By Paul Bubbosh, Adjunct Professor
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of George Mason University.
Overview
Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, specifically its chapter on the Environmental Protection Agency, presents policy recommendations that can best be described as extreme but not altogether unexpected from Heritage. This is kind of their thing. The chapter recycles familiar themes from Heritage acolytes, such as claiming that EPA is waging war on the coal industry and alleging that there are ‘deep state’ activists within the agency hell-bent on a globalist agenda. The core problem with this chapter is, well, it is boring. It is simply the go-to playlist of an organization that desires to appease wealthy funders and powerful politicians supporting the far right. It is not fair to blame Heritage alone for such a tactic, which is all too common among partisan think thanks. They all suffer from the same ‘do-the-opposite-of-the-other-guy’ syndrome which basically means you identify the policies of your opposition, and you recommend the opposite. It does not matter if the policy actually helps your guys. That’s not the point. Heritage and its brethren must stake their reputation, fundraise, and cull favor with political elites to climb the ladder to positions of power—all based on offering a different vision. Otherwise, all the money, notoriety, and power would evaporate. I have great admiration for those think tanks that do not lower themselves to these standards; those who offer genuine and productive policy recommendations. Unfortunately, the Heritages of the world tend to suck all the air out of the room.
At the end of the day, Project 2025’s section on EPA is simply useless partisan posturing. In my courses on environmental and energy law and policy, I discuss the historical whipsaw effect across administrations. One administration does it one way and the next reverses these gains and sets a different path. Rinse and repeat. The consequence of whipsaw policies is lack of consistency, great uncertainty, and ultimately, lack of progress. This would all seem futile except for the fact that we are dealing with public health and welfare. This has real consequences for our lives, livelihood, and well-being of our country.
Our country has not always been stuck in the quagmire of environmental whipsaw polices. There was a time of bipartisan support on environmental policies. The rise of extreme and partisan think-tanks with their network of fundraising and lobbying has created a phenomenon by which these elites dictate party belief and orthodoxy. Their influence flows up to its party leaders, who then adopt these extreme policies, and then these extreme policies flow back down to the regular folk. If you stop and ask the regular folks in communities around our country if they really believe in these recommendations (after you peel away the rhetoric) you will be surprised to learn that they disagree with such policies, but alas they are beholden to party affiliation. It’s a vicious cycle and we’re lost in its vortex. The only way to break this cycle is to somehow separate the blowhards from the regular folk. I don’t have the secret sauce for this, but one means might involve slowing things down, paying close attention, questioning everything, and making an effort to listen to people.
Project 2025 Themes on EPA
The Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 as a roadmap for a Republican presidential administration. The chapter on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was written by Mandy M. Gunasekara, who previously served in high-level positions at the EPA during the Trump Administration. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has garnered news of late due to Donald Trump’s support, and then rejection, of the publication. Apparently, according to reporting, Trump finds some of Project 2025’s recommendations as politically inconvenient.
The chapter on the EPA follows a familiar playbook from Heritage Foundation’s past policy recommendations. The themes roughly fall into five categories: (1) EPA is engaged in a war on coal and other fossil fuels; (2) EPA’s science must be controlled; (3) EPA career “activists” control the agenda and ignore EPA’s mission; (4) EPA regulations kill jobs; and (5) changes in EPA organizational structure from the last administration must be reversed. Apparently, this all falls under the rubric of “conservative” policies, as Ms. Gunasekara intones throughout her chapter, but there is nothing here that resembles “conservative” in any historical sense. It is most appealing to someone who knows little about environmental policies but knows these recommendations can serve as rhetoric for the masses. Project 2025’s section on EPA fails to advance any meaningful engagement on issues.
(1) EPA’s War on Coal, Oil, & Natural Gas: “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.”
Ms. Gunasekara recycles the GOP’s mantra that Democrats are waging a ‘war on coal’ and other fossil fuels. This was a Trump 2016 campaign pitch, which is re-packaged here (I assume) to appeal to Trump. The fact that coal is more expensive than other energy sources, such as natural gas, wind and solar energy, is a consequence of market fundamentals. To blame the economic outcome on EPA is largely misguided. For sure, environmental regulations require expensive pollution control equipment and this increases costs for polluters. The “polluter pays” principle arrived when Congress enacted the Clean Air Act over 50 years ago and delegated authority to EPA to set emission limits. EPA’s delegation compels action when it finds that a pollutant may “cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Coal and other fossil fuels emit pollutants which endanger public health and welfare, therefore EPA is legally obligated to do something to protect our health. If Ms. Gunasekara has a problem with this, she should advocate for changes to the law, which requires Congressional action, instead of taking the cudgel to EPA. I have never quiet understood why conservatives expect EPA to shirk its legal duties. Is it simply to delay, litigate, and hope the courts find in your favor? If so, at what cost to our health?
