Project 2025 Will Gut the EPA
Thank you for tuning in to Environmental Protection News. Like smog, Project 2025 still lingers in the air as we contemplate how the next administration will utilize EPA. If hearing from EPN volunteers wasn’t convincing enough, read on to hear what Carol M Browner and Christine Todd Whitman, two former EPA administrators, have to say about how devastating the Heritage Foundation’s guidebook for governing would be for EPA, human health and the environment.
Project 2025 Will Gut the EPA
By: Christine Todd Whitman and Carol M. Browner
Overlooked in all the descriptions, debates, and denials of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, their playbook for the next administration, is the devastating plan they’ve outlined for our environment and our climate, especially the dangerous plans for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
In our former roles leading the EPA, we witnessed the dedication and ethic of service that guides EPA employees day in and day out as they worked to protect people from dangerous pollution. The EPA’s mission is to protect our health and environment by enforcing our environmental laws and setting pollution standards for clean air, clean water, and a host of other protections from pollution.
However, Project 2025 would put an end to this critical work.
Project 2025 creates a roadmap that will obstruct the EPA’s ability to act. The chapter devoted to the EPA was written by six former Trump administration EPA political appointees, including his former EPA Chief of Staff.
Given the profound damage done to the EPA under President Trump during his first term, it’s hard to envision how the agency’s mission could be diminished further. Trump virtually ended science-based policy development, he reversed EPA standards on climate pollution, and he gutted the agency’s professional staff.
Yet, it could be even worse. Under Project 2025, polluters would be handed control of the very agency meant to oversee them and allowed to develop policies as they see fit. This, without question, will harm the air we breathe and the water we drink, putting the priorities and profits of polluters before our health.
A recent analysis conducted by the Environmental Protection Network, a non-partisan association of 650 former EPA staff who volunteer their time to support the EPA’s work, tallied the net health benefits of EPA policies and programs during the Biden-Harris administration. The report found that updated air pollution rules for smokestacks and tailpipes achieved during the Biden administration will prevent 100 million asthma attacks and save more than 200,000 lives through 2050.
Think about that for a moment.
If you have a friend, relative or loved one who suffers from asthma, you know the struggles to breathe; the missed workdays and school days; and the too-frequent visits to the hospital or doctor. And 200,000 premature deaths averted is equivalent to filling Michigan Stadium twice.
The EPA’s air pollution rules established over the past three years will deliver $250 billion in net annual benefits. Put together, the public health and climate benefits of the clean air standards alone will exceed compliance costs by trillions of dollars through 2050.
Notably, the report examined only clean air standards and did not consider the health benefits of other standards the Biden EPA implemented, such as protections against toxic chemicals, polluted water, and other severe environmental threats.
This progress – and more – is what’s at stake if Project 2025 comes to fruition.
While Project 2025’s direct attacks on the EPA’s work are bad enough, the plan is also an overt effort to politicize a federal agency. Project 2025 explicitly calls for replacing civil service experts with political appointees beholden only to the president. That puts core EPA functions like science-based policy making, law enforcement, and environmental justice initiatives under the thumb of industry-friendly partisans installed to replace career experts.
This is no way to protect our health and environment.
The EPA was created under President Richard Nixon with bipartisan support because everyone has a stake in a healthy environment. During Trump’s administration we already witnessed the harms that can result when important public health agencies like the EPA are disempowered by partisans and industry interests.
The EPA should protect all Americans and especially our most vulnerable citizens – children, senior citizens, at-risk communities and communities of color – that disproportionately bear the brunt of pollution. Project 2025 would render the agency utterly unable to achieve these vital objectives; it will roll back almost all of the progress of the last three years. We cannot go back.
Christine Todd Whitman is president of the Whitman Strategy Group. She served as the 50th Governor of New Jersey and Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush.
Carol M. Browner is a former Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and served as Assistant to President Barack Obama and Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy.