The Department of Interior (Project 2025)

By Kennedy Maize -- September 6, 2024

The Heritage Foundation’s 922-page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project) prominently includes political prescription for various energy and environmental reforms in the U.S. Department of Energy, Department of Interior, and Environmental Protection Agency.

While Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the document, it is virtually certain that if elected, he would move swiftly to try to implement the blueprint. Many of its authors were his appointees in his administration and likely would lead his government beginning in 2025.

The Heritage project for the Interior Department programs and policies is back to the future. Essentially, the chapter wants to erase the Biden administration’s policies and actions, many of which replaced Trump administration policies.

After describing the roles of the far-reaching agency, the chapter lays out its goal:

Given the dire adverse national impact of Biden’s war on fossil fuels, no other initiative is as important for the DOI under a conservative President than the restoration of the department’s historic role managing the nation’s vast storehouse of hydrocarbons, much of which is yet to be discovered.

William Pendley

The author of the chapter, William Perry Pendley, 79, was a chief architect of some of the Trump administration’s Interior Department activities, which often themselves overrode actions by prior Democratic and Republican administrations.

After law school, Pendley joined the new conservative “public service” Mountain States Legal Foundation, founded by fellow Cowboy State native James Gaius Watt (1938–2023). The foundation was a leading advocate of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement to turn over federal lands to local ownership.

When Ronald Regan named Watt as his first Interior secretary, Pendley became Watt’s deputy assistant secretary for energy and minerals. He was forced out as a result of the department selling Powder River Basin coal leases at rock-bottom prices after the agency’s minimum bids had been leaked to the coal industry. The scandal also resulted in Watt’s defenestration after he bragged that the panel he appointed to dissect the lease sale was balanced because it consisted of “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.”

Pendley again ran into trouble in the Trump administration where he was Interior’s Bureau Land Management deputy director and named acting director in 2019. As acting director, he ordered most of the BLM’s Washington-based workforce to relocate to Grand Junction, Colo. The Interior secretary extended Pendley’s “acting” status repeatedly, avoid Senate confirmation, which he likely would have lost, as had five Trump nominations since 2017. In Sept. 2020 a federal judge in Montana ruled that Pendley “has served and continues to serve unlawfully as the Acting B.L.M. director.” The ruling became moot when Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

Among the notable 2025 Heritage recommendations related to energy:

• A “new Administration must immediately roll back Biden’s orders, reinstate the Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda, rescind Secretarial Order (SO) 3398, and review all regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, and similar agency actions made in compliance with that order…. The April 2021 order by Biden Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, titled ‘Revocation of Secretary’s Orders Inconsistent with Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis,’ rolled back much of Trumps’ overturning previous DOI policies and practices.”
• “Review all resource management plans finalized in the previous four years and, when necessary, select studied alternatives to restore the multi-use concept enshrined in FLPMA and to eliminate management decisions that advance the [climate policy] 30 by 30 agenda.”
• Conclude the programmatic review of the coal leasing program, and work with the congressional delegations and governors of Wyoming and Montana to restart the program immediately.”
• In one of the longest sections in the chapter, labeled IMMEDIATE ACTIONS, “BLM headquarters belongs in the American West. After all, the overwhelming majority of the 245 million surface acres (10 percent of the nation’s landmass) managed by the agency lies in the 11 western states and Alaska: A mere 50,000 surface acres lie elsewhere. Moreover, 97 percent of BLM employees are located in the American West.” Pendley’s initiative to move BLM to Grand Junction “was the epitome of good governance….”
• “Reinstate the 2020 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) by secretarial order and lift the suspension of the leases.”
• Congress never intended for the National Environmental Policy Act to grow into the tree-killing, project-dooming, decade-spanning monstrosity that it has become….The Trump Administration adopted common-sense NEPA reform that must be restored immediately.”
• “Relocate the [Office of Surface Mining] Reclamation and Enforcement headquarters to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to recognize that the agency is field-driven and should be headquartered in the coal field. Reduce the number of field coal-reclamation inspectors to recognize the industry is smaller. Reissue Trump’s Schedule F executive order to permit discharge of nonperforming employees.”
• In an “American Indians and U.S. Trust Responsibility” section, the report says, “End federal mandates and subsidies of electric vehicles.” The rationale for this broad recommendation? EVs, “because of their remote locations, the absence of increased electricity demands for charging electric vehicles nearby, and the distances to be traveled, are not a choice for Indian communities.”

Reform is in the air. Expect major changes should Trump be elected come November, as with energy and the environment otherwise.

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Kennedy Maize blogs at The Quad Report, from which this post was adapted. Maize has been a Washington-based journalist covering energy and environmental topics for more than 40 years.