Climate Calamity: 100 Days of Project 2025
Written by Amanda Magnani Published 6/4/25
The end of April marked 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term and they were perhaps the most harmful of any administration for the climate, with an average of “at least one destructive action or proposal” every day, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. The influence of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” plan was clear from day one.
Despite his campaign trail claim to have “nothing to do with Project 2025,” President Trump has been implementing the right-wing guidelines beyond its creators' wildest dreams. Since taking office in January, his administration has introduced roughly one in five climate measures proposed by the right-wing document—and that promises to only the beginning.
According to Project 2025 Tracker, the administration took dozens of actions mirroring Project 2025’s recommendations in the past months. Roughly 40 of them are related to climate, the environment or energy transition. At least 22 of them have already been completed. They range from revoking rules regarding predator control and bear baiting, to rolling back Biden's executive orders that prioritised climate change remediation.
Trump kicked off his second term with his own executive order freezing all proposals pending White House review, including an EPA withdrawal from regulations to limit the discharge of PFAs, known as “forever chemicals,” into water sources. Since then, there has been a move to roll back the first ever legally enforceable limit to PFAs in drinking water. Approved in 2024 by the Biden administration, it held the industry financially responsible for cleaning up contaminated public water systems.
Trump also withdrew the country from the Paris Agreement yet again, paving the way for “dismantling the ability of the US government to project influence around the world,” as Jesse Young, former Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, said in an April press briefing. Trump doesn’t seem to care.
In line with Project 2025, his administration is on track to reinstate the so-called “Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda.” That entails terminating grants for clean energy projects, abolishing the Office of Domestic Climate Policy, ending all programs of the American Climate Corps and pretty much removing all mentions of climate change from federal websites.
Nothing illustrates this process better than what EPA chief Lee Zeldin called the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history.” On March 12th, he single-handedly rolled back 31 climate and environment rules from the previous administration. Zeldin even expressed support for reconsidering the 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are behind global warming and its disastrous consequences—the main basis for all U.S. climate action.
Attacks on climate science also followed Project 2025 to the letter. The administration has already laid off hundreds of NOAA employees and proposed cutting “all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes.”
“This blunt smashing of Federal agencies is limiting the ability of our nation to respond not only now, but in the future, because it's dismantling the very infrastructure by which we collect data, foster expertise and collaboration, and have the people and processes in place to take action,” Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), told journalists.
“You can’t have good science to protect the environment when the very institutions that produce it are under attack,” Rachel Cleetus, Senior Policy Director at USC, told AJI. She highlighted the “incredibly clear” role of the fossil fuel industry, whose avatars now hold high government positions, in implementing the agenda.
Like Project 2025, Trump’s administration advocates that LNG projects be “reviewed and approved expeditiously,” and that emission analysis of these projects is limited to those of pipelines themselves. That means excluding upstream and downstream effects, which masks the real results.
Following more of the document’s recommendations, the Department of Interior has been taking steps to reopen the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska for oil and gas leasing and ending its moratorium on federal coal leasing, in a move to “restore the coal industry.”
But the reality, as Cleetus puts it, is that “coal is so uneconomic in the U.S., that it’s crazy to think they want to prop it up.” Oil and gas are global markets, she says, and the country is running into this reality, where cleaner alternatives are getting cheaper all the time.
She urges a reminder that most of these actions are happening through the Office of Management and Budget where Russel Vought, key author of Project 2025, is the one pulling the levers. “What we're witnessing is an authoritarian regime that's going after the very foundations of democracy,” she concludes.
