Leaked Project 2025 Video Reveals Former Trump Officials' Plans to 'Eradicate' Climate Science

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In the leadup to the 2024 election, several extreme weather events of historic proportion have positioned climate at the center of the presidential race. Brutal summer heat domes led to spikes in heat-related deaths throughout the country, while Hurricanes Helene and Milton caused hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in property loss throughout the Southeast in the fall. The successive crises and the slow recovery efforts that followed highlighted the need to bolster federal weather forecasting and disaster response agencies like NOAA, FEMA, and the National Flood Insurance Program.

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Policy agendas published by Project 2025, a political initiative developed by The Heritage Foundation with close ties to the Trump campaign, however, outline plans to significantly reduce or altogether eliminate critical elements of the climate safety net. In “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” Project 2025 identifies the NOAA as the main driver of the “climate change alarm industry” and suggests it “should be broken up and downsized.” The same publication advocates reducing the federal government’s share of local disaster relief contributions from 75% to 25% and privatizing the National Flood Insurance program.

While right wing plans to dismantle disaster relief and mitigation programs are laid out in detail in public policy proposals, a recently-leaked internal video shows Project 2025’s plans to do away with climate science altogether. In a video obtained by ProPublica, former Trump official Bethany Kozma instructs potential future White House staffers that climate change is a ploy to “control people” and that they must “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

She goes on: “Even if you do not work at the Department of Energy — no matter where you work — because of the Biden administration’s executive orders and policy priorities, you will have to look for climate change language and get rid of it.”

And while Trump has made some attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, during his presidential administration there were widespread reports of government officials removing climate change references in documents from federal agencies ranging from the EPA to the National Park Service. And as a cash-strapped FEMA fights to provide disaster relief while also combating dangerous climate misinformation amidst ever-increasing risk of severe weather catastrophe, federal funding and support becomes all the more important.