The Lows of the Trump Administration’s Climate Onslaught
The government rolled back progress on the environment in at least 180 ways in 2025, and it’s just getting started.
Calling 2025 a disaster for the environment and renewable energy would be an insult to disasters. For the climate, 2025 was the equivalent of taking one of those rivers polluted enough to stand on, lighting it on fire and then driving a dodgy Amtrak train packed with scientists, puppies and nuclear waste into that river.
Funny enough, flaming rivers helped inspire the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Fifty-five years later, President Donald Trump’s EPA has all but dropped “Environmental Protection” from its name, thus fulfilling yet another prophecy of the satirical news site The Onion and also the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The latter might sometimes read like bleak satire, but it’s actually a deadly serious playbook for dismantling the regulatory state to make life easier and more lucrative for polluters of all kinds, especially the fossil-fuel companies whose products are heating the planet.
When running to get back into the White House last year, Trump denied any knowledge of Project 2025. You might want to sit down for this: He might not have been entirely truthful. Since taking office on Jan. 20, his administration has diligently carried out Project 2025’s commands, executing hundreds of actions to undermine renewable energy, environmental protection and climate science at home and abroad.
“It was even more aggressive than we anticipated,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said of the administration’s attack on the climate. “Project 2025 seems to be a pretty accurate blueprint for what’s happening.”
The Sabin Center has been tracking the regulatory rollback and lists 293 discrete events since Inauguration Day that have undermined environmental policy. It’s a valuable resource, but it’s not complete. Another tracker, from the nonprofit group Climate Action Campaign, lists some actions the Sabin Center omits. And that list is also not complete! Bloomberg Opinion has sporadically been tracking these actions, too, including a timeline published in March. And we’ve found some events not listed in those other trackers.
To mark the welcome end of this annus horribilis, we’ve put together another graphic, which you can see below, meant to visualize just how extreme this year has been. The graphic includes just 180 of the lowlights, mainly for aesthetic purposes. But hopefully it still provides a sense of how Trump’s lieutenants woke up each morning asking Project 2025 and the fossil-fuel industry that is essentially running the White House just how high they needed to jump that day.
One Year of the Government’s Attack on the Climate
Source: List compiled by Bloomberg; Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law; Climate Action Campaign
Note: Actions were compiled from official releases and news reports through the first 320 days of Trump’s second presidency. The dates relate to either the timing of official releases or earliest media reports. This is not a comprehensive list of all actions. A handful have been fully or partially reversed. Categories such as “affected area” are based on the authors’ subjective judgments and may not be fully comprehensive or descriptive.
One big question after a year like this is just how much meat is left to be picked off the climate carcass in 2026. Quite a lot, actually. Much of Project 2025’s wish list has been fulfilled, including the essential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, the gutting of regulatory agencies and the erasure of climate science and even language from government literature. America’s climate clock has been turned back decades. But there’s still more work to do before we achieve “burning rivers” status.
And the Trump administration has shown it’s happy to go well beyond the letter of Project 2025. On Dec. 16, the 331st day of Trump’s presidency, Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget — and a Project 2025 co-author — announced plans to end the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s top climate lab. Project 2025 called for breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but not NCAR. This is extra.
Trump’s attack on climate science and action has also created a permission structure for companies and other governments to backslide. Climate commitments made when the political waters were more inviting have been tossed aside at the first sign of turbulence. Even as they fail to meet their own temperature goals and watch tipping points like the mass death of coral reefs unfold, decision-makers worldwide are burning more coal, making fewer electric vehicles, softening their ambitions and shirking new commitments. Many justify this in the name of a false energy “pragmatism,” which promises everything will be fine, but we need just one more hit of fossil fuels to get by.
Everything will not be fine. Not at this rate. No matter what government scaffolding the Trump administration manages to dismantle next, the destructive fire lit in Washington is already spreading across the country. Americans will increasingly feel the loss of environmental protections, scientific expertise and new energy supplies at a time of soaring demand.
“A lot of what was done this year will come home to roost for people next year,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group that has also been keeping track of Trump’s attacks on science. “This is the moment where the reality of these cuts will become very real and put a lot of people in danger and the economy at risk.”
— With assistance from Taylor Tyson
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.