Project 2025’s Extreme Vision for the West

If Donald Trump is re-elected president in November, a coalition of more than 50 right-wing organizations known as Project 2025 will be ready with a plug-and-play plan for him to follow, starting with a database of potential administration appointees carefully vetted by coalition members; an online “Presidential Administration Academy” run by coalition members to school new appointees; and a 920-page policy platform called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”

Written by former members of the Trump administration and other conservative leaders, “Mandate for Leadership” exhorts its readers to “go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative state.” Among many other measures, it calls for radical reductions in the federal workforce and in federal environmental protections and for advancing a “Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda.”

Excerpts from “Mandate for Leadership” are below, preceded by an agency-by-agency overview of the proposals that could have the greatest impact on Western land, water and wildlife — as well as on Westerners themselves.

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR (p. 517)

The Project 2025 recommendations for the Department of the Interior were authored primarily by attorney William Perry Pendley, a vociferous opponent of protections for public lands and wildlife. As acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during the Trump administration, he transformed the agency into what one high-level employee described as a “a ghost ship,” in which “suspicion,” “fear” and “low morale” abounded.

Energy policy

Pendley notes that the energy section was written “in its entirety” by Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry group; Dan Kish of the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank long skeptical of human-caused climate change; and Katie Tubb of The Heritage Foundation. They recommend reviving the “Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda” by: 

• reinstating a dozen industry-friendly orders issued by the Trump administration’s secretaries of the Interior (p. 522);
• expanding oil and gas lease sales onshore and offshore (p. 522);
• opening the large portions of Alaska, including the Alaska Coastal Plain and most of the National Petroleum Reserve, to oil and gas exploration and development (pp. 523, 524);
• halting the ongoing review of the federal coal-leasing program and working “with the congressional delegations and governors of Wyoming and Montana to restart the program immediately” (p. 523);
• restoring mining claims and oil and gas leases in the Thompson Divide of the White River National Forest in Colorado and the 10-mile buffer around Chaco Cultural Historic National Park in New Mexico. (p. 523);
• and expanding the Willow Project, a ConocoPhillips oil-drilling operation on Alaska’s North Slope (p. 530).

Agency operations

The project’s organizers plan to upend federal land-management agency operations by:

• re-relocating Bureau of Land Management headquarters to the West (p. 524);
• placing BLM law-enforcement officers under the direct supervision of political appointees rather than the agency’s state directors, a move that could undermine the agency’s ability to enforce its own regulations;
• and weakening the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental reviews of federally funded projects, by restoring Trump-era changes that set time limits for reviews, allowed agencies to skip some reviews altogether and eliminated any consideration of a project’s climate impacts (p. 533).

Land conservation

The project aims to undo large landscape protections by:

• ending the America the Beautiful initiative (a.k.a. the “30 by 30” plan) (p. 531); 
• reviewing national monument designations with an eye to reducing their size (p. 532);
• seeking repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906 (p. 532);
• and reducing the size of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon, whose expansion by President Barack Obama was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court this spring (p. 532).

Wildlife 

Pendley expresses particular hostility toward the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose work he described as “the product of ‘species cartels’ afflicted with group-think, confirmation bias and a common desire to preserve the prestige, power and appropriations of the agency that pays or employs them.” He recommends:

• delisting the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems (p. 534);
• delisting the gray wolf in the continental United States (p. 534);
• putting states in charge of managing the greater sage-grouse;
• ending the reintroduction of “experimental populations” outside a species’ historic range (p. 534);
• abolishing the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey — which will be difficult to do, as it no longer exists as such and is now part of the National Park Service (p. 534);
• and reinstating Trump-era limitations on the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (p. 524). 

DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE (p. 289)

The free-market advocate behind Project 2025’s section on the USDA has long railed against the subsidies and food-stamp programs administered by the agency. As a fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Daren Bakst penned a lengthy report, “Farms and Free Enterprise,” that objects to many aspects of the farm bill, which funds annual food assistance and rural development programs. His vision, documented in the report, is present throughout Project 2025’s proposed agency overhaul.

Agency organization

Project 2025 seeks to limit regulation in favor of market forces by:

• reducing annual agency spending, including subsidy rates for crop insurance and additional programs that support farmers for lost crops (p. 296); 
• removing protections for wetlands and erodible land that farmers must comply with to participate in USDA programs (p. 304); 
• eliminating the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to enrich and protect parts of their land from agricultural production (p. 304); 
• removing climate change and equity from the agency’s mission (p. 290, 293); 
• and working with Congress to undo the federal labeling law, which requires consumer products to disclose where they were made and what they contain, as well as encouraging voluntary labeling (p. 307). 

Forestry

The project will reduce forests on public lands by:

• increasing timber sales in the name of wildfire prevention (p. 308);
• and rescinding the Biden administration’s “roadless rule” for the Tongass National Forest, which preserves 9.37 million acres of the world’s largest temperate rainforest and puts a cap on logging in the region (p. 531).

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY (p. 417) 

Prior to serving as the EPA’s chief of staff during the Trump administration, Mandy Gunasekara was famous for handing then-Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) a snowball to disprove the existence of human-caused climate change. At the EPA, she played a key role in the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and in the dismantling of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. Gunasekara’s vision for the EPA is characterized by staff layoffs, office closures and the embrace of public comment over peer-reviewed science. 

Agency organization

The plan will diminish the agency’s scope of work by:

• reducing full-time staff and cutting “low-value” programs (p. 422);
• shuttering offices dedicated to environmental justice and civil rights, enforcement and compliance, environmental education, children’s health, and international and tribal affairs, and distributing their functions elsewhere (p. 421); 
• eliminating all research that is not explicitly authorized by Congress (p. 436);
• restructuring scientific advisory boards and engaging the public in ongoing scrutiny of the agency’s science — potentially opening the door to a wave of pushback against the international consensus on climate change (p. 422, 436-438);
• eliminating the use of catastrophic climate change scenarios in drafting regulation (p. 436);
• relocating a restructured American Indian Office to the West (p. 440);
• partially shifting personnel from headquarters to regional offices (p. 430);
• and striking the regulations, including a program to reduce methane and VOC emissions, that enable the EPA to work with external groups to help enforce laws (p. 424).

Natural resources

The project would jeopardize clean air and water by:

• limiting California’s effort to reduce air pollution from vehicles by ensuring that its standards and those of other states avoid any reference to greenhouse gas emissions or climate change (p. 426);
• supporting the reform of the Endangered Species Act to ensure a full cost-benefit analysis during pesticide approval (p. 434-435); 
• repealing some regulations imposed by the Biden administration to limit hydrofluorocarbons, a particularly potent greenhouse gas (p. 425);
• and undoing the expansion of the Good Neighbor Program, which requires states to reduce their nitrogen oxide emissions, beyond power plants to include industrial facilities like iron and steel mills (p. 424).