Republished with permission from Florida Phoenix, by Craig Pittman

The other day I was watching a campaign rally by the one reeeeally ooooold presidential candidate, and he was warning everyone about Project 2025.

“Some on the right, the severe right, came up with this Project 25,” he said, mangling the name a bit, perhaps because he’s showing signs of mental decline. He mentioned people were reading the plan and not liking it: “They read some of the things and they are extreme, seriously extreme.”

“Wow,’ I thought, “if even Donald Trump says Project 2025 is extreme, it must be wiiiiiiiiild.”

Project 2025, in case you’ve been too busy binge-watching “House of the Dragon” to keep up with the news, is a blueprint for Trump’s next term, mostly written by people who have worked for him.

Well, not the ones who’ve renounced him. Or the ones who’ve been sent to prison. Or the one vice-president he tried to have killed. But some others, no doubt hoping for jobs in the second Trump administration. Despite Trump’s efforts to distance himself from it, he seems likely to follow this playbook should he be returned to office.

The plan’s details are spelled out in a 922-page policy document  produced by folks from the Heritage Foundation, an incredibly influential right wing think tank.

How influential? They’re the ones who came up with the idea for Mitt Romney’s “Romneycare,” which President Barack Obama liked so much he adopted it and it became Obamacare. Then the Heritage Foundation decided to oppose it—to no avail.

More Floridians have signed up for Obamacare than people in any other state, so you can see how important these Heritage Foundation studies can be for us. That’s why I was curious to see what Project 2025 would do for us in the “Free” State of Florida.

Well, folks, it ain’t pretty. Here be dragons.

The study is full of recommendations for clamping down on abortion, banning pornography, abolishing the Homeland Security and Education departments, killing the Head Start program for kids, and putting the entire executive branch, including the Department of Justice, under direct control of the president—no civil service protection.

Ed Benton, a constitutional scholar and political science professor at the University of South Florida, told NBC News the plan, subtitled “Mandate for Leadership,” is “a very far-right-wing approach to government.” It would be more accurate to call it Project 1875.

Meanwhile, the Heritage folks are already recruiting thousands of Trump loyalists to carry out these plans should Trump win in November. The recruiting is led by John McEntee, one of Trump’s former White House aides who was fired because his gambling habit made him a security risk. More recently, he founded the creepy The Right Stuff dating app. I think he may be single-handedly reviving Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, but in a different context.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin “I’m Not Kooky, You’re the Kook Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” Roberts says Project 2025 is a blueprint for “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”’

By “left,” I think he means “anyone with a lick of sense.” I say that because this plan is so full of slashing that it must have been dreamed up by Norman Bates and his mom. We here in Florida will NOT benefit from its bloodletting.

No More Free Weather

Florida calls itself the Sunshine State, but that’s just a fib we made up to fool the tourists. The more accurate name would be the Super Stormy Lightning Capital, because we are the place with the most lightning strikes in the U.S.

We’re also the state that gets clobbered most often by hurricanes—double the number that have slammed into the No. 2 state, Texas. Think of us as the chin that North America sticks out at the Caribbean and says, “Hit me!”

This is why smart Floridians keep a close eye on the forecast. Weather conditions control our tourism industry, plus farming, ranching, athletics, and so much more.

“Think of how much of Florida’s economy is impacted by the weather,” said John Morales, who’s been a Florida meteorologist since 1991.

Yet Project 2025 calls for tying the hands of the National Weather Service, eliminating its role as a forecaster.

It would relegate the agency to only collecting data. Then private companies could use that taxpayer-funded info to create their own forecasts, which you’d have to pay for.

Morales said that would be a devastating change for Florida in particular.

“The National Weather Service’s core function is to save lives and property through issuing weather watches, alerts, and warnings,” Morales told me. “I don’t understand why you’d propose to get rid of that.”

I think it’s because some people want to make buckets of bucks from what’s been free. Can you imagine having to pay for weather reports the way we pay for streaming services? I’m picturing a typical Florida couple, sometime between June 1 and Nov. 30 in 2026.

“Honey, the wind’s blowing really hard, the storm clouds look threatening, and there’s a school of mullet swimming down our flooded street. Are we in the hurricane’s cone of uncertainty? Should we evacuate?”

“I don’t know, babe, that’s only available on the premium channel and we just have basic.”

We saw a similar money-grab seven years ago when Trump nominated Barry Myers, CEO of AccuWeather, to be the boss of the weather service’s umbrella (ba-dum-bum!) agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

For years, Myers had “pushed for private companies to be able to use and monetize the weather reporting gathered through U.S. government satellites,” CNN reported then.

Fortunately, he wound up withdrawing his nomination citing poor health. I suspect what made him sick was that the Washington Post revealed that his company paid $290,000 to settle claims of sexual harassment and a hostile work environment.

Now AccuWeather is run by someone else, and the company has announced its opposition to that part of Project 2025. In a statement, the current CEO pointed out that the existing set-up “has saved countless lives and significantly reduced the adverse impact of weather on the economy by hundreds of billions of dollars.”