The obvious questions to pose to the author are about energy prices, health care costs, and job training and transition. For example, would Ms. Gunasekara rather have people pay more for higher-cost energy, such as coal? Does she prefer that people breathe dirty air, get sick, increase their medical bills, and live a lower quality of life? Why is she not focusing on resources to train and transition workers for new job opportunities? These are all legitimate policy questions to ask Ms. Gunasekara when she claims that EPA is waging a war on fossil fuels. Instead of the old tactic of scaring people into thinking Democrats are waging a war on coal or advocating for ignoring the law, I would recommend that Heritage develop and implement policies to ensure that fossil fuels are cleaner.
The real issue that Ms. Gunasekara has with EPA is its legal obligation to follow the law and this brings us to the second theme, which involves why EPA updates its regulations with more stringent emissions limits.
(2) EPA’s science must be controlled: “True transparency will be a defining characteristic of a conservative EPA. This will be reflected in all agency work, including the establishment of opensource science, to build not only transparency and awareness among the public, but also trust.”
To understand what this benign-sounding desire for “opensource science” means you need to understand EPA’s mandate from Congress, in laws such as the Clean Air Act. Many federal environmental laws require establishing pollutant limits based on health-based criteria. This is not an EPA requirement—it is a Congressional requirement. This requires understanding how pollutants affect our bodies and setting a safe limit for human health and public welfare. The limits must be reviewed every few years for possible updates to ensure they reflect the latest science. EPA has several scientific advisory committees comprised of experts in specific areas to determine an “adequate margin of safety to protect the public health,” specifying the maximum pollutant quantity that should be permitted in the air.
During the Trump Administration, EPA tried to change these regulations to reflect a more lenient standard—in other words, to allow more pollutants into the air beyond the scientific and medical recommendations. But to survive legal challenges, EPA had to change the underlying science. It is not easy to hide the science, but Trump’s EPA administrators tried their darndest to do so. Their tactics included firing the experts or censoring them, replacing them with partisan allies, slashing their budgets, or (wait for it) simply removing offending information from public records (abracadabra, no longer there)[1].
Ms. Gunasekara’s intent here is to resurrect the Trump Administration’s “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule from 2018. This rule was intended to prevent EPA from relying on studies whose underlying data are not publicly available due to privacy and ethical considerations. This rule was adopted by Trump and rescinded by Biden. Not surprisingly, the rule would give the EPA Administrator discretion over which studies to use. The absurdity of protecting scientific integrity and transparency by handing it over to a political appointee was not lost on the scientific and medical community which ridiculed the rule.[2],[3] One possible explanation for this recommendation is that Ms. Gunasekara knows that science does not support more lenient standards, so her policy recommendation is to simply finds ways to bury these studies. Whatever the reason, this policy is simply a round-about way to try to dismantle environmental regulations by cherry-picking science and it is anathema to sound scientific methodology. I would recommend that Heritage consider assigning weighting factors to studies, with higher points for studies that reveal participant data, if this is so desired. This way we are not ignoring relevant data and cherry-picking only favorable reports.
Another explanation for this recommendation is the rather bizarre notion that there is a cabal of scientists driven to hoodwink conservatives, and this brings us to our next theme.
(3) Career “activists” control the agenda and ignore EPA’s mission: “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….” And “The EPA under the Biden Administration has returned to the same top-down, coercive approach that defined the Obama Administration.”
To build support for undercutting science, it helps to conjure the trope of ‘deep state’ actors running amok in EPA’s corridors controlling everyone. This one is a bit difficult to follow, but I believe Ms. Gunasekara suggests that there are special interests influencing a globally aligned policy within the EPA, which has distracted the agency from meeting its domestic obligations. What proof does Ms. Gunasekara offer? Back in the Obama Administrations there were two domestic disasters involving EPA employees, the Flint, Michigan water crisis and the Gold King Mine spill, in Colorado. How Ms. Gunasekara ties embedded global activists with these two domestic disasters is not explained. She just says it is so. She conveniently forgets that Trump’s EPA was heavily criticized for its handling of the cleanup at Gold King Mine and its refusal to fully compensate affected communities, particularly the Navajo Nation, for the damage caused by the spill. In fact, in 2019, the EPA re-contaminated the Animas River, the same river affected by the 2015 Gold King Mine spill, when a water treatment plant operated by the agency released untreated mine wastewater, which included heavy metals, into the river.
But this kind of misses the point. Ms. Gunasekara suggests that Biden’s EPA is neglecting its core mission. This is a laughable comment coming from a former EPA official who was part of an effort to dismantle environmental regulations (for example, weakening protections for smaller waterways, weakening carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, cars and trucks, as well as mercury emissions from power plants). What I would recommend to Heritage is to drop the hyperbole about ‘deep state’ actors because it does a disservice to the career employees. Ms. Gunasekara should know better—she worked with these career employees during her tenure at EPA and I believe she knows better to disparage their work and intentions.
Let’s address the claim that the Biden administration is engaged in coercion. The single-largest environmental achievement in the Biden Administration is the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA is the opposite of coercion. It offers economic incentives (grants, loans, tax benefits) to change behavior. No one is forced to do anything. As much as Ms. Gunasekara wishes this was some draconian command-and-control legislation, the IRA is about motivating people to save money with cleaner and cost-saving energy technology and practices. The other inconvenient fact is that the IRA does offer incentives for fossil-fuel interests to emit less harmful pollutants, such as carbon capture and storage. The Biden Administration has landed on an industrial policy which is in-line with past U.S. efforts to support nascent energy industries. What goads the author the most here is the focus on clean energy technology which is not an ally of hers.
(4) Job Killing Environmental Regulations: “As a consequence of this approach, we see the return of costly, job-killing regulations that serve to depress the economy and grow the bureaucracy but do little to address, much less resolve, complex environmental problems.”
You must go all the way back to 1980, during Ronald Reagan’s campaign, to hear about the origins of job-killing environmental regulations. His acolytes picked this up and have been running with it ever since. It sounds great on the campaign trail. The only problem is that it has no support. The number of economic studies that have refuted the contention that environmental regulations result in a net loss of jobs is too lengthy to recount here.
Interestingly, Bill Clinton recently emphasized the following fact: Since the end of the Cold War (1989), Democratic Presidents have created more than 50 million new jobs, while Republican Presidents have created 1 million new jobs. During that period, there were 3 Democratic Presidents (Clinton, Obama and Biden) and 3 Republican Presidents (George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump).[4] So much for environmental policies as job killers.
(5) Reverse organizational changes from the previous administration
The remainder of the EPA chapter is an audacious attempt to recommend office-by-office changes and reversals from the Biden administration. Why? Because these changes are from the Biden administration. Why again? Because the “other guys” came up with this so it must be bad. I’m sorry, why again? Because we (Heritage) must recommend the opposite to fundraise and get political appointments in a Republican administration.
- “Returning the environmental justice function to the Administrator Office, eliminating the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.”
- My hunch is that if you eliminate an office devoted to environmental justice, your intention is to probably take away its budget and re-distribute its staff. I am not sure why conservatives have a beef with EJ issues. The historical record is clear on past injustices of placing environmentally harmful facilities and pollution sources near low-income and minority populations. I learned that Ms. Gunasekara is from Mississippi, and interestingly EPA’s Inspector General recently issued a report about how the state of Mississippi ignored elevated lead levels in the drinking water of Jackson, MI for half a year, allowing its residents to drink contaminated water. The state failed to share this information with EPA. EPA had to conduct its own tests, and afterwards issued an emergency order. By the way, EPA’s testing was in 2015 when Trump was President. Apparently, the Mississippi Department of Health had re-directed federal funds that were intended to address Jackson’s water problems. Independent reports have identified failures in communication, financial reporting, and technical capacity, among other issues.[5] I believe a strong and independent office devoted to EJ issues may have prevented this environmental and human health crisis from happening.
- “Returning the enforcement and compliance function to the media offices (air, water, land, and emergency management, etc.) and eliminating the stand-alone Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance, which has created a mismatch between standard-setting and implementation.”
