Project 2025 wants to dismantle the EPA

A climate change denier wrote the chapter on the environmental agency

Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders appeared on The Late Show. While the clip below is no longer about Biden’s 100 Day Agenda—perhaps it will (and should) be part of the Harris agenda—Sanders put in stark terms the relevance of climate change, something that the right continues to treat like a hoax.

This isn’t hyperbole.

The Project 2025 chapter on the Environmental Protection Agency was written by a climate change denier.

Mandy Gunasekara served as Chief of Staff for the EPA during the last Trump administration. Currently a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, she recently wrote an article for their website entitled, “As Demand for EVs Plummets, Biden’s Green Fantasy is Pummeling US Auto Dealers.”

Gunasekara previously worked as a Senior Fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank focused on instituting school voucher programs—really just a way of funneling taxpayer dollars into private, religious schools. The foundation dabbles in climate change denialism and aims to “explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels.” Oil companies pump millions of dollars into the foundation.

Gunasekara was also a visiting fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum, an anti-feminist organization founded to support Clarence Thomas against allegations of sexual harassment in 1992. The forum is a contributing organization to Project 2025, and operates in three countries: the US, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

If you don’t recognize her name, you likely recognize her impact: she was the chief architect behind withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Accord.

When SCOTUS recently overturned Chevron, which basically defangs the federal government from regulating environmental policies, she told the NY Times,

Overturning Chevron was a shared goal of the conservative movement and the Trump administration. It was expressed constantly. It creates a massive opportunity for these regulations to be challenged. And it could galvanize additional momentum toward reining in the administrative state writ large if the administration changes in November.

This is who Heritage Foundation believes would be a perfect candidate for running the EPA. Let’s look into some of her beliefs.

America » Atlantis

Gunasekara’s chapter begins with basic conservative rhetoric about supporting state and local governments in their environmental efforts—the supposed “hands-off” mentality that the right loves to pretend to care about. She calls for transparency and open-source science, which is rich given her track record in climate change denialism. She then tries to put the Flint water crisis on Obama’s shoulders because he was being proactive about renewable energy.

The right’s “small government” approach is then introduced. 

The EPA has been a breeding ground for expansion of the federal government’s influence and control across the economy. Embedded activists have sought to evade legal restraints in pursuit of a global, climate-themed agenda, aiming to achieve that agenda by implementing costly policies that otherwise have failed to gain the requisite political traction in Congress. Many EPA actions in liberal Administrations have simply ignored the will of Congress, aligning instead with the goals and wants of politically connected activists.

I read this chapter of Project 2025 as Hurricane Beryl plowed into Texas after becoming the earliest Category 5 hurricane to ever hit the Caribbean, by a matter of weeks. It was during back-to-back record breaking days here in Portland; it was 120 in Las Vegas and 128 in Palm Springs (for the first time ever).

Yet Project 2025 frames climate change as a “leftist agenda.”

Gunasekara goes on,