How Project 2025 threatens your investments
Project 2025 is a dangerous blueprint, designed by extremist groups with longstanding ties to Big Oil, that aims to upend working people’s investments by undermining responsible investing practices. Here’s why Project 2025 is a threat to financial stability and your savings.
What is Project 2025?
Project 2025 is a far-reaching plan spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and supported by various far right and fossil fuel-backed entities. It proposes to dismantle the financial regulatory system, and would undo key aspects of responsible investing, placing workers’ pensions, investments, and savings at greater financial risk.
Supported by long-standing climate denialists and funded by dark money billionaires, Project 2025 proposes to restrain the capabilities of the Securities and Exchange Commision, the Environment Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and consumer protection agencies, as part of a wider effort to eliminate commons-sense environmental and investor protections, putting financial stability at risk.
Project 2025 shares many of the same backers and funders as the ‘anti-ESG’ campaign. Both projects aim to sacrifice long-term sustainability in favor of short-term profits—at the behest of fossil fuel and other corporate interests that want to slow down climate action and reverse corporate progress on racial justice, workplace diversity, and labor protections.
How Project 2025 Threatens Your Investments
1. Risks to Retirement Security
One of the most concerning aspects of Project 2025 for investors and retirees is its attempt to coerce those who manage trillions of dollars of workers’ retirement savings into focusing exclusively on risky short-term returns instead of investing responsibly for the long-term. This would jeopardize millions of working people’s retirement savings. In the few states where anti-ESG proposals have become law, taxpayers lost hundreds of millions of dollars and workers lost access to thousands of good-paying jobs, leading to higher interest rates and transaction costs and stymying economic activity.
2. Bad for Business: Anti-ESG Attacks
Project 2025 proposes that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) create a task force to label corporate voluntary climate commitments, ESG, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts as “collusion.” Project 2025 also calls for Congressional investigations into those incorporating ESG practices into investment and business decisions. These actions would stifle corporate efforts to address environmental and social issues, and undermine universally accepted business risk management practices that contribute to long-term stability and growth.
3. Rolls Back Transparency and Accountability for Investors
Project 2025 seeks to limit the ability of investors to hold companies accountable for risky practices. The plan recommends using Congressional power to prevent the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from enforcing transparency and accountability in the financial system. This move would strip investors of crucial tools to evaluate and manage financial risks and opportunities.
4. Threatens Protections and Funding for Financial Stability and Climate Progress
Project 2025 plans to gut the federal agencies responsible for addressing the climate crisis and financial stability oversight. It proposes significant cuts to climate resiliency programs, clean energy investments and incentives and climate research, and eliminates agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These rollbacks halt progress on climate issues and clean energy initiatives, creating broad economic and environmental risks for businesses, particularly farmers and ranchers, and many communities.
5. Grants Free Reign to Fossil Fuel Billionaires
The push for Project 2025 is closely linked to fossil fuel interests, which have long sought to undermine climate and responsible investing policies along with the energy transition already underway. Many of the authors and backers of Project 2025 are affiliated with entities that have a vested interest in protecting fossil fuel profits, often at the expense of environmental, health, worker safety, and financial stability.
The Heritage Foundation is the coordinating group behind Project 2025. Heritage, which takes an anti-diversity and anti-democracy stance, has received millions of dollars from fossil-fuel fortunes.
Project 2025’s billionaire financial backers’ ties to fossil fuels are undeniable. Among its notable ultra-wealthy funders, the head of oil-focused Koch Industries, Charles Koch, donated at least $9.6 million to Project 2025-linked groups since 2020. Two other oil-linked family fortunes donated over $64 million to groups affiliated with Project 2025, including numerous climate-denying organizations like Turning Point USA.
Big Oil giant Shell’s associated U.S. foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to climate change-denying organizations, including fourteen groups on the advisory board of Project 2025.
