Project 2025, a controversial conservative roadmap intended to guide the next Republican administration, calls for the elimination of several energy and environmental agencies and regulations, a move that would limit the government’s ability to fight climate change and pollution.
Policies promoted under this plan would put politicians in positions of scientific oversight at key federal agencies and weaken those agencies’ restrictions on polluting industries.
The project also proposes breaking up several agencies, calling for the “dismantling” of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US’s ocean, weather, climate and fisheries science agency.
NOAA is home to the National Weather Service (which the plan says will focus more on commercial activities) and the Administration of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (which the plan says will “downsize” and “disband” much of its climate research).
The plan would also eliminate the department’s divisions focused on renewable energy, climate technology, and energy technology research. The Energy Department chapter also calls for “government-wide science assessment and synthesis,” including a “review of all federal science agencies.”
Additionally, Project 2025 seeks to work with Congress to repeal energy efficiency standards for home appliances. Such standards have been a target of Republican lawmakers, who have made multiple efforts to block or roll back the Biden administration’s appliance regulations.
Former President Trump also blasted regulations requiring more efficient light bulbs, showerheads and a variety of other products.
Trump has sought to distance himself from the project after the head of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that developed it, made controversial calls for a “bloodless” revolution.
But many parts of the plan were written by officials from the former president’s first administration, and the provision on energy efficiency standards is one of many areas where the plan appears to be broadly consistent with policies that Trump has sought.
The project, for example, would revive a Trump-era move to relocate the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, a move critics say would effectively force out longtime employees who were based in Washington, DC.
In an interview with The Hill, Western Energy Alliance president Kathleen Sugama, who co-authored the Interior section of the proposal, said the section was ” [oil and gas] Development and production from Federal lands.”
Sugama, whose group lobbying on behalf of the oil industry, said the series of proposals aims to reverse Biden administration policies that have restricted fossil fuel development on those lands.
After taking office, Biden signed an executive order pausing all new oil and gas leasing on public lands, which has now ended, and more recently signed an order permanently protecting about 13 million acres in the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve.
The plan would roll back those measures and reinstate Trump-era policies that opened up Arctic lands to drilling, reduced protections for endangered species, and imposed limitations on environmental and other review processes in order to boost infrastructure and energy projects.
Some of the blueprint’s proposals for the Department of the Interior would likely require congressional legislation. For example, the plan also calls for repealing the Antiquities Act of 1906, the law that allows the president to designate national monuments.
But others could likely be accomplished through the executive branch, such as opening up more Arctic land to drilling to bolster infrastructure and energy projects, reducing protections for endangered species and placing limits on environmental and other review processes.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to consolidate science and policy under a political bureaucracy, including appointing at least six political appointees to oversee and change the agency’s research and science activities.
They also call for transferring senior officials from the EPA’s Office of Water Quality and abolishing the EPA’s Office of Civil and Criminal Enforcement, instead transferring enforcement officials to the EPA’s Office of General Counsel.
The law enforcement agency, known as the Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Bureau, is responsible for pursuing criminal penalties and penalties when companies violate the law by polluting.
Asked about the rationale for moving senior officials out of the water department, Mandy Gunasekara, author of the plan’s EPA chapter, told The Hill that some officials in those positions use their positions to try to create roadblocks for policy proposals they don’t agree with. She said moving enforcement to the Office of General Counsel would address the “disparity” between those who make the rules and those who enforce them.
The EPA section of the plan also calls for an “update” of the agency’s 2009 findings that greenhouse gas emissions pose threats to human health and the environment. This risk finding forces the EPA to take action to address the threat of these emissions.
It is not clear whether the “update” could weaken or overturn the findings.
Additionally, the plan would make the agency’s review of potentially toxic substances more industry-friendly and “reconsider” rules currently in place to strengthen the cleanup of PFAS chemicals linked to cancer.
Gunasekara served as EPA chief of staff under the Trump administration and declined to say whether he would like to serve in a second term in the Trump administration.
The Interior Department’s chief architect, William Perry Pendley, is also a former Trump administration official. Pendley served as acting administrator of the Bureau of Land Management during Trump’s term but was never confirmed by the Senate, even though he led the agency for more than a year before being fired by a judge.
Pendley has long advocated for the sale of public lands, writing in a June op-ed that the BLM should sell off public lands to solve the housing shortage in the Western U.S. The reality of climate change A hole in the Earth’s ozone layer It’s called the Endangered Species Act. He made headlines by calling America a “failure,” calling illegal immigrants a “cancer” and claiming that Islam is at war with the United States.
“The project has made no secret of who wrote this,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, said of Sugama’s role at the Interior Department.
“Pendley wants to see most oil and gas policy left to states, even on federal lands,” Weiss added.
Project 2025 has raised concerns among environmentalists. Climate activist Jamie Henn said she’s concerned not that the project is necessarily more extreme than President Trump’s proposal, but that it is more specific.
“Trump would frack the National Mall if he thought it would make donors and big oil a few bucks,” said Henn, director of Fossil Free Media, a nonprofit that advocates for ending fossil fuel use.
But he said that while “Trump tends to talk in slogans,” “this is a plan that really goes into the details.”
“We’re not just looking at each agency individually, we’re looking at all of the agency’s programs and trying to remove any barriers to the fossil fuel industry,” Henn said.
Proponents of the project say their goal is to force the Conservative government to develop a detailed policy plan and be ready to act.
“My goal is very much aligned with the goal of the whole project, which is to make sure that we don’t waste time on the next opportunity for conservatives to lead the government,” Gunasekara told The Hill.
She said her goal in drafting the EPA section of the plan was to “1. lay out a clear policy vision and then 2. work out the steps that need to be taken to ultimately most efficiently implement it.”