- If there is one thing Republicans do not like about EPA it is enforcement actions. The Trump administration was no exception. Enforcement actions, civil cases, fines, and inspections all dropped to a two-decade low during Trump’s presidency.[6] The preferred “conservative” means to accomplish enforcement of Federal laws is to defer to the states to get this done, under the guise of “cooperative federalism.” The problem is that in some states there might not be a strong desire to police its industries, and this is where EPA must step in. EPA enforcement is also needed in complex cases involving multi-state violations. Further. Ms. Gunasekara’s recommendation to devolve enforcement to EPA media offices (air, water) is another attempt to weaken EPA’s hand. The saddest part is that there are many good actors who comply with the law. I am all in for regulatory flexibility and working on ways to encourage compliance instead of enforcement, but let’s face the facts—there are bad actors out there. When you essentially announce that once we take over we are backing off on enforcement, this signals those bad actors to violate the law. And what happens when they violate the law without consequences? One, people get sick and die. Two, you punish the good actors who comply with the law and the criminals get away with not spending funds.
- “Determine the opportunity to downsize by terminating the newest hires in low-value programs and identify relocation opportunities for Senior Executive Service (SES) positions.” And ”reduce the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) positions.”
- I do not know what “low-value programs” means, but I would venture to guess that these are Biden administration programs, or the various “hit list” she conjures up in this chapter (offices related to international programs, public engagement and environmental education, children’s health protection, small and disadvantaged businesses, and environmental justice and civil rights). Republicans tend to slash EPA payrolls by not back-filling retirements and freezing all new hires, and when Democrats increase hiring to make up for the losses Ms. Gunasekara and her allies claim, as she does in this report, that “agency costs and staffing have increased significantly”. Yep, that’s what happens when you gut the workforce during your watch.
The remainder of the chapter is both breathtaking and alarming in its yearning to exert maximum control and prevent EPA from doing its job. As stated in the beginning, this is expected from Heritage and the report’s author. I will conclude with one example about how I view the differences between policies in the GOP and Democratic EPA administrations. I believe this example represents what is most wrong about Project 2025’s chapter on EPA.
During the final days of the Obama Administration, EPA proposed to ban the use of methylene chloride in paint strippers. Dozens of people have died from inhaling the fumes from paint strippers. Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, shelved the rule when he took over. Then, the families of those who died from exposure to methylene chloride met with Mr. Pruitt and pleaded with him to ban the chemical. Their stories were heartbreaking. But Mr. Pruitt just couldn’t go as far as a total ban. He narrowed the restriction of methylene chloride by banning it from consumers who might purchase products at hardware stores, but he allowed commercial operators to continue using the product if they underwent training. The problem with this was that even with training people died. In fact, the mother of one victim explained that her son did receive training and still died. Of course, Biden’s EPA administrator, Michael Regan, banned methylene chloride in paint strippers for all. What I can’t shake from my mind is the reluctance of Mr. Pruitt to do the right thing. I imagine there was a small voice in his head saying “yes, it’s lethal and dangerous, but these industry guys are telling me they will have to fire people, and I don’t want to be seen as harming industry.” I have no idea what was going on in Mr. Pruitt’s head when he made this decision, but I just can’t get over his failure to do what was obviously the right thing to do. And this is how I view Project 2025—the failure to do the right thing.
[1] Webb RM, Kurtz L. Politics v. science: How President Trump’s war on science impacted public health and environmental regulation. Prog Mol Biol Transl Sci. 2022;188(1):65-80. doi: 10.1016/bs.pmbts.2021.11.006. Epub 2022 Jan 27. PMID: 35168747; PMCID: PMC8793038.
[2] Rose Z, Taylor CL. The politicization of regulatory science: Science transparency at the trump Administration’s EPA. Case Studies in the Environment. 2022;6(1). http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/politicization-regulatory-science-i-transparency/docview/2859048242/se-2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/cse.2022.1800281.
[3] Condon, Madison E, Michael A Livermore, and Jeffrey G Shrader. “Assessing the Rationale for the U.S. EPA’s Proposed ‘Strengthening Transparency In Regulatory Science’ Rule.” Review of environmental economics and policy 14.1 (2020): 131–135. Web.
[4] “Bill Clinton and the wide gap in job gains by presidential party,” Philip Bump, Aug 22, 2024, Washington Post; https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/22/clinton-dnc-jobs-created-since-cold-war/
[5] “Mississippi officials saw the Jackson water crisis coming — and did nothing,” Lylla Younes, Grist, Aug 23, 2024; accessed at https://grist.org/accountability/jackson-water-crisis-mississippi-epa-inspector-general-report/
[6] “New EPA Enforcement Data Show Continued Downward Trend During Trump Administration.” Environmental Integrity Project, Jan 14, 2021; accessed at https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/epa-enforcement-data-downward-trend-during-trump-administration/