Project 2025 proposes suppressing science

Throughout history, authoritarian governments have insisted that science be subordinated to government policy, often with significant consequences. Examples include:

1. Soviet Union (under Stalin): Stalin’s Soviet government forced science to conform to its political ideology. The most famous is Stalin’s Soviet government’s promotion of Lysenkoismpolitically driven agricultural science that rejected Mendelian genetics. Dissenting Soviet geneticists were persecuted for standing up for the science. More than 3,000 Soviet scientists were fired, imprisoned, or executed during this period alone for teaching the genetic consensus.
2. Nazi Germany: The Nazis promoted racial pseudoscience to justify their discriminatory policies. and rejected theories such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, calling them “Jewish physics.”
3. People’s Republic of China (under the leadership of Mao Zedong): During Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, the Chinese communist government insisted that science and education serve the political needs of the Communist Party.This led to the persecution of scientists who were deemed politically incorrect or counter-revolutionary because they advocated consensus science that contradicted the regime’s ideology.
4. Italy (under Mussolini): Mussolini’s fascist regime attempted to adapt Italian scientific research to its political goals. Scientists who did not conform to the regime’s ideology were marginalized and persecuted.
5. TFG 2025 Project: The 2025 Project is the de facto party platform for MAGA Republicans. The 2025 Project advocates for eliminating Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Since the 1970s, the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services have been required to update science-based dietary guidelines for Americans every 5 years. Revisions are suggested by a scientific advisory committee that includes Ph.D.-holding experts with decades of specialized experience in nutritional science. www.dietaryguidelines.gov/. During this period, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee reviewed the scientific evidence, held 6 public meetings, and solicited public feedback, ensuring a thorough and transparent process. These PhD experts have drawn conclusions based on science that undermine MAGA Republicans’ support for the monoculture farming practices of big agribusiness that are contributing to climate change and the skyrocketing rates of obesity-related diseases. Project 2025 states quite clearly that MAGA Republicans want to suppress this science, and with the support of the conservative majority in SCOTUS, they clearly plan to do just that.

Project 2025 is full of claims that contradict conventional wisdom, and the chapter on agricultural policy is no exception. This is to be expected in an enterprise with 34 authors and 2 editors, NONE OF WHOM HAS A POSTGRADUATE MEDICAL SCIENCE, unless surgery is considered a medical science. The lawyer who wrote the chapter on agricultural policy showed scientific naivety when he justified the elimination Dietary Guidelines for Americans complaining that “…The government is constantly changing its advice, underqualifying it, oversimplifying it, to the point of misrepresenting important points, questionable use of science, and potential political influence.” If 10 editions Dietary Guidelines for Americans were as useless as the author suggests, why studies consistently show that following dietary guidelines for Americans reduces the risk of heart disease cancer and all-cause mortality?

MAGA Republicans generally deny that human activity has contributed to climate change. and as a result we do not believe the scientific consensus that current agricultural practices are responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.

MAGA Republicans generally deny that multinational food companies are responsible for the 42 percent obesity rate among Americans. and oppose government efforts to educate American families about optimal, science-based dietary patterns that are associated with reduced risk of obesity (e.g., the Mediterranean diet)). Funny enough, Project 2025 explicitly assumes that Americans can get nutrition advice from their health professionals. Nutrition training in medical schools is notoriously limited to the nutritional needs of patients with specific diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, and does not address what healthy families should do to optimize their nutritional health.

SN accelerates the suppression of science. The impetus for MAGA Republicans’ efforts to subordinate government scientists to their ideological beliefs was the recent conservative majority decision by the Supreme Court to overturn a 40-year-old legal precedent known as the Chevron Doctrine.Congressional legislation directing the executive branch to promote the welfare of the general public through regulation often fails to include operational details to which only specialists have access.. Historically, the Chevron Doctrine has protected the judgments of doctoral-level experts with decades of specialized experience when they suggest specific policies to achieve congressional public health mandates, and those policies have angered important major congressional campaign donors. Courts have historically deferred to scientific expertise.

Government scientists will now be silenced. Thanks to a recent decision by the conservative majority on SCOTUS, the agency’s scientists will now be silenced, unless they resign, and will be unable to challenge government policies that are designed to please agribusiness campaign donors rather than protect American consumers. The $1.1 billion U.S. food industry is a major contributor to political campaigns. The ultimate decision-makers on the public health and safety consequences of government policies will now be people trained in law, not science, chosen for their allegiance to political ideology, not their understanding of science. The campaign to silence the “deep state” aims to prevent consensus science from interfering with the business plans of multinational corporations that put profits before human health.