Former President Donald Trump says he knows “nothing about” a conservative policy blueprint and has “no idea who is behind it.”
But the authors include Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries, top White House officials and senior aides — including former Trump appointees to EPA, the Interior Department and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Trump’s efforts to distance himself from Project 2025, a policy blueprint organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation, come as Democrats are seizing on pieces of the framework to attack Trump on policy and as the Biden campaign aims to shift focus away from questions about his age and mental acuity following the presidential debate.
Email blasts from the Biden campaign in recent days have been titled, “Project 2025: Trump’s Extreme and Dangerous BFFs;” “Donald Trump Takes His Project 2025 Abortion-Banning Agenda to Florida;” and “Trump’s Project 2025: Gutting the National Weather Service (Bad!).”
Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday slammed the project as she tied it to the former president. “Trump advisers have created a 900-page blueprint of their agenda for the second term. They call it Project 2025,” Harris said. “Let us be clear, this represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future.”
Stephen Moore, an adviser to the Trump campaign who co-authored the Project 2025 framework, said the policy guide has been misunderstood.
“It’s not meant to be a blueprint for Donald Trump — it’s meant to be a blueprint for a conservative president,” Moore said.
“We wrote this as our dream scenario,” Moore said of the authors, a list that includes former Trump Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro, who’s serving in federal prison after he was convicted of contempt of Congress.
“I assume some of the ideas Trump would reject and some he would adopt,” Moore said.
Three co-authors who laid out visions for overhauling energy and environmental agencies were high-ranking officials under Trump.
Mandy Gunasekara
Gunasekara was chief of staff at Trump’s EPA before she penned the Project 2025 vision for downsizing that agency and overhauling President Joe Biden regulations.
EPA, she wrote, has “long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states.”
She encouraged a realignment of the agency “away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator.”
Among other things, the blueprint recommends eliminating the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, developing a plan to relocate EPA’s regional offices “so that they are more accessible to the areas they serve,” and resetting science advisory boards.
Gunasekara urges EPA to identify existing regulations to be halted and reproposed, to stop and review grants slated for advocacy groups, and to reduce the number of full-time positions within the agency.
As for Trump’s comments distancing himself from the policy guide, Trump “is right,” Gunasekara said Wednesday.
“The project is the work of Heritage and many other conservative nonprofits,” she said. The policies “are designed for the next conservative administration to consider and provide strategic thought on how to achieve them. What is ultimately pursued is the prerogative of the president.”
William Perry Pendley
Former Trump Interior official Perry Pendley wrote in the Project 2025 blueprint that the next Republican president should slash the footprint of national monuments and move to bar future presidents from wielding executive power to protect federal lands.
He called the Biden Interior Department “at war with the department’s mission” when it comes to fossil fuel extraction and urges a conservative president to pursue the “restoration of the department’s historic role managing the nation’s vast storehouse of hydrocarbons, much of which is yet to be discovered.”
Perry Pendley led the Bureau of Land Management under Trump, although he was never confirmed by the Senate and a judge ruled that he had unlawfully served in that job.
A new administration must “immediately roll back Biden’s orders,” reinstate “the Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda” and put a series of Trump-era secretarial orders back into place, he wrote in Project 2025.
“We’ll see what happens after the election and what the president chooses to do,” Perry Pendley said Wednesday.
“I think we got some commonsense recommendations in there, certainly consistent with what [Trump] did during his first term,” he said. “Given the comments that [Trump] has made with regard to energy independence and developing our energy resources, I think once the president takes a look at what I prepared for the Interior Department that he’ll embrace it, but we’ll see.”
Bernard McNamee
McNamee, a Trump pick for FERC, urged the next administration to repeal Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws and to boost domestic energy production.
“DOE, instead of focusing on core energy and security issues, has been spending billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize renewable energy developers and investors, thereby making Americans less energy secure and distorting energy markets,” McNamee wrote in the Project 2025 energy section he authored.
McNamee, who also served in the Energy Department during Trump’s presidency, wrote that the next administration should “eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports” and “stop using energy policy to advance politicized social agendas.”
The next president should also support the repeal of “massive spending bills,” such as Biden’s signature infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, and “support the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs,” McNamee wrote.
McNamee did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
