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PROJECT 2025 AND ITS PLANS FOR THE NATION’S PUBLIC LANDS  
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Stephanie Woodard
September 9, 2024
Barn Raiser
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_ If Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wins in November,
his next administration comes armed with plans for a massive
deregulation of federally-owned public land—your land, our land, the
basis of our shared national identity. _

The Cortez Hills Pit at Mount Tenabo, operated by Barrick Gold Corp.,
the world’s largest multinational mining corporation. Mount Tenabo
and its environs are part of Newe Sogobia, the sacred ancestral land
of the Western Shoshone, which has never been , legally ceded to the
federal government. The Bush administration’s relaxation of mining
and environmental regulations opened the region to mining. (Credit:
Barrick Gold Corporation // Barn Raiser)

 

If Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wins the White
House in November, his next administration comes armed with plans for
a massive deregulation of federally-owned public land—your land, our
land, the basis of our shared national identity. This promises a
lucrative payday for businesses like oil companies, mining operations
and other extractive industries. Under Project 2025, a 920-page
playbook spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think
tank, such companies would have their projects fast-tracked and could
ignore potential environmental destruction. They would also enjoy
significant tax breaks.

The Cortez Hills Pit at Mount Tenabo, operated by Barrick Gold Corp.,
the world’s largest multinational mining corporation. Mount Tenabo
and its environs are part of Newe Sogobia, the sacred ancestral land
of the Western Shoshone, which has never been legally ceded to the
federal government. The Bush administration’s relaxation of mining
and environmental regulations opened the region to mining. (Barrick
Gold Corporation)

Meanwhile, “green” enterprises would lose Biden-Harris
administration incentives and tax breaks. Trump-era orders, such as
opening the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska to leasing and
development, would be reinstated to restore “American energy
dominance.”

Written by Trump’s current campaign aides and members of his former
administration, with contributions from more than 100 conservative
organizations, Project 2025 tells its supporters to “go to work on
Day One” of the next Trump administration “to deconstruct the
Administrative state.”

It promises a national abortion ban, union-busting measures and a halt
to climate action. It would terminate the Department of Education and
the Head Start program. It would cut the Affordable Care Act,
veteran’s benefits, Medicare, health care for the disabled,
prescription-drug price controls and much more—page after page,
chapter after chapter.

Project 2025 doesn’t just cut. It also adds. It advocates monitoring
menstrual cycles and pregnancies nationwide so more women bear more
children. It promotes hiring more children to work in what it calls
“dangerous occupations.” It is busy assembling lists of thousands
of conservative loyalists to be appointed to government positions in a
Trump administration.

As voters have begun learning about Project 2025, it has morphed from
what Trump called “an action plan” just a few years ago into a
cudgel for Democrats. Trump’s campaign now threatens anyone who says
Project 2025 has anything to do with him: “It will not end well for
you.”

THIS LAND IS (NOT) YOUR LAND

Among the many stunningly beautiful public places that Project 2025
puts at risk are Minnesota’s remote and lovely Boundary Waters Canoe
Area Wilderness and vast swaths of the ecologically and culturally
rich Arctic. New Mexico’s ancient Chaco Canyon would lose its
10-mile protective zone, endangering the 4,700 known archaeological
sites located just outside the national park.

The acreage in peril includes land controlled by the Department of the
Interior (DOI) and its subagencies such as the Bureau of Land
Management (BLM), National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service.
The total encompasses “500 million acres of federal lands, including
national parks and national wildlife refuges; 700 million acres of
sub-surface minerals; [and] 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental
Shelf,” according to William Perry Pendley, who authored Project
2025’s chapter on the DOI.

Pendley, a former oil industry attorney, briefly oversaw the BLM and
its nearly quarter-billion acres of public land during the Trump
administration, when he finalized plans to permit drilling, mining and
grazing on the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national
monuments in Utah. In 2020, he was removed
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the BLM’s acting director after a federal judge determined he had
served unlawfully for 424 days without Senate confirmation as required
under the Constitution.

Backcountry Hunters and Anglers members enjoy hunting, fishing and
other outdoor activities. They promote conservation and education
about wild public lands and waters. The group, which includes over 40
state and regional chapters, said
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2025 would be “detrimental to the future of these cherished public
resources and those who rely on them for the pursuit of their outdoor
traditions.”

