Project 2025 Part II: The EPA

The Heritage Foundation's plan for the expected next Trump administration spells trouble for America's environmental protections

Much has happened since I took a look at some of the environmental consequences of the proposed Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plans for a new Trump administration. Trump has survived an assassination attempt, named Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance as his running mate, and was cheered at the GOP presidential convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic candidate. Harris has chosen Tim Walz as her running mate.

That’s a lot of politics to happen in less than a month. One thing that hasn’t changed is Project 2025, the plan put forward by the Heritage Foundation, in their hopes of Trump returning to the White House. As folks have learned more and more about the project, both Democratic and GOP, Trump has more than distanced himself from the document. On his social media platform, Truth Social, he said of the document’s authors that he has “nothing to do with them” and called some of the proposed ideas in the document “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

But the denial rings hollow, as Trump was personally briefed on Project 2025 by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts during a flight they shared. Trumps running mate, J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to Robert’s as yet to be published book, Dawn’s Early Light, for which the publisher, HarperCollins has delayed the publication date as much of the text is being revised to tone down its violent rhetoric. Trump’s name appears more than 100 times in Project 2025, and many of the document’s recommendations are a call to return to policies and Executive Orders of the 45th president.

In the July 12th post of The Green Dispatch, I looked at the changes the project proposed to the Interior Department. Today I will try to explain the document’s implications for the Environmental Protection Agency.

The author

Mandy M. Gunasekara, a Senior Policy Advisor at the EPA during the Trump Administration and a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, authored or is the lead author of the chapter on proposed changes to the EPA. She has claimed that climate activists thrive off guilt and fear, and that the immense drops in emissions and pollution during the height of the COVID pandemic were achieved through Trump’s slashing environmental regulation. Emissions policies have “nothing to do with reducing emissions; they have everything to do with expanding control” to the “elite political class.”

Gunasekara’s continues her rhetoric in the introduction to the EPA chapter, saying that the EPA “has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends,” and is “led by activism and a disregard for the law.”

What Project 2025 wants to do to the EPA

Not to waste a moment, Project 2025 wants to have assembled a crew of political appointees ready to be “deployed” in the EPA as soon as Trump assumes office. Senate-confirmed positions, which often take weeks or months to be finalized, would serve as Deputies or Principal Deputies. Ideologues with no prospect of full confirmation could thus achieve much of the Heritage Foundation’s corporate-friendly agenda, possibly working at the EPA after they fail to pass confirmation, as William Perry Pendley did when he failed to pass confirmation in Trump’s Interior Department.

The basic gist of the project’s plan for the EPA is to return to the Reagan administration’s efforts to dwindle the power and effectiveness of the agency. Gunasekara even relies on favored terms from the eighties, including “downsize” and “budget review,” to describe the future Heritage Foundation sees for the EPA. Project 2025 recommends eliminating the "Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the branch of the EPA that also enforces federal civil rights laws, as well as the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, which is the law enforcement office of the EPA. Also on the chopping block: Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education.

The project contains the objective of “Resetting science advisory boards to expand opportunities for a diversity of scientific viewpoints free of potential conflicts of interest.” Nothing is being said out loud here, but I guess that Gunasekara and the Heritage Foundation want the EPA to include “science” that may come from petroleum industry insiders or climate-change deniers—anything to cast doubt when science finds a result that is inconvenient for business and industry.

A great success of the Biden administration is the “Good Neighbor” plan, intended to curtail polluting emissions that drift across state lines, mostly from power plants that cause smog and ground-level ozone. The authors of the project worry that this plan might “over control” the “upwind” states where the pollution originates.

Gunasekara also wants to repeal Biden administration legislation that reduces hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by 85 percent by 2036. HFCs were introduced as refrigerants to replace chlorofluorocarbons, which were found to destroy the Earth’s protective ozone layer. HFCs are safer for the ozone layer but are still heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Additionally, Project 2025 would loosen emissions standards for automobiles, while introducing standards like “lifecycle emissions” of electric vehicles. While electric cars may not be the panacea touted by many enthusiasts, burdening the manufacturers with this extra standard certainly favors the oil industry, which heavily backs GOP politicians over Democrats. Moreover, the project would restrict other states from adopting the lower emissions standards set by California.

Gunasekara would have the EPA work with Congress to pass legislation to codify the Rapanos v. United States Supreme Court decision that severely restricted the bodies of water protected by the Clean Water Act and opened up about half of the wetlands in the Lower 48 to development. She and the other authors of the project would cut back inspections and monitoring of point source pollutions, such as municipal wastewater operations.

This is only a portion of what Trump’s Project 2025 would do to the EPA. To fully explain it would require a lot more space than I usually take for this weekly posting. Please check out the previous post on the Interior Department if you want to know more.

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Project 2025 is as scary as The Year 2525.