What “Project 2025” Would Do To US EPA, Climate, And Environmental Protection Programs
Overt Politicization Of Science, Industry Control, Abdication To Voluntary Local Efforts
The Red Meat Ideological Rhetoric Is Revealing
“The Paranoid Style in American Politics”
Again way out in front, we were warning and beating the drum about “Project 2025” last July.
In a July 25, 2023 letter to NJ legislators, Gov. Murphy’s DEP Commissioner LaTourette, and media, we wrote:
I write to give you a heads up and urge you to read the Heritage Foundation’s recent initiative called “Project 2025″. It is explicitly designed to “dismantle the administrative State”. FULL REPORT HERE:
Chapter 13 provides a radical agenda to dismantle EPA and virtually all regulatory, science, and climate programs – read it here:
https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-13.pdf
I strongly urge you to get out in front of and do everything within your power to derail this freight train.
Of course we were ignored.
But now that the Democrats, Biden campaign, and the media finally have begun to focus on Project 2025, we thought we might begin to highlight the overt ideological framework and key aspects of the environmental and climate policies of Project 2025.
These radical policies must be considered in light of the personnel who will implement them – as originally outlined in the Trump “Schedule F” plan – to replace thousands of civil service scientists and experts with Trump loyalists.
And as we’ve written many times, these policies also must be considered in light of a right wing Supreme Court hell bent on “dismantling the administrative State”.
Chapter 13 targets US EPA.
Right up front, in red meat ideological rhetoric, they revealingly state the “problem”, and in doing so overtly politicize the EPA:
The challenge of creating a conservative EPA will be to balance justified skepticism toward an agency that has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states. Further, the EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator.
The first attack is on EPA regulations, particularly regarding climate and energy:
The Status Quo. Not surprisingly, the EPA under the Biden Administration has returned to the same top-down, coercive approach that defined the Obama Administration. There has been a reinstitution of unachievable standards designed to aid in the “transition” away from politically disfavored industries and technologies and toward the Biden Administration’s preferred alternatives. This approach is most obvious in the Biden Administration’s assault on the energy sector as the Administration uses its regulatory might to make coal, oil, and natural gas operations very expensive and increasingly inaccessible while forcing the economy to build out and rely on unreliable renewables.1
They next signal exactly how they will “dismantle” EPA. In doing so, they assert and connect dangerous political and legal falsehoods.
The dismantling will occur first by installing Trump loyalists to replace the “leftists” (“embedded activists”) via Schedule F. With radical Trump loyalists in charge and EPA science sidelined, there will be overt legal attacks in EPA regulatory policy and the invitation of right wing legal groups to bring cases to the US Supreme Court in order to expand their radical new “Major questions” doctrine and restoration of the 19th Century pre New Deal “non-delegation” doctrine.
The Court’s reversal of the “Chevron” doctrine was only the first step in dismantling the New Deal’s “administrative state”.
Here are Project 2025’s own words:
A Coopted Mission. The EPA has been a breeding ground for expansion of the federal government’s influence and control across the economy. Embedded activists have sought to evade legal restraints in pursuit of a global, climate-themed agenda, aiming to achieve that agenda by implementing costly policies that otherwise have failed to gain the requisite political traction in Congress. Many EPA actions in liberal Administrations have simply ignored the will of Congress, aligning instead with the goals and wants of politically connected activists.
EPA is a “breeding ground” that has been “coopted” by “embedded activists”? That’s an echo of “the paranoid style in American politics”:
I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
The ideological attacks particularly focus on climate – and are code for Trump’s cruder claim that climate change is a Chinese government “hoax”:
Although the U.S. environmental story is very positive, there has been a return to fear-based rhetoric within the agency, especially as it pertains to the perceived threat of climate change. Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.
EPA works via “fear” not science. The climate emergency is merely a “perceived threat”, not real (in other words, a “hoax” to quote Trump). The “Left” is “mischaracterizing” science and “scaring” the American public (“fake news!”). And it’s all really just a communist attack on Liberty and Property Rights!
As they say, when the right wing’s rhetoric makes their radical political program so obvious, believe what they say.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” #MayaAngelou
(In Part 2 and subsequent posts, we will highlight specific policy and program recommendations to “dismantle the [EPA] administrative state”)