Florida Is The Laboratory for Project 2025

Is Florida a laboratory for Project 2025? Nikki Fried sure thinks so. She says we “have been living as lab rats for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.” On Wed. July 31 on MidPoint we  asked Anders Croy, Communications Director of DeSantis Watch to elaborate. DeSantis Watch is an accountability project of Florida Watch and Progress Florida. It is shining a spotlight on Governor DeSantis’s failures of leadership in Florida that make all of us less free.

Anders Croy detailed many of the ways that Florida under DeSantis has been a laboratory for the Project 2025 agenda– everything from his unconstitutional “Stop Woke” legislation which echoes the goals of Project 2025 to eliminate any Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and “critical race theory,” to eliminating all abortion and most reproductive healthcare throughout the United States just as DeSantis has begun to do in Florida with his 6-week abortion ban. Project 2025 also intends to restore the Trump Administration’s Title IX regulations and undo the Biden Administration’s expansion of Title IX’s protections to include “gender identity.” DeSantis has vowed to reject this expansion of Title IX and his administration has unsuccessfully sued to reject these regulations in Florida.

On climate change, Governor DeSantis has ordered that climate change be removed from consideration in all energy policy-making in Florida and has deleted all of Florida’s decarbonization and climate protection goals from state policy, even as the Project 2025 agenda calls for rescinding most climate policies currently in force, including eliminating the EPA’s focus on climate change and green subsidies and eliminating the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Just as the DeSantis administration has pre-empted and prohibited local decisions on energy sourcing to expand renewable energy sources, Project 2025 promotes a nationwide push by the oil and gas industry to preempt local government initiatives to move off fossil fuels. Project 2025 states that the next (Trump) administration would direct the Dept. of Energy to “end the Biden Administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels…” Project 2025 also recommends eliminating NOAA, and the National Weather Service that warns the country of natural weather disasters and Florida of approaching hurricanes to alert people to weather dangers and allow them to prepare. Similarly, recently, DeSantis vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have alerted residents and increased warnings for Floridians and tourists when a beach or public waterway is polluted.

Finally, Anders Croy pointed out how Governor DeSantis has weaponized the  Florida Attorney General’s Office to do his bidding and defend his plainly unconstitutional laws in the courts, spending millions of taxpayer dollars on what are clearly losing appellate cases to try to preserve unconstitutional mandates, and by injecting Florida into outside legal cases around the country in other Republican-controlled states that also seek to legislate Project 2025 goals. This echoes the Project 2025 goal of weaponizing the U.S. Department of Justice, losing its historical independence from the executive branch of government and turning it into an agent of retribution for Trump’s political enemies; just as DeSantis has done in Florida by suspending 2 progressive prosecutors in Hillsborough and Orange counties whom he believed to be his political enemies.

These and other policies, programs, and goals of the Project 2025 governance plan have all been promoted and tried in Florida already, thanks to the DeSantis Administration. We have truly been “lab rats” for the Project 2025 agenda. Listen to Anders Croy on the complete show here, on the WMNF app, or as a WMNF MidPoint podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And, remember your vote is your voice!