Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump strongly and repeatedly denied any connection to the 2025 project, a political platform document written by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
“I have nothing to do with the 2025 project,” Trump said in a debate with former Vice President Kamala Harris last September. He said he had not read the document and had no intention.
However, the president and his administration have started or completed a 42% agenda in less than six months of their second stay in the White House. According to its website, the project 2025 Tracker is run by two “Believe in transparency, the importance of detailed analysis”.
Nearly a quarter of all action programs are related to the environment, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Department of Interior, Business and Energy. Furthermore, according to the analysis of track projects, it seems to be a top priority for the Trump administration, which has begun or completed about 70% of the environmental agenda (or about two-thirds) of the 2025 project.
These include projects 2025, such as rolling back air and water quality regulations; eliminating funding for clean energy projects and environmental justice grants; adjudicating scientists and researchers in related fields; and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, an agreement between nearly 200 countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming.
When asked about this overlap, the administration continued to downplay any link between the president and the 2025 project.
“In 2025, when they elect President Trump in November 2024, no one cared about the project, and they don’t care now,” White House spokesman Taylor Rogers said in an email. “President Trump is implementing his campaign’s first agenda to release wasted DEI spending to conduct cutting-edge scientific research, back off radical climate regulations, and restore U.S. energy advantages while ensuring Americans have clean air and clean water.”
The 2025 project refers to the “alert industry” used to support radical left ideology and agenda.
“Misunderstanding the profile of our environmental conditions in general the actual harms of climate change is a preferred tool used by the left to scare the U.S. public to the U.S. public to accept its invalidity, free fundraising regulations, reduced private property rights and high costs,” it said in a chapter on the EPA.
The author of the chapter, Mandy Gunasekara, served as Chief of Staff for the EPA in Trump's first administration. In that document, she advised the president to take many actions to reform the EPA, including reducing agencies, eliminating its Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights, and suspending and reviewing grants – everything Trump does.
The same chapter also suggested that the president undermined California’s ability to set strict vehicle emission standards, and Trump vowed to do it shortly after taking office. The Senate voted this week to revoke California's right to formulate policy on the issue.
Gunasekara did not respond to a request for comment.
Matthew Sanders, acting deputy director of Stanford University’s Environmental Law Clinic, said these and other strengthened actions in 2025 could have far-reaching implications. He noted that 11 other states chose to comply with California's emission rules.
“California’s approach has affected what elsewhere in the country,” Sanders said. “In that sense… the decision on how to implement the Clean Air Act provisions is a technical effort for most of the country to isolate California and eliminate its ability to do it will have far-reaching consequences.”
EPA is not the only agency affected by changes in environmental policy reflected in the 2025 project.
The Trump administration also directed the Department of Energy to expand oil and gas leasing in Alaska, remove considerations for upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions, and speed up approval of liquefied natural gas projects, all of which are recommendations outlined in the document.
The internal departments that oversee national parks and public lands in the United States have seen at least a dozen President Biden’s execution orders that prioritize addressing climate change and end policies in the Biden-era era to protect 30% of the U.S. land and water by 2030, also known as the 30×30 program.
In April, Trump issued an executive order Open 112.5 million acres of national forest land As stated on page 308 of Project 2025, industrial logging. The president said the move would touch all 18 national forests in California – aiming to increase domestic timber supply, reduce wildfire risks and create jobs.
Action on public land is particularly important, not only for the extraction of resources, but also for protected species and their habitats, Sanders said. The president has taken steps in the 2025 plan to reduce protection of marine life and birds and calls for narrowing down protections provided by the Endangered Species Act.
He also expressed concern about Trump's January 20 proposal to amend or revoke the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations that require federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of their actions – page 2025, page 60, recommended steps.
While the president described NEPA and other rules as “heavy, ideologically motivated regulations” that restrict U.S. work and stressful economic growth, Sanders said the framework is an oversimplified that could make the environment a scapegoat for other administrative goals.
“When we make these decisions in a thoughtful, cautious, intentional way, we can actually have jobs and economic development and He said, environmental protection. I think these things are essentially against, but I think the government gets some miles from suggesting they are certain miles. ”
Indeed, the commercial sectors that own the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service and other climate-related entities have also seen changes after the 2025 program script. The document describes the agency as “one of the major drivers of the climate change alert industry and therefore harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
In recent months, the president has taken a “breakup” NOAA move, page 674 of the project's 2025 documents, including layoffs of hundreds of employees, closing several offices and proposing massive cuts to its research division.
The government also adopted a project launched in 2025 to shift disaster relief responsibility from the federal government to states; relax the energy efficiency standards of electrical appliances; and revoke the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) policy to address climate change and help countries transition from fossil fuels and other policies.
These are some of the nearly 70 environmental action projects identified in the 2025 Project Tracker, 47 of which have been completed or are being completed within less than 150 days of Trump’s second term.
Tracking government progress is a subjective process, partly because many instructions are completed by executing commands or require multiple steps. Additionally, many of the goals outlined in the 2025 project are indirect or suggestive and therefore not included in the tracker, according to one of its creators.
Cobb told The Times that she read the entire document and extracted only “a clear call for action, or a suggestion that the author explicitly declares that something should be done.”
“My goal is to make the tracker use its own words as much as possible to reflect the author’s intentions,” she said. “By focusing on direct language and actionable projects, I’m trying to create an accurate and responsible list of source materials.”
Although the Trump administration continues to deny any connection to the 2025 project, the creators of large books are always clear about their presidential intentions.
“This volume – the conservative commitment is the opening remark of the 2025 presidential transition project,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts wrote in his advance. “Its 30 chapters have made hundreds of clear, specific policy recommendations for the White House office, cabinet departments, Congress and institutions, committees and boards.”
