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How Project 2025’s Health, Education, and Climate Policies Hurt Americans

Project 2025 is a radical plan that details how a Republican administration would undercut working families by making health care and higher education less affordable; providing less support to families; and rolling back climate enforcement and research. This Republican plan would concentrate power within the executive branch, make life harder for working people, and cede power to Big Pharma and other corporations. 

Project 2025 would make health care cost more and produce worse health outcomes by:

  • Reversing Democrats’ efforts to lower prescription drug costs (see page 465). 
    • This means Medicare could no longer negotiate down the cost of high-price prescription drugs, and drug companies wouldn’t have to reimburse patients when they hike prices faster than inflation. 
    • Seniors would lose out on the $2,000 out-of-pocket cap for prescription drugs.
    • This would remove important pricing guardrails on drug companies, and 18.7 million seniors would lose their prescription drug savings, costing each senior an average of nearly $400 in lost savings in 2025.
  • Putting lifetime limits or caps on Medicaid coverage (see page 468). These arbitrary limits would threaten heath care coverage for nearly 18.6 million low-income Americans, including many families, children, and pregnant and postpartum women. Without Medicaid coverage, they would face steep out-of-pocket costs or be forced to delay or skip necessary medical care. 
  • Overruling FDA approval for medication abortion (see page 457), making it increasingly difficult to access these vital medicines by mail (see pages 458-459), and prohibiting the use of federal funding to cover the travel needed to obtain an abortion (see page 471). These restrictions would further limitwomen’s reproductive freedom, lead to worse health outcomes for mothers and babies, and cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars. 

Project 2025 would undermine public education and raise student loan costs by:

  • Gutting public school funding by creating a school voucher program (see page 347) and cutting Title I funding that supports low-income schools (see page 325). Project 2025 would use voucher programs that can harm students’ academic achievement and pose particular challenges for rural students who have fewer educational options. Lower Title I funding would result in budget cuts at over 60% of public schools across the country.  
  • Rolling back free school meals programs for low-income children (see page 303). Project 2025’s changes to these programs would force up to 20 million students in low-income areas to begin paying for school meals or go hungry. Data show that kids who miss meals perform worse in school and may face higher rates of school discipline. 
  • Eliminating Head Start (see page 482), a program that currently supports nearly 800,000 children. This would increase the number of Americans living in child care deserts, force some Head Start families across the country to spend on average almost $12,000 more a year on child care, and prevent some parents from working as they stay home to care for their children. 
  • Ending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF) (see page 354) and creating a new, less generous income-driven repayment (IDR) plan (see page 337). For the two million public-servants eligible for PSLF, this rollback would force them to pay up to $96,000 on average that would otherwise be discharged, while Project 2025’s IDR plan would cost people ages 25 to 34 with a bachelor’s degree an additional $4,000 a year. 

Project 2025 would exacerbate the climate crisis by:

  • Directing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to favor fossil fuels over renewables and raise market prices received by fossil fuel companies (see page 400). These policies would make energy markets less competitive and pave the way for more utility monopolies, raising prices for consumers.  
  • Gutting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcement (see page 425) by directing the agency to ignore the effects of greenhouse gases on public health and the environment. Project 2025 would also limit the number of industries that are required to report their emissions to the EPA from 41 high-emitting industries to just a handful. 
  • Rolling back Democrats’ investments in clean energy production that are cutting pollution and lowering emissions (see page 365). Project 2025 would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which is helping to combat climate change and spurring billions of dollars in clean energy investments throughout the country that are expected to create millions of jobs.
  • Removing key protections for public lands (see page 532), threatening these vital natural resources that also support state and local economies throughout the country. Among many attacks on public lands, the plan would roll back national monument protections, threatening the $59 billion in state and local tax revenue each year tied to recreation
  • Dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a hub for climate research and the primary source of weather data (see page 674). This would eliminate many of NOAA’s core functions and could let companies put even basic weather reports behind a paywall. This would leave Americans less prepared for climate change and extreme weather, causing them to face additionalcosts associated with such events. 

Project 2025 lays out a bleak vision for America where the president would have unchecked power to raise prices for Americans in health care and higher education and create worse outcomes for our health, education, and climate. The plan is also an assault on the rule of law and a host of other core American freedoms.