Project 2025 Means Gutting Key Environmental Laws. We’ll Fight Back.
We are prepared to defend the environment and communities no matter who holds political office.
Grizzly bear near Roaring Mountain in Yellowstone National Park. (A. Falgoust / NPS)
September 27, 2024
The Project 2025 policy playbook written by former government officials and Heritage Foundation staff would strip away our rights to clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet. It would trade these basic freedoms to help polluters profit.
Though the scope of planning written down in Project 2025 is new, many of the ideas it presents are not. At Earthjustice, we’ve seen presidential administrations push similar agendas before — and through the courts we have pushed back.
What Project 2025 says: about bedrock environmental laws:
- Gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA): Project 2025 would rewrite the most successful legal tool we have for protecting wildlife in ways that would harm imperiled species. It specifically calls for removing protections from gray wolves and Yellowstone grizzlies.
- No need for national monuments: Another proposal would repeal the Antiquities Act, which would strip the president of the ability to protect priceless public lands and waters as national monuments.
- Weaken the Clean Air Act: Project 2025 would nix the part of the law that requires the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set health-based air quality standards.
- Less say for communities in environmental decisions: The plan would undermine key portions of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which ensures you have a voice in major projects built near you.
How Earthjustice will fight:
- Defend endangered species: The Trump administration went after both Yellowstone grizzlies and the Endangered Species Act itself. Both times, Earthjustice went straight to court. One of our cases spared the grizzlies from planned trophy hunts, and the Biden administration subsequently reversed some damaging changes to the ESA.
- Defend national monuments: When the Trump administration gutted Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, Earthjustice immediately sued. Protections for the monuments have now been restored. We also helped defend the monuments from a later legal challenge by the state of Utah that attacked the Antiquities Act itself.
- Defend NEPA: This summer, when 21 state attorneys-general sued to block important updates to NEPA, we intervened to fight back. The updates will ensure that critical infrastructure needed for the clean energy transition is built quickly and equitably and is resilient to climate change.