Former Environmental Protection Agency employees warn that implementing Plan 2025, the conservative manifesto written by former Trump officials, could have serious public health consequences.
Air quality protections issued over the past four years are intended to reduce pollution and related health risks and prevent premature deaths and hospitalizations in the coming years. A group called the Environmental Protection Network (EPN), which was created by hundreds of former EPA employees during the exodus of scientists from the agency under the Trump administration, calculated the numbers in a recent report. benefit.
But this result is not guaranteed. Many of the policies recently enacted by the Biden administration could be in jeopardy if Donald Trump is re-elected as president and leads to another turbulent period for the EPA. Project 2025, guided in part by former members of the Trump administration, lays out a blueprint for overhauling the agency.
“They will turn it into a shell of its true mission.”
“The 2025 plan is full of proposals that would basically weaken the EPA. They would turn it into a shell of its true mission,” said Stan Mayberg, executive director of the Sabin Center for the Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University. Mayberger worked at the EPA for nearly four decades until resigning as acting deputy administrator in 2017 and currently serves on the EPN board of directors.
“From the environment [air quality] Standards for greenhouse gas emissions regulations for cars and power plants — all of those are things that Project 2025 recommended and the Trump administration followed up on in the last iteration,” Mayburger said.
Trump has rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations in a single term. He has appointed fossil fuel insiders to key positions at federal agencies, including the EPA, and has sought to slash the EPA’s budget. Amid the turmoil, 550 environmental experts, or one in four, left the agency between 2016 and 2020.
The Biden administration is trying to reverse course, updating and issuing new policies to limit air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions. The EPN report predicts that if these policies survive November’s presidential election, they could have huge public health benefits.
The organization analyzed the potential impact of 16 major air pollution regulations enacted since 2021, estimating that they could prevent 200,000 premature deaths and lead to 100 million fewer asthma attacks in the United States by 2050. Costs and annual net benefits will increase to as high as $250 billion by 2050, the report estimates.
“It’s hard to imagine 200,000 people…that’s the equivalent of a bus convoy stretching down the highway from Philadelphia to New York City. Think of the families waiting for these people to disembark,” said Jeremy Symons, senior consultant at EPN ), who co-authored the report and served as a climate policy adviser to the EPA before leaving in 2001.
EPN’s estimate is limited to 16 measures the EPA takes to clean the air—a small part of the agency’s work, considering it’s also responsible for preventing land and water pollution. Those policies include tougher standards for cars, trucks and power plants, as well as limits on emissions from oil and gas wells, appliances and manufacturing.
The “2025 Project” developed by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation specifically targets some of these policies. One example is the EPA’s troubled Good Neighbor Program, which aims to prevent smog-causing pollutants from upwind states from flowing to neighboring states. Project 2025 said the next president should “review Biden-era regulations to ensure they do not ‘overly control’ headwind states.”
The Supreme Court and its three Trump-appointed justices have dealt a blow to the Good Neighbor Plan. In June, the Supreme Court granted Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and industry groups a temporary stay on the plan while they challenge the policy’s legal basis in court. A series of Supreme Court decisions since the Trump administration have advanced the conservative deregulatory agenda, making it more difficult for the EPA to craft new regulations no matter who the next president is.
Vice President Kamala Harris said she would “fight the climate crisis” and pointed to lawsuits she brought against polluters as California’s attorney general, even as she touted record U.S. oil production under Biden. She is expected to defend Biden-era environmental policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest clean energy spending package ever passed in the U.S. and which Donald Trump said he would defund. The huge amount of money the IRA is asking the EPA to spend or disburse adds to its workload as it still recovers from the brain drain of the Trump era.
Meanwhile, the 2025 plan pushes for a “major reorganization” of the EPA, further reducing the number of full-time positions and eliminating the entire department and any projects deemed “duplicate, wasteful or redundant.” The lead author of the EPA chapter is Mandy Gunasekara, who served as EPA chief of staff during the Trump administration. She works under Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist Trump appointed to lead the agency.
“The authors of the EPA 2025 plan chapter used their years at the EPA under Trump as a training ground for reconnaissance missions and more reckless plans,” Simmons said. “We have moved on from President Trump’s previous We have to take it seriously when they intend to take the EPA out of the game and hand the keys to polluters.
The Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The EPA did not comment on the 2025 plan, but spokesman Remmington Belford said in an email that “EPA remains committed to protecting public health and the environment by enforcing science-based pollution standards to Fight climate change and improve air quality for all Americans.
