At a glance: Project 2025's Indian Country agenda

Project 2025's intended and unintended consequences toward federal Indian trust responsibilities

First and foremost, Project 2025 seeks to dismantle the federal government and institute a Christian Nationalist agenda in all sectors of American life, a kind of assimilation tribal nations and Indigenous citizens are all too familiar with. While some of the policy proposals seem vague, broad, and unlimited, the goals are plainly written: defund all aspects of federal Indian administration, hand power to states, and de-regulate tribal lands to easily access fossil fuel development, even on sacred sites and treaty lands.

Indian Country’s federal administration may seem isolated to the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, yet that is simply not the case. Each department and agency has federal Indian trust responsibilities, legislation, or rules and regulations that must square with tribal nations and Native citizens. An overhaul of the federal government at the magnitude of Project 2025 will inevitably impact tribal nations, whether or not it was written or intended.

[Read full story on Project 2025 and Indian Country: “They want to completely terminate the trust responsibility”]

Take a look at some of the policies Project 2025 proposes for Indian Country, keeping in mind that the proposed vague and broad policies are not where the far-right agenda begins and ends with Indian Country—meaning that if a sympathetic president is elected, such as Donald Trump, there may be new, unwritten, and equally impactful policies targeting federal Indian administration and the federal Indian trust responsibilities of the United States government.

Selected policies:

• Repeal the Antiquities Act of 1906, law that has designated many Indigenous sacred sites as national monuments and memorials (pg. 

• “Eliminate” the Head Start Program that serves over 44,000 Native children, (pg. 482)

• A vague proposal to “Overhaul” Bureau of Indian Education Schools, (pg. 538)

• Opens up previously restricted lands from energy and mineral production leasing in White River National Forest in Colorado and Chaco Cultural Historic National Park in New Mexico, (pg. 523)

• Approve Willow oil and gas production project in Alaska, “the largest pending oil and gas projection in the United States” with new oil pads, (pg. 530)

• Open up 100 million acres of lands in Alaska for oil production through the Alaska Native American Claims Settlement Act, (pg. 523)

• Allow Alaska’s authority to manage all fish and game on “all federal lands” through Reagan era legislation, (pg. 531)

• Bans the US government from entering into new loans or loan guarantees, including with tribes, eventually eliminating the Interior Department’s entire loan program, (pg. 383)

• Defunds the Housing and Urban Development (HUD), “consider a wholesale overhaul of HUD” in favor of “private market” and moves Indian housing programs to Interior Department, (pg. 520)

• Risks health, safety, and child and adolescent development of Two Spirit, Trans, and non-binary Native students at Bureau of Indian Education Schools through anti-LGBTQ policies targeting “radical gender ideology” in faculty and class conduct and curriculum, including not using a student’s preferred name or pronoun that don’t “align” with their biological sex or respecting their wishes to keep their gender or sexual identity from their parents, (pg. 346)

• Risks curriculum overhaul at BIE and public schools through policies targeting “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms,” (pg. 8)

• “Reforms” the Indian Health Service (IHS) so Indian patients are “empowered to rely on alternatives to IHS” in the private sector, (pg. 487)

• “End the war on fossil fuels” by opening tribal lands to easier fossil fuel development, (pg. 356)

• Within the context of proposed deportation of all “illegal” immigrants and ending “open border” policies, Project 2025 seeks to increase border security against migrants to “protect the sovereignty and safety of tribal lands,” (pg. 536)

• “End federal mandates and subsidies of electric vehicles;” unclear as to why this is a crucial reform for Indian Country (pg. 536)

• And within the context of opening fossil fuel development, “restore the right of tribal governments to enforce environmental regulation on their lands,” (pg. 536)

These are only the known policy goals of Project 2025 for Indian Country. According to undercover report, the chief architect of Project 2025 Russel Vought is overseeing “overseeing the drafting of hundreds of executive orders, regulations and secretarial memos, to help make the US conservative movement’s radical goals a reality.”

Indian Country is not prepared for Project 2025’s secretive plan.