Key architect of dystopian Project 2025 blueprint could sabotage next National Climate Assessment

While RFK, Jr. and Elon Musk and the Arsonist-Elect are getting lots of ink and electrons in the run-up to January 20, the media haven’t been nearly so attentive to a nominee who is a key architect of the notorious, Heritage Foundation-produced Project 2025.

That guy is a prominent political and religious extremist who says his plans for government are to prevent a “Marxist takeover” of the United States. Carried out, those plans would set him up as Dismantler in Chief of the “deep state,” the administrative state, or whatever the right is now calling it. He already served in the first Trump administration and has been chosen for a repeat in the second as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He’s Russell Vought, a Christian nationalist who has also served in the past 20 years as policy director for the House Republican Conference, executive director of the Republican Study Committee, and legislative assistant to former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm. He was the big mover on the Republican Platform Committee last year.

Vought told Foxaganda’s Tucker Carlson before he got the boot that the entire concept of independent federal agencies should be done away with and that the president must take control of the executive branch. He said he was spending 80% of his time on plans “to take control of these bureaucracies.” He wrote an entire chapter about this in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. In it, he posited OMB with greatly extended reach. And since he views himself as tip of the spear in taking control, the changes would extend his power to implement whatever of the Project’s dystopian elements he and Donald and Elon desire.

The environment is just one target. Of course, Vought wants to defund the Environmental Protection Agency. Cutting staff and limiting travel can make it more difficult to perform the EPA’s mission, but it makes certain barons of pollution happy. But defunding is only a piece of the envisioned wrecking.

The fifth edition of the National Climate Assessment (NCA) is due in 2026 or 2027. Each assessment presents a comprehensive look at the specifics of how the climate crisis is affecting the country, specifically “to enhance the ability of the U.S. to anticipate, mitigate, and adapt to changes in the global environment.” The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) generates strategic plans and research, including the NCA. The assessments are authorized by the Global Change Research Act of 1990, with the first installment being published in 2000. The fifth was published in 2023.

Scott Waldman at Climatewire notes that the new administration “could dial back the usual scientific rigor in favor of an approach that would both elevate the viewpoint of climate science denialists and jettison all contributions from the Biden administration.”

In fact, in his Project 2025 chapter on OMB, Vought writes: “The next President should critically analyze and, if required, refuse to accept any USGCRP assessment prepared under the Biden Administration.” And he argues in favor of more diverse opinions contributing to the NCA, where hundreds of scientists now contribute.

Waldman continues:

Scientists and climate policy experts say the proposed changes — which are being pushed by aides to President-elect Donald Trump — run the risk of undermining a foundational reference for government officials. And they say it could make it harder to craft future U.S. policies to address global warming.

The goal of the next administration “is to undermine any policies aimed at accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. [...]

Don Wuebbles, an emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois who worked on all five of the previous National Climate Assessments, said Vought’s push to include more diverse voices was in fact cover to bring in “more biased” ones.

“It will make the U.S. look like clowns to the rest of the world,” he said. “They’re going to try to basically say, ‘We don’t know enough to do anything about the climate,’ which is nonsense.”

Having a climate science denier in charge of putting the next NCA together would surely not happen in any world but the surreal one we’re now immersed in. But that could very well be the case since such a fellow was briefly in charge last time.

David Legates was executive director of the USGCRP in the final months of the administration, just as Vought was OMB chief for those months. But, as Waldman reported at the time, Legates was later ousted from that post after it was discovered he and a top NOAA official were part of an effort to publish disinformation in the form of flyers emblazoned with a White House executive seal that falsely blamed climate change on solar energy and natural variability. “They were an attempt to establish a government record of denialist claims that could be used in both the National Climate Assessment as well as in court cases against regulations, according to those involved,” Waldman wrote in 2021.

It’s always tempting to label these deniers numbskulls. But that gives them too much slack. Malevolent paints a more realistic picture. Just like the guys at Exxon and the Heartland Institute and a bunch of Koch-funded mouthpieces, Vought and Legates know the climate crisis is real. But they don’t care because the government actions needed to deal with the crisis are of the type that they seek to destroy, whether a particular agency is focused on the environment or another matter. Ideology, greed, and obedience to corporate patrons form their lodestar.

The man with a plan to upend government, and what it entails by Roll Call

“Put Them in Trauma”: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda by Pro-Publica

Ready or Vought: Project 2025’s Mastermind Takes His Shot by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism