‘Trump-Musk-Project 2025 administration’ guarantees more emergencies and disasters

by Bob Doppelt

President Donald Trump and his billionaire co-director Elon Musk have wasted no time dismantling the federal government. They claim to want to eliminate waste and fraud and cut costs. But this is clearly a smoke screen. Almost all of their actions are right out of the Project 2025 playbook that aims to eviscerate the institutional checks and balances that safeguard our democracy and establish an authoritarian state controlled by Christian nationalists, big corporations, and the far-right uber-rich.

The future remains unknown. But one thing is certain: here and abroad, countless new extreme stresses, emergencies, and disasters will result. To prepare, every community should rapidly organize local resilience networks that work to prevent harm and help residents recover after adversities. Forming these networks might also be key to overcoming today’s polarization and build the social efficacy needed to protect our democracy and establish a better society.

Before I dive into how this can be done, I want to note just a few of the more ominous acts taken by what I believe should be called the “Trump-Musk-Project 2025 administration.”

How the new administration will create more stresses, emergencies, and disasters

First, they installed numerous cabinet and agency leads that are ideological zealots with little expertise in their field. Their prejudicial mindsets are likely to often lead them to misconstrue reality and make faulty decisions that produce unnecessary emergencies that harm many people.

In addition, even though global temperatures have now risen to extremely dangerous levels, the Trump-Musk-Project 2025 administration is dismantling federal climate change and environmental policies and programs. This is a core demand of Project 2025 and Trump’s billionaire fossil fuel donors. Among other acts, they are gutting the National Environmental Policy Act, revoking the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, blocking the development of clean renewable energy, and expediting the production of domestic fossil-fuels.

Further, just as more record weather disasters are occurring, such as Hurricanes Helene and Milton that blasted the southeast last year, and the recent wildfire in Los Angeles, the administration laid off hundreds of FEMA and other federal emergency response workers. This will weaken disaster response, prolong wait times for aid, and place greater burden on state and local recovery efforts.

And, just when new illnesses and diseases are emerging, thousands of employees from federal health and science agencies have been terminated. This includes sweeping layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, where funding was also cut for climate change and health programs.

These actions, and the termination of thousands of other federal employees and programs, are just the beginning. Much more is coming.

Don’t get me wrong. Reducing government financial waste and inefficiency is important. A carefully thought-out targeted approach would be widely applauded. But this is not what is happening, nor is it the real goal.

Their real goals

For example, if the goal of the Trump-Musk-Project 2025 administration were actually to cut costs to benefit the general public, they could start by eliminating the $757 billion that in 2022 the International Monetary Fund estimated went to fossil fuel subsidies. This included $3 billion in explicit subsidies and $754 billion in “implicit subsidies,” meaning costs of environmental degradation and impacts on human health borne by society, not the industries than caused them.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute also found that in 2022 oil and gas subsidies exceeded U.S. federal revenue from fossil fuels by $2.1 billion, creating a huge net loss for the government, even as fossil fuel corporations reaped billions in profits that year.

Eliminating this massive subsidy would raise the costs of fossil fuels, which would reveal that clean renewable energy is now less expensive and far safer for people and the environment than gas, oil, and other fossil fuels. But the Trump-Musk-Project 2025 administration is doing everything it can to prevent the public from knowing this.

Another waste-saving action the new administration could take if they were serious about benefiting the public is to eliminate the $300 billion the government spends annually on farm subsidies, the vast majority of which goes to large industrial agricultural companies.

They could also cut the $1.8 billion in subsidies given annually to the timber industry to cut trees on federal land.

As with fossil fuels, many of the practices these industries use exhaust soils, pollute waters, degrade ecological systems, deplete biodiversity, and diminish nature’s ability to sequester carbon.

Almost all of the fossil fuel, agricultural, and timber subsidies go to multibillion-dollar corporations that would do just fine without getting massive sums of money from us, the public. But the Trump-Musk-Project 2025 administration continues to socialize the costs to the public, and privatize the gains to corporations and the far-right super wealthy, while concentrating social, economic, and political power in their hands, and jettisoning federal employees and programs that threaten this agenda.

The many consequences

One of the consequences will be more climate-disrupting emissions released into the atmosphere and more damage to the natural environment. The result will be increasingly hotter temperatures, and every small rise will produce more harm. Many impacts will grow slowly and undetectably, then occur suddenly by surprise when tipping points are breached.

We must all prepare for even more catastrophic wind, rain, and snow storms, heat waves, cold waves, floods, droughts, wildfires and other weather disasters. The disasters will cause physical injuries and deaths, damage and destroy homes, infrastructure, and entire communities, and devastate valued cultural resources and natural landscapes.