6. Halting economic progress
Project 2025 lays out plans to stop the clean energy transition and efforts to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure by repealing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. These measures have already created over 300,000 jobs in states with majority Republican voters and states with majority Democratic voters alike, and injected $361 billion in new investments into communities in these states. The IRA is expected to create millions more jobs by 2030 and increase economic growth by billions. Up to one million federal jobs would be lost if Project 2025 were implemented, and these economic gains would be wiped out.
The economic fallout under Project 2025 could be near the trillion dollar mark. By contrast, a recent analysis by nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation Policy & Technology found continuing ‘Climate Leadership’ policies would create more jobs, increase GDP, improve public health, and generate more household energy savings for the United States compared to the suite of Project 2025 policies.
The economic effects of these two roadmaps are wildly different. By continuing policies like the IRA and climate leadership measures, U.S. GDP is projected to grow by $450 billion per year by 2030 and $730 billion per year by 2050, according to the previous analysis. By contrast, over the same timeframe under a Project 2025 scenario, U.S. GDP would decrease by $320 billion per year over the next five years and by $150 billion or more per year over the following 20 years. The U.S. economy would shrink by $770 billion annually by 2030 under the Project 2025 scenario when compared to the IRA climate leadership scenario and the gap would only widen from there, which would lead to trillions in cumulative GDP losses and significant investment and retirement saving losses.
Research by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has shown that excluding fossil fuels from many passive investment vehicles has resulted in slightly superior returns over the last 10 years, and that there is good reason to believe this is a trend that will persist. Fossil fuel companies have in recent years become more dependent on volatile external events they can’t control for profitability, IEEFA found, and are “ill-prepared to manage shareholder value in the coming years” as fossil fuels’ face rising competition from cheaper alternative technologies. Project 2025 seeks to prop up the fossil fuel industry through subsidies and favorable policies, injecting more financial instability and hindering economic progress more broadly.
By manipulating federal agencies into vehicles to serve corporate and billionaire interests, as opposed to the public interest, Project 2025 maps out plans to promote fossil fuel interests at the expense of broader economic wellbeing and financial security of everyday people. It would allow industries to evade climate pollution accountability while imposing higher costs and taxes on families.
How to Protect Your Investments
- Stay Informed: Educate yourself about Project 2025 and its consequences. Reliable sources and expert analyses can provide clarity on how these changes may affect your investments.
- Advocate for Responsible Investing: Support policies and initiatives that encourage responsible investing principles and oppose measures that undermine these practices. Engage with lawmakers and advocate for responsible investing standards and transparency.
- Consult with Financial Advisors: Seek advice from financial professionals who understand the importance of responsible investing and are required to act in your best interest. They can help navigate the complexities introduced by Project 2025.
The Bottom Line
The ultimate goal of Project 2025 is to erode the federal government as an institution which serves and protects the public, and instead concentrates power in an authoritarian leader to serve Wall Street, corporations, and the ultra wealthy . Project 2025 threatens responsible investing, financial stability, and erodes fundamental human rights and protections, using government control as a vehicle to further drive up wealth inequality at the expense of working people. Project 2025 undermines responsible investing and denies the uncontroversial financial risks of the climate crisis, all of which will only further jeopardize people’s ability to retire and achieve financial security. It is critical that we stay informed to advocate for responsible investing principles that are essential to protecting our financial security and future, while also contributing to a sustainable economy now and into the future.
Additional Resources
- Project 2025: Risking Americans’ Financial Security – Unlocking America’s Future
- The Billionaire Fortunes Bankrolling Project 2025 – DeSmog
- IEEFA Report on Fossil Fuels and Market Performance – IEEFA Report
- Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos: “Eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere” – ProPublica
- Project 2025 promises billions of tonnes more carbon pollution – Guardian
- The Second Half Of The Decisive Decade: Potential U.S. Pathways On Climate, Jobs, And Health – Energy Innovation Policy & Technology
Last modified: October 16, 2024
