This commentary was originally published in the Winter 2025 edition of PEEReview.
During the campaign, President Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, a conservative plan to radically remake the federal government. With the election behind him, Trump is now embracing the people and ideas behind the project.
Some of those ideas have been well reported, such as eliminating civil service protections for many government employees, slashing funding for climate programs, and commercializing the forecasting operations of the National Weather Service.
Other aspects of Project 2025 are less well-known. Here are three lesser-discussed parts of Project 2025 that we will closely follow.
Remaking Public Lands
The plan calls for the reinstatement of secretarial orders issued under the Trump administration that removed almost all environmental and climate change mitigation policies for oil and gas extraction on public lands, and it directs the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) 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 also roll back protections for national monuments and abolish the Antiquities Act of 1906, a law that has allowed nearly every President since Theodore Roosevelt to protect the nation’s archeological heritage and enhance conservation, and severely weaken the Endangered Species Act, which establishes protections for fish, wildlife, and plants listed as threatened or endangered. Moreover, it would remove protection for western species like gray wolves and grizzly bears and imperil the existence of the iconic Greater Sage-Grouse. The plan would also end a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service program that allows the reintroduction of a species within its historical range to aid in the recovery of the species.
Weakening Chemical Reviews
The plan calls for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stop using the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS). EPA created IRIS in 1985 to generate scientific information on cancer and non-cancer human health eects from chronic exposures to environmental contaminants. The objective of IRIS was to ensure that EPA’s risk assessments are consistent and to provide hazard identification and dose responses that could be used by local, state and federal agencies, and tribes.
IRIS assessments are relied upon in EPA regulations under the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and programs that regulate chemical substances and hazardous waste clean-ups. Eliminating IRIS would severely reduce the ability of federal, state, local, and tribal governments to implement critical public health functions, which in turn would lead to weaker regulations and less protection for public health and the environment.
Imperiling Fisheries
Project 2025’s proposed actions include attacks on marine sanctuaries. This project calls for the reinstatement of a 2017 Trump-era mandate that directed the DOI to stop the establishment of any new sanctuaries and examine national marine sanctuaries established in the past decade for energy and mineral potential. As a result of this executive order, the U.S. Department of Commerce suggested changing the boundaries of 11 national marine sanctuaries in 2017 to prioritize oil and gas drilling, something we expect will happen again.
Tim Whitehouse is the Executive Director at PEER.