We can also expect more escalating breakdowns to the ecological, economic, and social systems people rely on for food, water, power, jobs, incomes, health, safety, security, and other basic needs. These disruptions will allow pathogens and diseases to spread into new areas, produce crop failures and famines, compel people to make difficult and often costly adaptations to deal with the impacts, make some areas uninhabitable, force an increasing numbers of people to migrate to new locations, continually raise the cost of living in many regions, and much more

The emotional stresses and traumas caused by these blows will threaten everyone’s social, psychological, emotional, and behavioral health. Due to comorbidity, they will also increase many physical health problems. No one will be immune. In different times, ways, and magnitudes, each of us will be affected.

How should we respond?

Persistent strong efforts to block the Trump-Musk-Project 2025 administration’s crusade to establish a totalitarian state will be needed by the courts, member of Congress, and all other levels of government. But they can only go so far.

Pressure from the bottom up to reject the authoritarian power grab and create a better society for all will ultimately be key to success. Regular people from all walks of life will need to come together, find ways to overcome their differences, and build the collective pressure required for fundamental change.

A starting point is for people in every urban neighborhood, and in every small and mid-size community and rural area, to reach out and ask others join them in forming a local resilience network. The network can include respected grassroots, civic, education, youth, faith and spirituality, mental and physical health, human services, business, disaster response, and other non-profit, private, and public sector leaders.

The resilience networks should take time to get to know each other, and learn and practice good communications and conflict resolution skills. They should then develop strategies to protect every resident from harm, help them recover when impacted, adapt to changing circumstances, and construct health, safe, just, and resilient local conditions.

I call these Transformational Resilience Coordinating Networks (TRCNs), but each coalition should choose a name that resonates locally. These networks can engage in a range of important activities.

One vital action is to build robust social connections and supports across cultural, economic, and geographic boundaries in their area. The goal should be to ensure that everyone has someone to provide them with practical assistance and emotional support before, during, and after extreme stresses, emergencies, and disasters.

A powerful way to do this is to engage residents in forming mutual aid networks in their area. The networks can provide people with physical help, as well as food, water, shelter, power, resilience first aid and more prior to, in the midst of, and following adversities.

Local resilience networks can also actively engage residents in prosocial activities that give them meaning, purpose, and hope in the midst of upheavals. In addition to participating in mutual aid networks, this might include enhancing housing, transportation, and other aspects of the physical environment, supporting local businesses that provide living-wage jobs, caring for animals, restoring local waterways, forests, and biodiversity, and other focuses.

Another activity resilience networks can pursue is to regularly engage residents in practices known to enhance wellness and resilience. This can include being gratitude for what one has, practicing forgiveness for the self and others, eating a healthy diet, getting sufficient exercise, and finding ways to keep a sense of humor during difficult times.

In addition, resilience networks can help residents that are seriously stressed or traumatized recover in a safe and supportive environment. This can be done by establishing age and culturally-appropriate healing circles, religious or spiritual rituals, somatic, nature-based, arts-based, mindfulness-based, and other therapeutic methods.

As local resilience networks pursue these activities, they should be super careful not to lose their way in the disinformation and distractions created by the Trump-Musk-Project 2025 administration. The networks should also do everything possible to protect all residents from harm. Even though migrants are now their primary target, the new administration and other authoritarian ideologues are likely to come after many other community members in the future.

When residents come together to do this work, they will often discover that the root cause of most problems today is not people who look, think, or act differently from them. Nor is it government inefficiency. It is the unprecedented level of economic inequality that now exists which has been created by the gigantic corporations, Wall Street titans, and far-right super rich individuals that control our economic and political systems.

In addition to structuring the economy to continually eliminate meaningful work, keep wages low, and funnel money upward to them, they have also been unwilling to protect people, the earth’s climate, and nature environment when doing so in any way diminishes their profits, wealth, or power.

This awareness will likely motivate many people to rise above their perceived differences and join with others to push back against the Trump-Musk-Project 2025 administration agenda, stop the far-right authoritarian takeover, and rebuild our democracy in a much more socially, economically, environmentally, and politically safe, healthy, fair, and sound way.

Cover image courtesy Bob Doppelt, from Transformational Resilience: How Building Human Resilience to Climate Disruption Can Safeguard Society and Increase Wellbeing.

Bob lives in Eugene, directed a climate program at UO for many years, ran a nonprofit that started the watershed council program in Oregon, and now coordinates an international climate and mental health organization.  His latest book is Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas: A Guide to Building Resilience and Hope in Communities. Subscribe to his Substack at https://bobdoppelt.substack.com/ .