Project 2025 Takes Energy Backwards

Earlier this year Texas Signal published an introduction to Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project. From now until the Election we will be highlighting how Project 2025 would impact the lives of everyday Texans. This week we are taking a deep dive into the chapter on the Department of Energy. 

Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, is essentially a blueprint for running the government under a new Trump presidency. The plans, which are a set of policy recommendations pertaining to government agencies that runs nearly 1,000 pages, are all available online. 

The conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation is the principal organization behind Project 2025. Their connections to Ted Cruz are extensive, and there is a deep parallel between what he says and what is included in Project 2025. Especially in their vision of the Department of Energy, which is written by Bernard McNamee, Cruz’s former energy advisor and senior domestic policy advisor. 

One of the first goals from McNamee is to re-establish “American energy dominance.” According to McNamee the country has been forced into an energy crisis which he attributes to “green” policies. “Under the rubrics of ‘combating climate change’ and ‘ESG’ (environmental, social, and governance), the Biden Administration, Congress, and various states, as well as Wall Street investors, international corporations, and progressive special-interest groups, are changing America’s energy landscape,” he writes. 

Affirming “American energy dominance” requires repealing many of the landmark accomplishments of the Biden Administration. That includes the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. McNamee notes that both those bills provided “hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to renewable energy developers.” The increased funding for renewable energy has been a boon for Texas, as Chris Tomlinson of the Houston Chronicle wrote earlier this year. Texas leads the nation in both wind and solar energy, and that will likely only increase unless there is a repeal of that funding. 

Every Texas Republican voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, and perhaps nobody has come out stronger for repeal than Ted Cruz. “Joe Biden and Biden officials have proven time and time again that they care more about their radical climate agenda than the needs of the American people,” he wrote in May. 

Unsurprisingly, McNamee takes a dim view of climate change within Project 2025. And he argues that focusing on the changing planet has impacted not just energy, but science overall in the country. Under a new Trump administration, the Department of Energy would be transformed. And not just symbolically. McNamee proposes renaming the whole department into the “Department of Energy Security and Advanced Sciences.”

That new focus for the new Department would mean eradicating climate change policies, or what McNamee would call “interference.” This would include a review of all federal science agencies, eliminating the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, ending energy efficiency for appliances, and many other rightwing goals. 

Like the proposals for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, Project 2025’s idea of a new Department of Energy would radically transform not just the country, but within Texas where carbon-free and green energy has proliferated. The impact of abandoning renewable energy could be cataclysmic for the state’s economy. But that’s the current proposal that Project 2025 is offering.