But Project 2025 doesn’t care about that. In fact, the Heritage folks are even out to sink NOAA—the agency, not the ark builder.

Too Much Climate Science

Florida is on the front lines of climate change. We’re a mostly flat state surrounded by water on three sides and close to the equator. The rising sea level creeps further inland here and the temperatures climb far higher, even at night. Florida leads the nation in heat related illnesses.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, consider this: Last week a Florida plant, the Key Largo tree cactus, became the first species in the world to be completely wiped out by climate change. The cacti, known for their height (up to 20 feet), were washed away by rising seas.

Project 2025 refers to stories like this as “climate alarmism.”

The report insists that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated” because it’s “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

Yes, corporate profits are SO much more important than either science or saving lives.

What’s worse, the report says, is that the agency’s mission “seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

Seems to me NOAA is focused more on planning how to avoid things we don’t want, such as further acidification of our oceans from soaking up excess CO2.

The report does recommend keeping the National Hurricane Center in Miami (phew!) but with one major change: “Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”

I suppose that means it would be OK to mention that abnormally hot ocean temperatures are making hurricanes grow more intense more quickly. You’re just not allowed to mention WHY the water is hotter than Bobby Flay’s grill.

But hey, I’m no scientist. Of course, neither is the author of that section of the Project 2025 report. It’s by Thomas F. Gilman, a former Chrysler executive whom Trump installed as assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce.

Who’d know more about climate change than an auto executive?

In case you’re wondering, the entire energy section of the report was written by nonscientists: Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry group; Dan Kish of the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank long skeptical of human-caused climate change; and Katie Tubb of the Heritage Foundation.

These folks are not advocates for the kind of clean energy that Florida’s utilities are heavily investing in these days. You can pretty much sum this section up in three words: “Drill, baby, drill!”

Then, since Project 2025 insists on ditching the rules put in place to protect the environment, we can stand by for another BP oil spill to defile our beaches.

Speaking of beaches, you’ll never guess what Project 2025 has in mind for them.

Equal Treatment of Abuse and Neglect

Most of the ideas contained in the plan aim to cut the size of the federal government, regardless of the popularity of the programs. Thus, it makes sense to the authors to hang a bullseye on one of the most debt-ridden government programs in history.

Project 2025 calls for an end to federally subsidized flood insurance.

That would affect folks in Florida more than people in any other state. According to the Insurance Journal, Florida is the largest flood insurance market in the country, with 1.7 million homes covered by the federal program.

Federal flood insurance “should be wound down and replaced with private insurance starting with the least risky areas currently identified by the program,” Project 2025 says.

The 50-year-old National Flood Insurance Program is more than $20 billion in debt from repeatedly paying out claims for damages. But economists and insurance agents said ending it would disrupt home sales and mortgage loans across the country.

“It would mean the collapse of the lending market,” said one Fort Myers agent contacted by the Insurance Journal.

I called a couple of my knowledgeable Southwest Florida sources, starting with Jim Beever. He spent 16 years as a biologist for the state wildlife commission, then 17 years with the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council.

Beever told me folks in Southwest Florida “would not be happy” with Project 2025’s proposal. People whose homes were devastated by Hurricane Ian relied on federal flood insurance to cover their losses, he said.

“But a lot of the people who were here when the hurricane hit are not going to rebuild,” he said “Instead, new groups are coming in and building even bigger buildings.”

Of course, the new folks expect to be covered by federal flood insurance, too. They even expect a discount on the price, just like the earlier residents had. When it looked like they might not get one because of irregularities with the rebuilding effort, local officials started howling like dogs hearing a siren in the distance, until this week the feds relented.

No private insurer will do that. In fact, lots of private insurers have fled Florida in recent years, freaking out over the cost of our repeated climate-fueled disasters.

The other person I consulted about this is Wayne Daltry, who was Lee County’s “smart growth” coordinator back when such planning skills were valued.

Ending taxpayer-subsidized flood insurance here “would blow up much of the real estate industry, which I recall sort of leans to the right, so left and right get equal treatment of abuse and neglect,” Daltry told me.

Project 2025’s authors offered a perfectly logical explanation for this radical recommendation: “These subsidies and bailouts only encourage more development in flood zones, increasing the potential losses to both (the program) and the taxpayer.”

They’re not wrong. But Florida developers and politicians don’t want anything to stand in the way of disaster-prone development, not even common sense. Something tells me that’s the section of the 900-page plan that will be tossed out first.

Except for that, though, I feel like we in Florida have been given a sneak peek at what could be forthcoming should Project 2025 be implemented.

So much of what it proposes nationally is already being implemented here by Gov. Ron “Why Is Legal Weed Is More Popular Than I Am?” DeSantis. We’re seeing it all, from abortion limits to the disruption of public education to deleting climate change from state law and even science textbooks.

Next thing you know, DeSantis will make the Project 2025 handbook required reading for Florida’s schoolchildren. They’ll have to read it aloud in the classroom, right after they pledge allegiance to the Orange-Faced Elder-in-Chief.