By now, you have heard of Project 2025, the authoritarian playbook for a future Republican administration to radically remake the Federal government. Project 2025 touches all facets of American life, from health care to education, the environment, and fiscal policy. This far-right agenda would concentrate federal power in the presidency, undermine democracy, and give politicians and corporations significantly more control over Americans’ lives.
Should Donald Trump be elected, much of our work will shift to protecting public employees who will bear the wrath of this administration’s playbook for public lands management by the Department of the Interior.
Project 2025’s Chapter on the Department of the Interior was written by William Perry Pendley, the infamous Interior Secretary in the Trump administration who once opined that all public land in the West should be sold off to private investors.
The plan would give the extraction industries nearly unrestricted access to public lands. The plan calls for the reinstatement of a number of secretarial orders issued under the Trump administration that removed almost all environmental and climate change mitigation policies for oil and gas extraction, and it directs Interior to increase the pace at which it leases public land for drilling and permitting of new wells. In Alaska, the plan would open millions of acres of wilderness to drilling, mining, and logging.
Project 2025 would roll back protections for spectacular national monuments, such as Oregon’s Cascade Siskiyou National Monument and Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters. The authors want to abolish the Antiquities Act of 1906, a law that has allowed nearly every President since Theodore Roosevelt to protect the nation’s archeological heritage, enhance conservation, and expand recreational opportunities for everyone.
The plan would also severely weaken the Endangered Species Act, which establishes protections for fish, wildlife, and plants listed as threatened or endangered. It would remove protection for Western species like gray wolves and grizzly bears and imperil the existence of the iconic sage grouse. The plan would also end the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “experimental species” program, which allows the reintroduction of a species within its historical range to aid in the recovery of the species.
The list of recommended reforms for the Interior Department is too extensive to recount here. Suffice it to say, the document reflects how the new Trump administration will operate, with industry insiders calling the shots and the public locked out and in the dark. In one perverse way, this makes sense because an overwhelming number of Americans nationally and in the West do not want the radical changes called for in Project 2025 to public lands management.
To help make all these radical changes come to fruition, Project 2025 sets forth a plan to wreck the civil service, or what the far right now calls the “deep state.” One way it will do this is by reinstating the “Schedule F” program. One of President Trump’s last acts before the 2020 Presidential Elections was to sign an executive order creating a new Schedule F within the civil service, allowing political appointees to easily hire and fire civil servants in policy-determining, policymaking, and policy-advocating positions. This would allow the President and other political appointees to strip protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal and encourage expressions of allegiance to the President when hiring.
Indeed, the Trump team is already preparing an enemies list of opponents should it achieve power. The media has widely reported the campaign’s desire to prosecute their political opponents. Less known is that civil servants’ views are being investigated by researchers by pro-Trump researchers. ProPublica reported that three investigators for the Heritage Foundation, the organization that developed Project 2025, have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, requesting a wide range of information on government employees, including lists of agency personnel and messages sent by individual government workers that mention words and phrases such as “climate equity,” “voting” or “SOGIE” (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Expression).
This is scary. A new Trump administration will come to office with a list of those who might have what they would call a “woke” agenda or ideas counter to their own.
While a new Trump administration will not be able to implement most of the proposals in Project 2025, we do know this far-right movement is persistent and has a long-range plan to change government in many dangerous and undemocratic ways. They are playing the long game as they did with the Supreme Court. That is why we will have to be on guard for many years to come.
Chandra Rosenthal is the Director of PEER’s Rocky Mountain Office located in Denver, Colorado.
