A Project 2029 Agenda & The Fever Act

The planning and team building that went into the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report enabled the second Trump Administration to spread its political goals and agenda across the federal government at a remarkably brisk pace.  

A comparable effort is needed to develop changes in law, executive action, regulation, and budget priorities sufficient to bring about systemic, deep, and impactful change across the food and agricultural sectors. The public health, economic, and cultural problems that have taken root in rural America are deeply worrisome, as is what happens to food quality and safety once it leaves the farm. 

The past 50 years of farm policy has consciously and effectively subsidized technology and management systems that have increased yields of an incrementally smaller mix of progressively less nutritious crops and livestock products. 

Gains in “productivity” have come at the expense of soil health, scarce water resources and water quality, animal welfare, farm income, economic resiliency, and rural community health and cohesiveness. And the collateral damage is mounting: ongoing loss of soil health, water unfit to drink, lack of qualified labor, and excessive dependence on government subsidies and bailouts, and a predominantly immigrant labor force.

Our systems are on cruise control toward unsustainability. HHRA believes a system reset is now essential, and has taken on the task of producing a Project 2029 agenda for building health outcomes into the DNA of food and ag policy.

All government programs, policies, laws, and budget decisions impacting the food and ag sectors, and especially those impacting public and environmental health, are fair game to be addressed via Project 2029. 

Our work will venture well beyond the programs and policies addressed in five-year farm bills. It will include food quality and safety, pesticide laws and policy, access to and use of water, the role and sustainable funding for federal farm commodity and conservation programs, and rural health care and health-promotion infrastructure. Ditto, competition and the exercise of market power.