Project 2025 Means More Mining and Drilling on Public Lands. We’ll Fight Back.

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 mining and drilling:

• Prioritize oil and gas: Project 2025 tells the agencies that manage federal lands and waters to maximize corporate oil and gas extraction. It calls for approving more pipelines like Keystone XL and Dakota Access.
• Willow? Make it bigger: The agenda explicitly aims to expand the Willow Project, which is already the largest proposed oil and gas undertaking on U.S. public lands.
• Target iconic landscapes: The project also calls for drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and mining in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness, among other irreplaceable natural treasures.

How Earthjustice will respond:

• Fight on all fronts: Under the Trump administration, Earthjustice challenged an aggressive extractive agenda at every turn. Our victories included winning protections for 128 million acres of ocean and hundreds of thousands of acres of sage-grouse habitat threatened by oil and gas development.
• Defend the places Project 2025 targets:
  • We have been defending the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from fossil fuel development since the 1980s, and we celebrated last year when the government canceled a set of illegal oil leases.
  • Our litigation and advocacy have helped secure a 20-year mining ban in the Boundary Waters.
  • Currently, we are fighting the Willow Project in court.

What you can do with us today: Advocate to protect our federal lands from fossil fuels.