Project 2025 redux

President Donald Trump signs an executive order at an indoor Presidential Inauguration
event in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Project 2025's alive and well with Agent Orange, the new POTUS, actively signing executive orders designed to implement the Heritage Foundation's view of a far right America controlled by the rich and religious described with passion as the Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.

To whit

Of the 26 formal executive orders Trump signed on Monday, 16 mirrored at least in part proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page Project 2025 to reshape the federal government, according to an analysis by The Lever.

That includes orders that withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, end Biden’s electric vehicle mandates, and increase oil and gas drilling in Alaska — all proposals that first appeared in Project 2025 months earlier.

It gets better.

Several architects of Project 2025 are now filling out the Trump administration. Russell Vought, the former vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s sister organization Heritage Action for America — who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States — was nominated by Trump to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the agency tasked with developing the president’s proposed budget and executing Trump’s agenda. Vought previously headed the agency during the first Trump administration. 

Trump nominated Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission, the same agency that Carr wrote a chapter about for Project 2025. In the chapter, Carr calls to end the censoring of “political viewpoints,” specifically singling out Facebook and YouTube’s censorship policies. 

As for billionaires, the tech bros are in alignment.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, recently announced that Facebook would begin promoting political content and end its third-party fact-checking program. Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, attended Trump’s inauguration. 

Musk as DOGE commander needs no introduction nor does Bezos

Regarding the environment ...

Other executive orders issued by Trump offer additional benefits to the corporate interests that backed the Heritage Foundation and his presidency. Several will roll back climate and environmental rules, as suggested by Project 2025. The moves are a win for oil and gas interests like Koch Industries, the petrochemical giant that funds the Heritage Foundation through its sprawling dark money philanthropic network.

Trump’s executive orders roll back Biden-era limits on oil and gas leasing on federal land, strip energy efficiency standards for household appliances, and eliminate incentives for electric vehicles. These victories for oil and gas interests were proposed in Project 2025, which instructed that a new administration “must immediately roll back Biden’s orders” on climate.

Trump also followed Project 2025’s directives to open up fragile Alaska wilderness to oil and gas drilling — even though the oil industry has been hesitant to take on such a project given the high costs and risks of drilling in far-flung, undeveloped land. In his executive order “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” he reinstated a plan launched during his first administration to allow drilling and development in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, which had received new protections under the Biden administration.

In closing, profit "trumps" climate change, a take resembling Custer's Last Stand in the cosmic scheme of things as nature always finds a way.

Lithograph showing the Battle of Little Bighorn, from the Indian side.