Wednesday I mentioned Michael McDonald, the professor at the Univeristy of Florida who is an election data guru. Something I noticed in the first days of early voting was that most of the swing states that surfaced gender breakdowns for early voting showed around a ten point spread between men (~45) and woman (~55). There are more women than men and women vote more than men. So the difference didn’t surprise me. But that spread still seemed pretty big. So I asked McDonald whether that was a signal of any sort. He said, no, that’s roughly the spread you see in early voting.
But over the last couple days, both in my exchanges with him and in a few of his tweet updates, something else has come out of this. That ~10 point spread is about what we should expect from other cycles. But we’re also seeing a lot more Republican early voting. All things being equal that high rate of Republican early voting should be compressing that gender divide. But it’s not.
Morning Memo had the chance to attend director Nick Quested’s screening of his Jan. 6 documentary “64 Days” last night in DC. It draws mostly on footage Quested shot while he was embedded with the Proud Boys in the run-up to Jan. 6 and during that day’s attack on Capitol.
Quested’s footage — which revealed the clandestine meeting between Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and and Oath Keepers top dog Stewart Rhodes, both of whom were subsequently convicted of seditious conspiracy — was turned over to law enforcement and Quested testified publicly to the House Jan. 6 committee about his experience. So the gist of what Quested had shot was already known.
But seeing him compile his exclusive, up-close footage into a 64-day narrative that builds from Election Day 2020 to Jan. 6 was a good reminder of how intentionally orchestrated, blatant, and obvious the planning and preparation was for the effort to overturn the election results that culminated with the attack on the Capitol.
In the post-screening Q&A moderated by former TPMer Ryan Reilly, Quested was joined by Jan. 6 committee Chief Investigative Counsel Timothy Heaphy and one of his staff counsel, Jacob Glick. The documentary and the subsequent discussion reminded me of something I’ve written in various ways a few times before: If only we could be so lucky as to have Jan. 6 be the end of the story. It is not. Jan. 6 never stopped. It is ongoing.
The items below in today’s Morning Memo demonstrate that Jan. 6 was not an end point but a way station on a treacherous path toward something even darker and more dangerous:
Trump’s new threat to fire Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting him for his alleged Jan. 6 crimes;
The virulent and conspiracy-addled attacks on immigrants by Trump, Elon Musk and others combined with false claims about non-citizen voting to create a pretext for challenging the 2024 election results as fraudulent;
The army of election deniers installed at the state and local level in the years since 2020 and now actually in charge of elections in many places.
From the get-go, the Jan. 6 attack was part of a larger conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election. But the effort to subvert the election was itself part of a larger Trump-driven fascistic movement to use violence and the threat of violence to tear down democracy, undermine the institutions of civil society, and eliminate other power centers as threats to far-right hegemony — all in pursuit of creating a new paternalistic American authoritarianism.
The historical perspective we can’t yet have with much clarity is unlikely to see Jan. 6 as a distinct point in time or a discrete event but as the loudest, most glaring warning sign we had on the road to American fascism.
Trump Threatens To Fire Jack Smith Immediately
In an interview Thursday with Hugh Hewitt, Donald Trump plainly said he would fire Special Counsel Jack Smith as soon as he is sworn in to a second term. “Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy … I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said.
Smith is prosecuting Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack and for absconding to Mar-a-Lago post-presidency with classified documents.
Trump has promised repeatedly and in myriad ways to weaponize the Justice Department against anyone who opposes him, revoke its independence, and use the powers of the presidency recently enhanced by the Supreme Court to protect himself from criminal prosecution and accountability to the rule of law.
Former president Donald Trump painted a dark picture of the United States under the Biden administration at a campaign rally here Thursday, comparing the country to “a garbage can for the world” because of illegal border crossings.
“First time I’ve ever said ‘garbage can,’” Trump said. “But you know what? It’s a very accurate description.”
We’ve Known For A Long Time Now
This was making the rounds again yesterday, a 2018 video by Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley on Trump’s fascism:
Quote Of The Day
“Donald Trump is running to be an American tyrant.”
Conspiracy theories are working. People believe the election system is rigged.
Deniers are taking over county and state boards that oversee elections.
They are trying to change the rules.
Some administrators are willing to face consequences for their efforts
Election Threat Watch
NBC News: ‘Big lie’ 2.0: How Trump’s false claims about noncitizens voting lay the groundwork to undermine the election
Joyce Vance: What DOJ is doing to protect the election
CNN: In a defeat for the RNC, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that voters will be allowed to cast provisional ballots in person at their polling place if their mail ballots are rejected because of certain defects.
By The Numbers
*FINAL* NYT/Siena College poll: Among likely voters nationwide, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are tied at 48% apiece.
Harris trounced Trump in fundraising in the first half of October: $97 million to $16 million. The final FEC reports due before the election show both campaigns spent half a billion dollars over just 16 days in October
The Bulwark: “In the past five weeks, Trump’s operation has spent more than $29 million on TV ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting transgender surgeries for inmates and illegal immigrants in detention, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. That makes the topic, by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending.”
2024 Ephemera
WaPo: How Trump talks: Abrupt shifts, profane insults, confusing sentences
MT-Sen: In “a sign of confidence” that Sen. Jon Tester (D) will lose, the GOP super PAC American Crossroads is moving money out of the Montana Senate race, Semafor reports.
Bloomberg: The election-betting site Polymarket has identified a French national as the source of more than $45 million in pro-Trump wagers via four different accounts. Contrary to initial speculation, Polymarket says the person has “extensive trading experience and a financial services background” and that it has not found any evidence to suggest the bets were made to manipulate or attempt to manipulate the market.
What Trump II Portends
ProPublica: Trump Says He’ll Move Thousands of Federal Workers Out of Washington. Here’s What Happened the First Time He Tried.
NYT: The right-wing think tank America First Policy Institute is poised to be more influential in a Trump II presidency than Project 2025.
Harris’ Short List For Attorney General
NBC News reports that the three main contenders for attorney general in a Harris administration are:
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper
former Biden DOJ No. 3 Vanita Gupta
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams
Not Bold Enough Or Fast Enough
New UNEP emissions gap report highlights a "massive gap between rhetoric and reality" and calls for a "quantum leap" in ambition to deliver Paris goals, as the world is way off-track today.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
During a campaign speech in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 19, 2024, Donald Trump promised to save the country from immigrants: “I will rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in a jail or kick them out of our country.”
Depicting immigrants as a threat has been a pillar of Trump’s message since 2015. And the types of terms he uses aren’t just disparaging. It might not seem like it, but Trump is continuing a long tradition in American politics: using language shaped by the Bible.
When the former president says those at the border are “poisoning the blood of our country,” “animals” and “rapists,” his vocabulary mirrors verses from the New Testament. The Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, says those kept out of the city of God are “filthy”; they are “dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.”
In fact, Americans have been using the Bible for centuries to talk about immigrants, especially those they want to keep out. As a scholar of the Bibleand politics, I’ve studied how language from Revelation shaped American ideas about who belongs in the United States — the focus of my book, “Immigration and Apocalypse.”
The shining city
The Book of Revelation describes a vision of the end of the world, when the wicked are punished and the good rewarded. It tells the story of God’s enemies, who worship the evil Beast of the Sea, bear his mark on their body and threaten God’s people. Because of their wickedness, they suffer diseases, catastrophes and war until they are finally destroyed in the lake of fire.
God’s followers, however, enter through the gates of the walls surrounding the New Jerusalem, a holy city that comes down from heaven. God’s chosen people enter through the gates and live in the shining city for eternity.
Throughout American history, many of its Christian citizens have imagined themselves as God’s saints in the New Jerusalem. Puritan colonists believed they were establishing God’s kingdom, both metaphorically and literally. Ronald Reagan likened the nation to the New Jerusalem by describing America as a “shining city … built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace,” but with city walls and doors.
Reagan was specifically quoting Puritan John Winthrop, one of the founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose use of the “city on a hill” phrase quotes Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. But Reagan’s detailed description closely matches that of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21. Like God’s heavenly city, Reagan’s picture of America also has strong foundations, walls and gates, and people from every nation bringing in tribute.
Barring the gates
If people imagine the U.S. as God’s city, then it’s easy also to imagine enemies who want to invade that city. And this is how unwanted immigrants have been depicted through American history: as enemies of God.
In the 19th century, when virtually all politicians were Protestant, anti-Catholic politicians accused Irish immigrants of bearing the “mark of the Beast” and being loyal to the “Antichrist”: the pope. They claimed that Irish immigrants could form an unholy army against the nation.
At the turn of the century, “yellow peril” novels against Chinese immigration imagined a heathen horde taking over the U.S. At the end of one such book, China itself is depicted as a satanic “Black Dragon,” forcing its way through “the Golden Gate” of America.
‘Uncle Sam’s Farm in Danger’: an 1878 cartoon by G. F. Keller depicts Chinese emigrants fleeing famine. The Wasp via Wikimedia Commons
And all immigrant groups who were unwanted at one time or another have been accused of being “filthy” and diseased, like the enemies of God in Revelation. Italians, Jews, Irish, Chinese and Mexicans were all, at some point, targeted as unhealthy and carrying illness.
This constellation of labels from Revelation — plague-bearing, bestial, invading, sexually corrupt, murderous — has been reused and recycled throughout American history.
Others have more explicitly used images from Revelation to talk about immigration. Pastor Robert Jeffress, who preached at Trump’s 2017 inauguration church service, told viewers on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” “God is not against walls, walls are not ‘un-Christian,’ the Bible says even heaven is going to have a wall around it.” The Conservative Political Action Conference held a panel in 2017 titled “If Heaven Has a Gate, A Wall, and Extreme Vetting, Why Can’t America?” There are even bumper stickers that say, “Heaven Has A Wall and Strict Immigration Policy / Hell Has Open Borders.”
Revelation 21 indeed describes the heavenly New Jerusalem with a massive shining wall, “clear as crystal,” with pearls for gates. Trump, similarly, talks about his “big, beautiful door,” set in a “beautiful,” massive wall that also has to be “see-through.”
The city of God metaphor has long been a tool for American leaders — both to idealize the nation and to warn against immigration. But the concept of a walled-in city seems increasingly outdated in a digitally connected, global world.
As migration continues to rise around the world due to climate changeand conflict, I’d argue that these metaphors and the attitudes they drive are not just obsolete, but exacerbating crisis.
The Times has a piece up this morning which is largely complimentary of Elon Musk’s political operation and Musk himself. It’s a far cry from the range of critical pieces which have been published elsewhere and which I’ve published. It rather confidently reports that Musk’s canvassers are hitting “well over 100,000 doors a day,” for instance, “according to a person with knowledge of the group’s activities.
Needless to say, that’s almost certainly someone from America PAC or someone who works directly for Musk. So the Times appears to be going purely off their say so. Which strikes me as more than a little odd.
We have a nice addition to the emerging library of reporting on Republican ground operations from Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect. Cooper actually lives in one of the swingiest parts of Pennsylvania. So he’s not only a very sharp political reporter and commentator, he’s there on the ground as a recipient of the door-knocking and mailering and all the rest — both lab-coated scientist and guinea pig, as it were. So it’s a unique view. The gist matches what I’ve come up with. There just doesn’t seem to be much if any GOP ground operation in the sense of door knocking, dropping off pamphlets or much of anything else. There’s a slew of mailers. And there you’ve got the other issue I’ve been obsessed by: Cooper is a left-leaning Democrat who I’d assume has seldom or ever voted for a Republican. So why is his mailbox bursting with GOP mailers?
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh debate whether we’re living in a post-October surprise world, discuss Trump’s former generals using the F-word, and investigate an interestingly timed E. coli outbreak.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Vice President Kamala Harris appears set to close her presidential campaign with a rousing defense of American democracy and a withering indictment of Donald Trump’s fascistic inclinations.
