespread cancellation of grants at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as those targeting specific universities, were not explicitly proposed in Project 2025, but the roots of the cancellations are present in the blueprint.

Project 2025 expresses strong opposition to the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and related federal initiatives. It proposes “deleting” terms including DEI, gender, and reproductive health “out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” An executive order, issued immediately after Trump took office, targets DEI-related initiatives across the government. The White House followed up with a directive to temporarily freeze and review federal grant spending. The administration later canceled nearly 6,000 grants at NIH and nearly 2,000 at NSF.

For the Environmental Protection Agency specifically, Project 2025 proposes putting a political appointee in charge of determining the distribution of grants. The Trump administration applied similar policies both formally and informally at additional science agencies. Staff at NIH and NSF have reported that staff from the Department of Government Efficiency, created by Trump and led by Elon Musk, were overseeing grant reviews and cancellations, and Trump later formalized such reviews through an executive order in August that directs agencies to give political appointees ultimate decision-making power over grants.

Trump also froze billions in federal research funding to Harvard and other large research universities, an idea that is not explicit in Project 2025 but echoes its proposal for USAID to eliminate funding for partners that “promote discriminatory DEI practices” and to consider debarment in “egregious cases.” The Department of Health and Human Services has referred Harvard to its office responsible for debarment.

Although Project 2025 calls for a freeze on hiring for certain federal positions, the blueprint cautions against large-scale reductions-in-force, warning that they can be more expensive than they are worth. “Cutting functions, levels, funds, and grants is much more important than setting simple employment size,” Project 2025 states. “Simply reducing numbers can actually increase costs,” the document adds, pointing to costly buyout programs in the first Trump administration and the Clinton administration. In contrast, the administration pursued widespread workforce reductions last year, including through an estimated 150,000 federal employee buyouts.

Pending or rejected ideas

Research security: Project 2025 proposes to “eliminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations” with particular emphasis on reducing visas for Chinese students and researchers. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in May the U.S. would “aggressively revoke” visas held by Chinese students, but the White House later decided to issue 600,000 Chinese student visas over the next two years, in line with numbers issued in previous years.

Project 2025 proposes several other ideas related to research security. Some of these ideas have been floated by the president’s allies in Congress, but the White House has not pursued them directly. These include relaunching the Justice Department’s China Initiative; withholding federal funds from universities that take money from the Chinese government; and prohibiting “all Communist Chinese investment” in U.S. high-technology industries.

NIST: Project 2025 proposes combining NIST with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Technical Information Service, creating a new Office of Patents, Trademarks, and Standards with all non-mission-critical research functions eliminated or moved to other federal agencies. The Trump administration has not done this.

SBIR: Project 2025 looks to direct more R&D funding toward small businesses through the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. The report encourages the administration to push Congress to increase the percentage of spending by federal research agencies that is set aside for small business R&D. This percentage has not changed, and the congressional authorization for the program lapsed in October.

NIH: Project 2025 suggests that Congress consider converting NIH’s grants budget into block grants provided to state governments and proposes instituting term limits for top leaders at NIH. The administration has not pursued either idea, but more than a dozen directors of NIH institutes and centers have left the agency since January 2025. Six of these directors were fired in mass layoffs.