EPA Dismantlement: Project 2025's War on Public Health Infrastructure
Project 2025's blueprint for a Day One executive order to reorganize and downsize the EPA — with 'pause and review' teams that can indefinitely freeze major rules, stop grants, and terminate newest hires — would deliberately dismantle the agency's capacity to enforce clean air, safe water, and health-protective regulations, with direct consequences for life expectancy in frontline and low-income communities, as partially signaled by second-term administration actions.
Project 2025's EPA chapter is a surgical dismantlement plan dressed in bureaucratic language. The proposed Day One executive order creates 'pause and review' teams that can indefinitely freeze major rules (like the Good Neighbor Program that cuts cross-state air pollution), stop grants for advocacy groups, terminate the newest hires in 'low-value programs,' and relocate Senior Executive Service staff — all before the courts can catch up. In the first Trump term, all 10 NEPA-related actions identified in Project 2025 were completed or attempted; political appointees sidelined experts and forced out thousands of career staff; and over 100 climate-related research projects were canceled at NSF, with NIH budget cuts requested through normal channels. The House bill now seeks to make these actions the new statutory baseline.
This is not a technocratic reorganization — it is a public health catastrophe in waiting. When EPA scientists are replaced with political loyalists, when cost-benefit analysis is rigged to ignore co-benefits and health effects at low doses, when enforcement is shifted to states that have already shown they will not act, the people who die are those in neighborhoods near refineries, power plants, and highways — disproportionately Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities. The 2025 administration's removal of thousands of federal datasets and public health webpages, later restored under court order, was a dry run for suppressing the evidence that would make this dismantlement visible. The alternative is not just to defend the EPA as it exists, but to codify the agency's scientific independence and health-protective mission into statute, so that no single Day One order can gut public health protection for a generation.
The humanitarian alternative
Congress should pass the Public Health and Environmental Protection Restoration Act to: (1) codify EPA's Office of Research and Development statutory independence; (2) require that all EPA rulemakings include a cumulative health impact assessment for frontline communities; (3) mandate that at least 40% of EPA enforcement resources be directed to nonattainment areas with disproportionately high pollution burdens; and (4) establish a rapid-response public health data reporting system that cannot be removed or altered by executive order without 90-day congressional notification and a public comment period.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 14: Department of Health and Human Services (pp 455-457)"— 422 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Resetting science advisory boards to expand opportunities for a diversity of scientific viewpoints free of potential conflicts of interest. l Restoring the guidance portal to ensure that regulatory and subregulatory standards are clear to affected entities. l Working with Assistant Administrators to implement major reforms in media offices. Day One Executive Order. To initiate the review and reorganization, a Day One executive order should be drafted for the incoming President with explicit language requiring reconsideration of the agency’s structure with reference to fulfilling its mission to create a better environmental tomorrow with clean air, safe water, healthy soil, and thriving communities. The order should set up “pause and review” teams to assess the following: l Major Rules and Guidance Materials. Identify existing rules to be stayed and reproposed and initiate rule development in appropriate media offices. l Pending Petitions. Grant new petitions for rule reconsideration and stays of rules. l Grants. Stop all grants to advocacy groups and review which potential federal investments will lead to…"