Project 2025 would devastate America’s public lands
The extreme agenda seeks to hand public lands over to corporations, end vital land protections, and harm wildlife
Project 2025 is a radical action plan for a future Republican presidential administration that seeks to significantly roll back federal regulations and allow big corporations to exploit hardworking Americans and publicly-owned natural resources. Project 2025 was launched by the Koch-funded think tank Heritage Foundation in 2022, and, according to the New York Times, is a $22 million operation to staff the next Republican administration at a scale “never attempted before in conservative politics.” It also includes a far-right policy platform that touches on almost every function of the government, including the management of federal public lands.
Project 2025 lays out a plan to gut the Interior department and remove environmental safeguards that ensure the health of our public lands. The chapter on the Interior department was written by former acting BLM head William Perry Pendley, who believes the federal government shouldn’t even own land. Pendley sought the help of extractive industries in writing this chapter and freely admits that the energy section was written “in its entirety” by oil industry leaders.
Given its authorship, it’s unsurprising that Project 2025 would devastate public lands. But the extent to which it favors industry over wildlife and the environment is largely unprecedented. It would give extractive industries nearly unfettered access to public lands; severely restrict the power of the Endangered Species Act; open up millions of acres of Alaska wilderness to drilling, mining, and logging; roll back protections for spectacular landscapes like Oregon’s Cascade Siskiyou National Monument; and remove protections for iconic Western species like gray wolves and grizzly bears.
The recommendations in Project 2025 stand in stark contrast to the wishes of Western voters, who, year after year, affirm their love of public lands and wildlife in polling conducted by Colorado College in the annual Conservation in the West poll. The majority of Western voters across the political spectrum say they want elected officials to preserve nature and protect wildlife, not sell off public lands to the oil, gas and mining industries, as Project 2025 recommends.
Below is an overview of the most egregious aspects in Project 2025 that pertain to public lands.
Unfettered fossil fuel production
Project 2025 seeks to roll back environmental regulations as well as recent fiscal reforms to give the oil and gas industry free reign to extract fossil fuels from public lands at bargain basement rates, at the expense of the environment and taxpayers.
The plan calls for the reinstatement of a number of secretarial orders issued by former President Donald Trump’s Interior department, including S.O. 3349, which directs the department to implement “American Energy Independence” by removing almost all environmental and climate change mitigation policies that apply to oil and gas extraction, and S.O. 3354, which directs Interior to increase the pace at which it leases public land for drilling and permits new wells. The plan also directs the Interior department to hold lease sales in all oil-producing states every quarter, to the maximum extent allowed under law. This would be a sharp reversal of current Interior department policy, which seeks to balance drilling with other uses of public land by leasing only lands that have high potential to produce oil and are not in environmentally sensitive or recreationally valuable areas. The plan also calls for rescinding the Bureau of Land Management’s recently-finalized Waste Prevention Rule, which aims to reduce methane waste from venting, flaring, and leaks during oil and gas production on federal and Tribal lands.
Additionally, the plan calls on a future president to abandon mining and drilling withdrawals of lands in the Thompson Divide in Colorado, the 10-mile buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota. It also directs the future president to reinstate leases and permits for energy and mineral production in these areas.
Finally, the plan seeks to revitalize the dying coal industry in the West by resuming the federal coal leasing program, which has been in legal limbo for the past decade. Project 2025 calls for immediately restarting coal leasing in Wyoming and Montana, reversing the Biden administration’s plan to ramp down coal production over the next two decades.
End federal land protection
Project 2025 calls on a future Republican president to slash national monument designations, kill the Antiquities Act, and end the national goal of protecting 30 percent of U.S. land and water by 2030, a cornerstone of President Biden’s “America the Beautiful” initiative.
The plan calls for shrinking national monuments in Maine and Oregon (Katahdin Woods and Waters and Cascade-Siskiyou, respectively), and directs a future presidential administration to conduct a review of monuments, including those designated by President Biden. It calls on a future administration to make “downward adjustments” to the size of monuments and to seek the repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which presidents have used to protect some of America’s most iconic landscapes, from the Grand Canyon to Acadia. It also calls for the end of the America the Beautiful goal of protecting 30 percent of U.S. land and water by 2030 and the reinstatement of a Trump-era policy that requires the approval of state and local governments before federal acquisition of private property with money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
Project 2025 also advocates for the review of “all resource management plans finalized in the previous four years and, when necessary, select studied alternatives to restore the multi-use concept enshrined in FLPMA [the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976] and to eliminate management decisions that advance the 30 by 30 agenda.” This would reverse huge gains in balanced resource management made by the BLM. Many of the management plans (also known as RMPs) finalized since 2021 are updates to plans that were over two decades old. These new plans determine where mining and drilling can occur on huge swaths of public land. They also include protections for fragile habitats and popular recreation areas. For example, new RMPs for 1.6 million acres of public land in the Colorado River Valley and Grand Junction field offices, closed more than one million acres to drilling and designated over 120,000 acres as Areas of Critical Environmental Concern. The creation of these plans involves thousands of hours of meetings with stakeholders and the public, and they represent compromises between the many user groups that interact with public land. Vacating all of the RMPs completed in the past four years would be a huge loss for land conservation and a huge waste of resources — all for the sake of giving extractive industries unfettered access to public lands.
Gut the BLM and OSMRE
Project 2025’s recommendations seek to hamstring the federal government’s ability to effectively manage public lands by firing career employees and moving federal offices out of D.C.
The plan advises a future Republican president to reinstate the “Schedule F” program first enacted by President Trump in 2020, which would strip protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president and encourage expressions of allegiance to the president when hiring.