A series of developments Wednesday portend a final 10-day stretch until Election Day in which Harris more directly and powerfully confronts the Trumpian threat than she has to this point:
In a move heavy with symbolism, Harris plans to hold a rally next Tuesday on The Ellipse in which she will make her closing argument to the American people writ large, before presumably spending the last week of the campaign barnstorming swing states. Taking her campaign to the site of the instigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection is a potent reminder of the stakes of this election and a bold, confrontational, affirmative stroke: reclaiming public ground on the National Mall that was soiled by Trump’s infamous “Stop the Steal” rally. Contrast that with Trump’s planned Madison Square Garden closing event.
In brief midday remarks from the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory in DC, Harris directly addressed the new public remarks by former Trump White House Chief of Staff John Kelly calling Trump a fascist. “We know what Donald Trump wants,” Harris said. “He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be, ‘What do the American people want?’”
Asked Wednesday night on a CNN town hall if she believes that Donald Trump is a fascist, Harris didn’t miss a beat in responding unequivocally: “Yes, I do.” But she was also quick to say don’t take my word for it, just listen to those who have worked for and most closely with Trump. Later in the town hall, she said voters “care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
I don’t know if it’s the winning message, but it’s the right message. It’s hard to imagine waking up the day after Donald Trump wins and wishing you’d spent more time talking about inflation and economic anxiety.
At least we’re going to have a plain choice right in front of us and there can be no doubt what a Kamala Harris win would mean: a rejection of fascism.
Quote Of The Day
Chris Geidner: “[T]his election isn’t about alliances in the way that we normally think about them in politics. This isn’t about who you want in your boat. It’s about if you want the boat to stay afloat.”
We have been studying democratic crisis and authoritarianism for 30 years. Between the two of us, we have written five books on those subjects. We can think of few major national candidates for office in any democracy since World War II who have been this openly authoritarian….
The U.S. establishment is sleepwalking toward a crisis. An openly antidemocratic figure stands at least a 50-50 chance of winning the presidency. The Supreme Court and the Republican Party have abdicated their gatekeeping responsibilities, and too many of America’s most influential political, business and religious leaders remain on the sidelines. Unable to rise above fear or narrow ambition, they hedge their bets. But time is running out.
WTF?
The U.S. Naval Academy’s history department invited NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat to give a guest lecture this month about what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule, then the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing figures launched a pressure campaign and the academy disinvited her.
‘In Dangerous Times, Honest People Need To Stand Up’
The LA Times editorials editor has resigned in protest after the newspaper’s owner – South African-born billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong – blocked the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.
Election Threats Watch
WaPo: “A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.”
CNN: “Georgia’s secretary of state’s office this month fended off a cyberattack believed to have come from a foreign country against the website voters use to request absentee ballots, the office told CNN.”
AP: “An Arizona prosecutor said the man arrested in the shooting of a Democratic National Committee office in suburban Phoenix had more than 120 guns and over 250,000 rounds of ammunition in his home, leading law enforcement to believe he may have been planning a mass casualty event.”
CNN: How Michael Flynn built a business and MAGA following out of election denialism
2024 Ephemera
Justice Department warns Elon Musk that his $1 million giveaway to registered voters may be illegal.
Former longtime GOP Rep. Fred Upton (MI) has endorsed Kamala Harris.
WaPo: A GOP operative accused a monastery of voter fraud. Nuns fought back.
What The Fascism Looks Like
Hitler apologias, yearning for daddy, and other snippets from Trump defenders in just the past day:
“German generals who were Nazis or whatever” …
Fox host Brian Kilmeade justifies Trump wanting German generals
Kilmeade: I can absolutely see him go it'd be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do, maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever pic.twitter.com/6lpjH6foEk
Tucker Carlson, campaigning for Trump: “There has to be a point at which dad comes home…Dad comes home, and he's pissed…You know what he says? ‘You've been a bad little girl, and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now.’” pic.twitter.com/HGx9jXp3em
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 23, 2024
“Daddy’s home” …
After Tucker Carlson likened Trump to "daddy" tonight, and said a reelected Trump would need to give the media and Democrats a "spanking," the rally crowd "went wild," @alaynatreene reports. Later, when Trump came on stage, the crowd screamed "Daddy's home" and "Daddy Don" pic.twitter.com/c11wtHoGV6
This article first appeared at ProPublica and High Country News. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In 2019, the administration of then-President Donald Trump announced plans to relocate the federal government’s largest land management agency from the nation’s capital to Grand Junction, Colorado, a city of about 65,000 people a four-hour drive from the nearest major airport.
Trump had campaigned on a vow to “drain the swamp” and throughout his time in office voiced suspicions about the federal bureaucracy. Moving the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters out of Washington, which officially happened in August 2020, was a step toward fulfilling that promise.
The bureau, known as the BLM, manages mining, hunting, recreation, timber harvesting, oil drilling and more across an area more than 50 times larger than New Jersey, nearly all of it in the West. Though most of the agency’s staffers were already in the West, the administration argued that the bureaucrats in the agency’s headquarters should also be closer to the land they oversee.
A total of 176 employees working in the BLM headquarters were told to move; 135 declined, with many leaving the agency to take positions elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy, according to the Government Accountability Office, an independent federal research agency. The office’s research also found that disruptions caused by the relocation delayed the BLM finalizing policies governing the use of federal public lands.
Looking to undo the previous administration’s “upheaval,” President Joe Biden’s administration quickly moved the headquarters back to Washington and proposed increasing the agency’s funding. The BLM’s fiscal year 2024 budget represented a more than 30% increase from fiscal year 2021, the last year the Trump administration prepared the budget request.
But if Trump wins in November, he has signaled he’ll pick up where he left off with the BLM as part of a broader strategy to shrink the federal government and create a bureaucracy more beholden to him.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the 900-plus page blueprint for a potential second Trump term, recommends sending the BLM headquarters back to Colorado and relocating other agencies, ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional offices to the Air Traffic Organization and the American Indian Environmental Office.
Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, and a senior campaign adviser told ProPublica in a statement that the document does not set policy for a potential second term. During the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump said of the document: “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas. I guess some good, some bad.”
But scores of people who worked in the Trump administration helped draft Project 2025. They include William Perry Pendley, his former pick to helm the BLM. Pendley oversaw the headquarters relocation to Grand Junction and authored the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of the Interior, which includes the recommendation to move the BLM’s headquarters back to the West.
Separate from Project 2025, Trump has doubled down on his plan to take aim at the federal bureaucracy as part of Agenda47, his campaign’s outline for a second term. “Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado,” he said in March 2023, “as many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out, and I mean immediately, of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America, and they really do love America.”
BLM employees who watched the relocation told ProPublica that the 2020 move out of Washington felt like naked politicking and the latest swing of the pendulum between administrations that has pointed the agency in wildly different directions. Rather than move, many in leadership left the agency. Those who remained were scattered, making collaboration with other divisions of the federal government more difficult and disrupting the continuity of internal programs.
“They ran the career people out,” said Steve Ellis, who spent nearly 40 years working for the federal government, rising to the level of BLM’s deputy director during the Obama administration. “This business about politicizing the civil service, that’s a problem. It’s something that should concern all Americans.”
Mick Mulvaney, then Trump’s acting chief of staff, insinuated during a 2019 speech that downsizing was the intent of the move, calling the relocation of agency offices “a wonderful way to streamline government.”
Employees in other bureaus and departments worry that what happened at the BLM will come to them in a second Trump administration.
Jeremy Symons, a former climate policy adviser with the EPA, is concerned that such changes would undermine his ex-employer’s ability to protect the environment and public health, in part by relocating or entirely dissolving government offices.
“What they plan on doing this time around was learned from that BLM experience,” he said.
“The Reorganization Will Functionally Dismantle the BLM”
Months before the Trump administration moved the BLM’s headquarters to Grand Junction, James Caswell, the agency’s director during President George W. Bush’s administration, warned Congress that “the reorganization will functionally dismantle the BLM.” It would remove the agency from having a voice in major decisions made in the capital, he said, and “effectively take the BLM off the playing field.”
Indeed, an exodus followed from the roughly 500-person headquarters, with numerous employees taking jobs elsewhere in the federal government to avoid leaving the Washington area, where they had put down roots. Vacancies in the office jumped to 326 from 121, according to the GAO.
