Presidential actions and legislative pushes to fast-track mineral permitting on public lands use existing FAST-41 authority to compress environmental review timelines, testing community consent and taxpayer liability for cleanup costs.
The record
Climate & Environment
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GM and LG Energy Solution announced on May 13, 2025, plans to commercialize low-cost LMR prismatic cells for electric trucks and SUVs. The $6,000-per-pack cost reduction often attributed solely to LMR is actually a combined claim tied to LFP chemistry and a separate innovation in GM's April 8 release; LMR-specific savings are estimated by executives but not confirmed in GM's own language.
The Trump administration's Justice Department killed a federal criminal investigation into Sen. Jim Justice's coal operations, which was examining potential Clean Water Act violations. The decision shields a political ally and undermines environmental enforcement in West Virginia.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a motion for a preliminary injunction on May 1, 2026, to block the Trump administration's use of the Defense Production Act to restart two onshore oil pipelines shut down for safety violations. The motion is part of a second lawsuit challenging the federal order, filed March 30, 2026.
A fifth-generation rancher in Arizona could lose his family's century-old grazing lease on state trust land if the Arizona State Land Department approves a long-term commercial solar lease to Ørsted, with no requirement for rancher compensation or co-location. This is a state-level dispossession, not a federal one.
The White House is deploying three Cabinet secretaries to back Sable Offshore's forced restart of a corroded Santa Barbara oil pipeline, overriding California's safety and environmental objections under a national security emergency declaration tied to Iran.
The Trump administration is repurposing funds from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—a law it sought to neuter—to combat record-low Colorado River flows that threaten water and power across the West, revealing a tactical, crisis-driven policy reversal without embracing the law's climate rationale.
Fox News frames the data center power boom as a clean-tech renaissance, but the real story is federal inaction: FERC and DOE have not set mandatory efficiency standards for data center power use, nor required utilities to cost-allocate the massive new transmission and generation needed, leaving residential ratepayers to subsidize billionaire-driven projects while emissions from fossil-fuel backup generation climb. IEA data show global data center electricity demand could reach ~945 TWh by 2030, with natural gas and coal meeting over 40% of the additional demand through 2030, and in the U.S. natural gas alone supplies about 40% of data center electricity today.
Project 2025's DOI chapter frames tribal lands as a strategic mineral reserve and sovereignty as an obstacle to extraction. The April 2025 FAST-41 fast-track on tribal lands has already been executed, while the promised restoration of tribal environmental enforcement authority and Land Buy-Back reauthorization remain unimplemented. This pattern reveals the agenda: extraction before sovereignty, not sovereignty.
Project 2025 directs the Fish and Wildlife Service to delist grizzly bears and gray wolves, cede sage-grouse management to states, and abolish the USGS Biological Resources Division—actions that would reverse decades of recovery and shift conservation to state or private interests, while the DOJ Civil Rights Division's halt on pattern-or-practice investigations silences enforcement of environmental justice.
Project 2025 calls for revoking Public Land Orders to transfer federal land to Alaska, reinstating the 2020 Alaska Roadless Rule, and permitting BLM to kill or sell wild horses for slaughter. As of early 2026, the PLO revocation is partially executed (a reported 1.4M acres transferred), the Roadless Rule rollback is in motion with a proposed rule expected March 2026, and the wild horse disposal provision remains blocked by the House Interior Appropriations subcommittee, though the FY26 budget proposal would partially advance the goal by removing slaughter protections from the BLM transfer program. These actions would open protected areas to logging, mining, and fossil fuel extraction, accelerating climate emissions and harming ecosystems and communities.
Project 2025's self-congratulatory account of moving BLM's headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, ignores the documented chaos: a $17.9 million price tag, 60% staff turnover, and a Biden-era reversal after the move proved unworkable. The real story is a deliberate gutting of institutional knowledge to accelerate fossil-fuel extraction.
Project 2025 calls for rescinding the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, eliminating the legal basis for all Clean Air Act greenhouse gas regulations, paired with deep enforcement cuts and 31 deregulatory actions. As of this writing, the rescission has not been finalized; the draft describes a potential future scenario.
Project 2025 proposes rescinding the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which would strip the EPA of the Clean Air Act authority needed to regulate greenhouse gases—undoing emissions limits for power plants, vehicles, and oil and gas operations. This would sever the legal and scientific basis for federal climate action and shield pollution from future restoration.
Project 2025 directs FERC to ignore upstream/downstream climate impacts when approving natural gas pipelines and LNG terminals, and orders NRC to expedite nuclear license extensions while eliminating the ALARA radiological protection principle. These steps are designed to fast-track fossil fuel and nuclear infrastructure without meaningful environmental review, locking in emissions for decades and eroding public health safeguards.