In addition to reinstating Schedule F, Project 2025 recommends moving the Bureau of Land Management headquarters out of D.C. and back to Grand Junction, Colorado, where President Trump moved the agency’s headquarters in 2019. It was returned to D.C. by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in 2021. The 2019 move led to “confusion and inefficiency,” according to a 2021 Government Accountability report. Dismantling the D.C. office more than doubled the number of vacancies at the agency and drove out the agency’s most experienced employees, according to the report. Finally, the forced relocation of staff to the West was a solution in search of a problem. Roughly 95 percent of BLM employees are already located outside of D.C., with hundreds of staff in each Western state. Moving the BLM’s headquarters back to Colorado would throw the agency into turmoil once again, undercutting its ability to effectively manage public lands and natural resources.
Project 2025 also recommends relocating the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation, and Enforcement headquarters to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This would likely have a similar effect on OSMRE that moving the BLM headquarters to Colorado had on that agency. The plan also recommends reducing the number of field coal-reclamation inspectors, giving a green light to polluters.
Ravage Alaska wilderness and wildlife
Project 2025 recommends opening up untouched Alaska wilderness for drilling, mining, and logging, exacerbating climate change and putting wildlife at risk.
First off, the plan calls on the president to reinstate a plan that would open up over a third of the 23 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to drilling, reversing a recent decision by the Biden administration that limits drilling to about half of the reserve in order to protect threatened and endangered species. The plan also calls for reinstating oil and gas leases within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that were issued under the Trump administration and recently canceled by President Biden. The nine leases cover over 430,000 acres within the refuge’s 19.6 million acres, which are home to an abundance of wildlife including musk oxen, wolves, caribou, and polar bears. In addition to reinstating those nine leases, the plan calls for the establishment of a competitive leasing and development program within the refuge on Alaska’s Coastal Plain.
In addition to encouraging more drilling in Alaska, the plan directs the president to immediately approve the Ambler Road Project, a 211-mile-long gravel highway through the Brooks Range in Alaska that would devastate the fragile arctic tundra. The road would disrupt and permanently harm water and wildlife, intersecting almost 3,000 streams and 11 rivers (many of which are salmon-bearing), and the migratory routes of three caribou herds.
Finally, the plan recommends opening up more than half of the Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development. The Tongass serves as a massive carbon sink for North America and provides key habitat for wild Pacific salmon and trout. It also boasts the highest density of brown bears in North America, and its trees — some of which are 1,000 years old — absorb at least eight percent of all the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48′s forests combined.
Hamstring environmental reviews
Project 2025 seeks to make federal environmental reviews ineffective and block conservation groups from suing over inadequate reviews.
All major actions on federal lands are subject to the National Environmental Policy Act, which involves an environmental review, a public comment period, and a protest period. These reviews ultimately inform whether the government permits major projects — like clear cuts and power line construction — to move forward. NEPA reviews also seek to reduce the negative environmental impacts of major projects and actions as much as possible.
Project 2025 would revert back to Trump-era NEPA rules, which disallow the consideration of climate impacts in environmental reviews. The plan also recommends placing time and page limits on NEPA documents and putting a price tag on the cost of the reviews. These recommendations are made under the guise of expediting environmental reviews and transparency, but they are actually meant to undercut the environmental review process in favor of industry. According to research from the University of Utah, speeding up the NEPA review process is a matter of adequately staffing agencies and empowering staff to work efficiently by implementing new systems for communication, not page and time limits. These will only weaken the quality of the review, resulting in environmental harm. Project 2025 also calls on a future administration to champion congressional changes to NEPA, including the elimination of judicial review of NEPA documents, which would effectively render the law meaningless.
Put endangered species at risk
Project 2025 seeks to strip Endangered Species Act protections from iconic Western species, like grizzly bears and gray wolves, and put greater sage-grouse at risk of becoming endangered.
The plan recommends delisting the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems, delisting the gray wolf in the entire lower 48, and ceding jurisdiction over the greater sage-grouse to Western states. Giving up on federal protections for the sage-grouse would put the bird on a path to extinction and, with it, the health of the entire Western sagebrush sea ecosystem.
It also recommends ending the “experimental species” program conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which allows the establishment of a population of a species within its historical range in order to aid in the recovery of the species.
Clear cut forests
Project 2025 recommends ramping up logging in national forests to “prevent” wildfire.
The management of national forests falls under the Department of Agriculture, not Interior, so this issue is covered in the Project 2025 chapter on USDA, which calls for increased logging and decreased prescribed burning in national forests. It states that the Forest Service “should focus on proactive management of the forests and grasslands that does not depend heavily on burning,” even though manual thinning is much more costly and less effective than prescribed burning. In effect, this is a call for more logging by private industry, not targeted treatment to prevent wildfire. The plan calls on a future administration to “embrace” and build on Executive Order 13855, which called for an increase in logging and a reduction in the rigor of environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.
An industry wishlist
Oil and gas industry leaders literally wrote the Project 2025 chapter on public lands. As mentioned at the top of this blog, author William Perry Pendley freely admits that the section on energy policy was written by industry leaders, including Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma and Senior Vice President of Policy at the American Energy Alliance Dan Kish. A number of other industry leaders and allies contributed to the Interior department chapter, including representatives and attorneys from the ranching, fossil fuel, and farming sectors.
This is a clear example of letting the fox into the henhouse. Extractive industries represent their own interests — not those of the American people. Project 2025 is a frightening example of what it would look like to sell off America’s natural resources and public lands to corporations with no regard for the environment, the climate, taxpayers, or wildlife.
