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Kennedy Corn
The Heritage Foundation's 922-page Leadership Mandate: Conservative Commitments (Project 2025: Presidential Transition Plan) prominently includes political prescriptions for various energy and environmental reforms at the U.S. Departments of Energy, Interior, and Environmental Protection Agency.
Although Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the document, he will almost certainly move quickly to try to implement the blueprint if elected. Many of the report's authors are people he appointed in the government and are likely to lead his administration starting in 2025.
The legacy of Home Office programs and policies is back to the future. Essentially, this chapter hopes to undo the Biden administration’s policies and actions, many of which replaced those of the Trump administration.
After describing the role of this far-reaching institution, this chapter sets out its goals:
Given the crippling national toll of Biden's war on fossil fuels, no other move is more important for the Interior Department under a conservative president than restoring the department's historic role in managing the nation's vast hydrocarbon reserves. Most of these hydrocarbons have yet to be discovered.
William Pendley
The chapter’s author, William Perry Pendley, 79, was the chief architect of some of the Trump administration’s Interior Department activities, which themselves often overrode the actions of previous Democratic and Republican administrations.
After law school, Pendley joined the neoconservative “public service” Mountain States Legal Foundation, founded by Cowboy State native James Gaius Watt (1938-2023). The foundation is a leading advocate of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement to bring federal lands to local ownership.
When Ronald Reagan appointed Watt as his first Secretary of the Interior, Pendley became Watt's deputy assistant secretary for energy and minerals. He was forced out after the agency sold coal leases in the Powder River Basin at rock-bottom prices after the agency's lowest bid was leaked to the coal industry. The scandal also led to Watt being kicked out of the window after he boasted that the panel he appointed to dissect rental sales was balanced because it consisted of “a black man, a woman, two Jews and a disabled person” .
Pendley was once again in trouble in the Trump administration, where he served as deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management at the Interior Department and was named acting director in 2019. . A federal judge ruled that Pendley “has unlawfully served and continues to serve as acting” BLM director. That ruling became moot when Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
Notable heritage and energy-related proposals for 2025 include:
- “The new administration must immediately rescind Biden's order, restore the Trump-era energy dominance agenda, repeal Secretary Order (SO) 3398, and review all regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies and similar agency actions consistent with the order. …Biden Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s April 2021 order, titled “Rescinding Secretary’s Orders Inconsistent with Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring a Science-Based Response to the Climate Crisis,” reversing a previous Trump push to overturn the Interior Department Much of the policy and practice.
- “Review all resource management plans finalized over the past four years and, if necessary, select alternatives to study to restore the multiple-use concept embodied in FLPMA and eliminate management decisions that drive resource management decisions. [climate policy] 30 x 30 agenda.
- Complete a program review of the coal leasing program and work with the congressional delegation and the governors of Wyoming and Montana to immediately restart the program.
- In the longest section of the chapter, labeled “Act Now,” “The BLM is headquartered in the Western United States. After all, the vast majority of the 245 million acres of land managed by the agency (10 percent of the nation's landmass) is in the West 11 states and Alaska: only 50,000 acres elsewhere Additionally, 97% of BLM employees are located in the Western United States Pendley’s initiative to move the BLM to Grand Junction “is the epitome of good governance.”
- “Reinstate the 2020 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and lift the leasing moratorium by Order of the Secretary.”
- Congress never intended for the National Environmental Policy Act to become the tree-killing, project-destroying, decade-long monstrosity it has become… The Trump Administration has adopted common-sense NEPA reforms that must be restored immediately.
- “move [Office of Surface Mining] Reclamation and Enforcement is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recognizing that the agency is field-driven and should be headquartered in the coalfields. Reduce the number of coal reclamation inspectors on site and recognize that the industry is smaller. Reissue Trump’s Schedule F executive order to allow for the firing of underperforming employees.
- “End federal mandates and subsidies for electric vehicles,” the report says in the section “American Indians and America's Trust Responsibilities.” What's the rationale for this broad recommendation? Electric vehicles “are not an option for Indian communities due to their remote location, increased demand for nearby electric vehicle charging electricity, and longer travel distances.”
Reform is brewing. If Trump is elected in November, significant changes are expected, including in the energy and environmental sectors.
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Kennedy Maize blogs at The Quad Report, from which this article is adapted. Metz has been a Washington reporter for more than 40 years, covering energy and environmental issues.
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