The administration imposed hiring restrictions, including a freeze on filling certain senior positions to gauge whether they were necessary. “All of the BLM staff we interviewed told us about challenges in completing their duties because of headquarters vacancies after 2016,” the GAO report found. Vacancies matter because the BLM oversees an estimated 30% of all the mineral value in the country.
Pendley argued in Project 2025 that the BLM’s relocation was necessary and still is because a vast majority of the bureau’s staff and its jurisdiction remain in the West.
In an interview with ProPublica, Pendley said, “It makes much more sense to have the top people who are managing those lands and managing those people closer to the lands and the people themselves.”
In a potential second Trump administration, he said, there would be a “clear carve-out that things that are budget-related remain in Washington, things that are Capitol Hill-related remain in Washington.”
But the bureau is already decentralized, according to former BLM leadership, with the headquarters — what staff refer to as the Washington Office — located there to collaborate with the rest of the federal government.
“Part of the goal” of relocating the BLM’s headquarters “is for it to be disruptive,” said Mary Jo Rugwell, who was the BLM’s Wyoming state director until her 2019 retirement and now serves as president of the Public Lands Foundation, a nonprofit made up mainly of retired BLM employees. “We’ve got to stop this back-and-forth thing. It’s just not good for an organization. It’s not a healthy way to operate.”
Giving even more power to political appointees to fire career staff is a frightening proposition to Rugwell. “Putting people in place because of their loyalty to a person puts people in place that are not qualified to do the job,” she said.
“Less Effective and Less Efficient”
Project 2025 not only calls for the relocation of agencies’ offices but also goes further in promoting an industry wish list for lighter regulations. In some cases, the leaders of trade groups or industry advocates wrote chapters proposing how to redirect agencies regulating their member companies.
Among their environmental proposals: delist key species from protections under the Endangered Species Act; vacate Biden’s goal of conserving 30% of the country’s land and water by 2030; walk back protections for large swaths of the West in order to offer lease sales to the oil industry; and dismantle policies meant to combat climate change.
If such environmental and public health proposals move forward, “it would be a mistake to underestimate the scale of the demolition,” said Symons, the former EPA employee.
Symons now works with the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit composed of former EPA staff, and believes the Biden administration has begun turning around the agency. He co-authored a recent report that estimated rules the agency wrote on topics such as air pollution since Biden took office will save more than 200,000 lives through 2050.
Project 2025 proposes disbanding multiple offices within the agency, halting millions of dollars of grant funding for universities that “produce radical environmental research” and pausing Biden-era rules.
“The EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator,” Project 2025’s authors wrote.
“By putting polluters in control over our air and water instead of EPA scientists,” Symons said, “Project 2025 would put the lives of millions of Americans needlessly at risk from asthma attacks, cancer, lung disease and heart disease.”
The number of coal mine inspectors should be cut, Pendley wrote, pointing to the industry’s falling production. “The people that I talked to thought there were enough people out there to do the job,” Pendley told ProPublica.
Former agency staff questioned his logic. Moving the headquarters would only serve to make the agency “less effective and less efficient,” argued Joe Pizarchik, the agency’s longest-tenured director, who served until the day Trump was inaugurated.
The largest coal-producing state by far is Wyoming, not Pennsylvania, and historical coal mines in need of cleanup are scattered across Appalachia. As with the BLM, the employees who need to physically be in mines are already stationed in coal country, from offices in Charleston, West Virginia, to Casper, Wyoming. Headquarters staff, meanwhile, need to be in the capital to work alongside Interior Department leadership, Pizarchik said.
As for the agency’s inspectors, many mines that no longer produce have yet to be cleaned up, so the number of permits that the agency oversees has not fallen significantly, Pizarchik explained. Meanwhile, the number of coal mine inspections across the country, a 2018 study found, had already fallen more than 20% over the preceding decade.
“Frankly, it’s asinine,” Pizarchik said of Project 2025’s call to cut inspectors because of decreased production. “That statement is either made out of ignorance of the facts, or it is trying to mislead people.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) warning that their much-hinted-at plan to flout transition rules could end up endangering national security.
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