Project 2025's proposals for FERC and RTOs frame renewable integration as a reliability threat, urging pricing reforms, reserve-margin changes, expanded gas infrastructure, and reliability pricing for dispatchable generation. While some FERC orders have begun altering market rules, the core restructuring—weakening renewables' market access and mandating dispatchable generation—remains on paper. The proposals risk locking in fossil dependency by distorting market signals away from clean resources.
Executive Order 14408, published June 3, 2026, rescinds two long-standing executive orders (11644 from 1972 and 11989 from 1977) that required federal land managers to designate off-road vehicle use only after minimizing impacts on wildlife, habitats, and aesthetic values. The order replaces those environmental criteria with a statutory-only framework, eliminating the specific environmental protections and removing barriers to energy and timber production. The order is in effect, with agencies directed to initiate rulemakings; as of this writing, those rulemakings have not been publicly completed.
The EPA's Feb 12, 2026 repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding eliminates the legal basis for most federal greenhouse gas regulations, a core climate action already in motion. Separately, Project 2025 proposes reconstituting the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) to advance Yucca Mountain licensing and increasing NNSA warhead modernization—but these remain unenacted as of early 2026, as the source discusses them as policy recommendations rather than current administration actions.
On May 18, 2026, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin proposed to rescind enforceable drinking water limits for four PFAS chemicals (PFHxS, PFNA, HFPO-DA/GenX, and a hazard-index mixture) under the Safe Drinking Water Act and extend the PFOA/PFOS compliance deadline from 2029 to 2031. The proposal, published in the Federal Register on May 20, 2026, for comment until July 20, 2026 (virtual hearing July 7), directly benefits polluters including Chemours—whose employees Shawn Gannon and Sean Uhl were appointed to the EPA Science Advisory Board on April 17, 2026.
The Department of Energy's Program Notice 26-2, issued under the guise of 'advancing affordability,' restricts the $4.5 billion High-Efficiency Electric Home Rebate program (HEEHRA) by prohibiting fuel-switching—meaning households can no longer use rebates to replace gas appliances with electric ones. The guidance took effect May 29, 2026, and only covers replacements of existing electric appliances with more efficient electric models, directly undercutting the program's original purpose of reducing household costs and emissions.
The Trump administration has partially executed Project 2025's blueprint by restructuring $83 billion in Biden-era DOE loans (January 2026), cancelling 24 OCED awards worth $3.7 billion (May 2025), and reportedly eliminating ARPA-E and other R&D programs. The Loan Programs Office (LPO) has not been fully eliminated but is being redirected toward fossil-fuel 'energy dominance' projects, while the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) has been gutted through award cancellations. ARPA-E's elimination is claimed by Senator Lujan in a July 2025 letter but no official action has been confirmed. The Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) extrastatutory renewable-energy goals remain on the chopping block but have not yet been rescinded.
Project 2025's plan to eliminate the Grid Deployment Office and Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is already being partially realized via administrative termination of grants and Office closure — actions House Democrats have called illegal. This dismantles the federal government's ability to decarbonize the power sector, deploy demonstration projects like direct air capture and hydrogen hubs, and plan a modern, reliable grid.
Project 2025 proposes eliminating or renaming the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), repealing federal appliance efficiency standards, and expediting LNG exports by reinstating a NEPA categorical exclusion and expanding automatic approvals to NATO and FTA allies. As of mid-2025, these actions remain proposed, though the Paris Climate Accord withdrawal (executed Jan 20, 2025) and EO 14154 (expedited fossil fuel permitting) signal a broader deregulatory push.
Project 2025's DOE chapter calls for renaming the department to DESAS, repealing the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and redirecting focus from climate to fossil fuels. As of mid-2025, the IRA and IIJA remain law, but the administration has partially executed the fossil fuel redirect via executive orders and legislation to repeal clean energy tax credits has been introduced, threatening hundreds of billions in clean energy investment.
All three core predictions from the January 2026 entry have been substantially vindicated: the FEMA Review Council has still not published a final report (now extended to May 29, 2026 with no report in sight), FEMA's total workforce has demonstrably shrunk well past 15% from January 2025 levels with over 1,000 CORE employees cut, and multiple disaster declaration denials — most prominently Colorado's — have produced documented harm and congressional pushback, though formal litigation specifically over the declaration denials (as opposed to BRIC program cuts) remains nascent.
EO 14397 extends the FEMA Review Council—established in January 2025 to assess whether to abolish or restructure FEMA—through May 29, 2026 (or 10 days after its final report), marking the council's second extension after it missed its October 2025 deadline and had its December 2025 final vote abruptly cancelled amid reports of White House interference with the report's content.