Throughout President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, he has strongly and repeatedly denied his relationship with Project 2025, a political platform document created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said in September last year during a discussion with former Vice President Kamala Harris. He said he didn’t intend to read the documents either.
However, less than six months after his second stay at the White House, the president and his administration began or completed 42% of the Project 2025 agenda, according to a tracking project that identified more than 300 specific action items in a 922-page document. The Project 2025 Tracker is run by two volunteers “who believes in the importance of transparent and detailed analysis,” according to its website.
Of all action items, almost a quarter is related to the environment through agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and internal, commercial and energy sectors. Additionally, according to time analysis of tracked items, the environment appears to be a high priority for the Trump administration, which started or completed about 70% of the Project 2025 environmental agenda, or about two-thirds.
This includes action items for Project 2025, such as rollback air and water quality regulations. Cancellation of funds for Clean Energy Projects and Environmental Justice Grants. Dismiss scientists and researchers in related fields. Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, agreements between nearly 200 countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that promote global warming.
When asked about this overlap, the administration continued to downplay the relationship between the president and Project 2025.
“When I elected President Trump in November 2024, no one cared about Project 2025, but now I don’t care,” White House spokesman Taylor Rogers said in an email. “President Trump is implementing the first American agenda to campaign to recover US energy spending while freeing up wasted DEI spending for cutting-edge scientific research, rolling back radical climate regulations and ensuring that Americans have clean air and clean water.”
Project 2025 is called the “alarm industry” used to support climate change radical left ideology and agenda.
“In general, mischaracterizing the condition of our environment, and the reasonably attribute of actual harm to climate change is a preferred tool that the left wing uses to scare the American people, particularly to accept inefficient and freedom-smashing regulations, reduced rights to private property, and exorbitant costs,” he says in the chapter on the EPA.
The author of that chapter, Mandy Gunasekara, served as EPA Chief of Staff in Trump’s first administration. In the document, she recommends that the president take many actions to reform the EPA, including downsizing the agency, eliminating environmental justice and civil rights duties, and launching subsidies suspensions and reviews.
That same chapter also recommends undermining the president’s ability to set strict vehicle emissions standards in California. This week the Senate voted to revoke California’s right to enact policies on the issue.
Gunasekara did not respond to requests for comment.
Matthew Sanders, acting vice-director of Stanford’s Environmental Law Clinic, said the moves dealing with these and other projects 2025 could have a wide range of impacts. He said 11 other states have chosen to follow California emissions regulations.
“What California is doing affects what other countries do,” Sanders said. “In that sense… decisions on how to affect clean air obligations have profound consequences to monitor the technology of most of the country, isolating California and eliminating the ability to do so.”
The EPA is not the only institution affected by changes in environmental policy reflected in Project 2025.
The Trump administration has also directed the Energy Department to expand its oil and gas leases in Alaska, eliminate considerations regarding greenhouse gas emissions upstream and downstream, and to promote approval for liquefied natural gas projects.
The Home Office, which oversees U.S. national parks and public lands, has seen the rollback of at least dozens of President Biden’s executive order prioritizing climate change efforts, and the end of Biden-era policies to protect 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030.
In April, Trump issued an executive order opening 125.5 million acres of national forests for industrial logging, as outlined in page 308 of Project 2025.
Sanders said actions on public lands are particularly consequential, not just because of resource extraction, but also because of protected species and their habitat. The president has already taken steps mandatory by Project 2025 to reduce marine life and bird protection, calling for narrowing the protection provided by the Endangered Species Species Act.
He also expressed concern over Trump’s January 20 proposal to amend or withdraw regulations in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of actions. This is the recommended step for page 60 of Project 2025.
The President described NEPA and other rules as “regulations of burden and ideological motivation” that limits the economic growth of American work and stymie, but Sanders said such framing is an overly simplification that could make the environment a scapegoat of other management goals.
“If you make these decisions in a thoughtful, careful and intentional way, you can actually have work, economic development and environmental protection,” he said. “I don’t think they are inherently opposed, but I think the administration will get some mileage from suggesting they are.”
In fact, the Department of Commerce, which houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service and other climate-related organizations, also saw changes following the Project 2025 playbook. The document describes the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change warning industry and therefore harms the future of the United States.”
In recent months, the president has made the move to “disband” NOAA. This is also a directive on page 674 of the Project 2025 document, which will lay off hundreds of staff, close several offices, and propose a significant cut in its research department.
The administration has similarly taken the measures recommended by Project 2025 to displace disaster relief responsibility from the federal government to the states. Loosen energy efficiency standards for electrical appliances. It will withdraw its USAID policy to address climate change and help the country move away from fossil fuels.
These are some of the nearly 70 environmental action items identified in the Project 2025 Tracker, of which 47 have already been completed or are currently underway within 150 days of President Trump’s second term.
Tracking the progress of the administration is a somewhat subjective process. This is because many of the directives require multiple steps to go through or complete an executive order. Additionally, many of the goals outlined in Project 2025 are indirect or implicit and therefore not included in the tracker, according to one of its creators, Adrienne Cobb.
Cobb read the entire document and spoke to the Times, extracting only “an explicit call to action or recommendations that clearly state that the author should do something.”
“My goal was for the tracker to use his own words as much as possible to reflect the author’s intentions,” she said. “We have sought to create an accurate and accountable list of source material by focusing on language and practical items directly.”
The Trump administration continues to deny its relationship with Project 2025, but the creators of the large book have always been clear about the president’s intentions.
“This volume – a conservative promise – is the opening salvo for the 2025 Presidential Transition Project,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts wrote to the Forward. “The 30 chapters list hundreds of clear and specific policy recommendations for the White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and agencies, committees and boards.”
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