Scientists agree. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) includes
scientists, policy experts and others who advocate using “rigorous,
independent science” to ensure “a healthy, safe, and just
future.” Rachel Cleetus, the group’s policy director, calls
Project 2025 “stomach-churning to contemplate. Let’s hope it never
gets beyond a theoretical exercise in how to destroy our country and
leave our children’s futures dark and uncertain.” 

Lauren Pagel, policy director of the prominent environmental group
Earthworks, was unsparing in her criticism. “Every person impacted
by heat waves, wildfires and extreme storms deserves leaders who
accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, not offer big
giveaways to corporate polluters.” She says Earthworks is
“extremely concerned with anything that may impact tackling the
climate crisis.”

Pagel points to Earthworks studies that explain how to recycle and
responsibly mine lithium, rare earth minerals and other substances
needed for a climate-friendly economy. These practices include ways to
avoid contaminating water and soil and to protect worker health while
extracting the minerals.  

INDIGENOUS SACRIFICE ZONES

Tribes have been, and would continue to be, among those bearing the
heaviest burden of environmental destruction. The examples are many
and extreme. According to _Indian Country Today, _in 2014
one-quarter of the nation’s 1,322 Superfund sites were on Indian
reservations. About 1% of the U.S. population lives with 25% of the
country’s worst pollution.

In 1979, the nation’s largest and almost entirely unknown nuclear
accident occurred in Church Rock, New Mexico, on the Navajo
reservation, when a uranium mine collapsed, pouring 1,000 tons of
radioactive waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive slurry over
the reservation and contaminating food and water sources. To this day,
Navajo babies are born with excess uranium in their systems. The
environmental and human health harms far exceed that of the world
famous Three Mile Island accident, which also occurred that year, with
tiny radioactive releases in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

 
Members of the Navajo Nation protest uranium hauled across their land
from Pinyon Plain Mine to White Mesa Mill in August 2024. (Credit:
Navajo Nation  //  Barn Raiser)
The Fort Belknap Indian Community, in Montana, is fighting resumption
of gold and silver mining in the Little Rockies Mountains on its
southern border. For more than a century, rivers originating there
have poured down onto the reservation carrying cyanide, arsenic,
mercury, acids and other substances used to obtain and process the
ore.

In Nevada, environmental and Native rights groups oppose
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new lithium mine that would remove massive amounts of precious
groundwater, endanger protected habitat and destroy Native graves
resulting from an 1865 massacre.

Today, in Utah, the Ute Mountain Ute tribal nation lives with a
uranium processing mill next door. The White Mesa Mill stores 700
million pounds of radioactive waste in open-air pits. School buses
carrying Ute Mountain Ute children may drive through dangerous sludge
spattered on the roads by waste-laden trucks headed for the mill.

Outsiders “look at tribal land as someplace they can do whatever
they want,” says Joseph Holley, chairman of the Te-Moak Tribe of
Western Shoshone Indians, headquartered in Elko, Nevada. The heart of
his ancestral homeland has suffered dramatic damage. Nevada’s 70
million acres are 80% federally owned public land, the highest
proportion of any state. Much of that is dedicated to the state’s
nearly 100 “major” mines, oil fields and geothermal areas,
according to Nevada’s Commission on Mineral Resources. The U.S.
Bureau of Land Management counts 180,000 active mining claims in
Nevada, so the number of major sites could increase under Project
2025.

Nevada also has 200,000 abandoned mines, including 50,000 the
state’s Abandoned Mines Program calls dangerous. They have deep open
shafts that unsuspecting hikers and dirt-bikers may fall into,
explosives left behind that hinder rescue and other life-threatening
hazards.

 
An abandoned mine continues to pour pollution into the valley below
on Western Shoshone sacred lands in Nevada. (Credit: Joseph Zummo  //
 Barn Raiser)
Mining has leveled entire mountains in Nevada, according to Holley.
Mount Tenabo, the highest peak of the Cortez mountain range, figures
prominently in Shoshone creation stories. Mining pits have demolished
half of it, Holley says. Pits throughout the state
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and abandoned—have destroyed other sacred sites, he says. Tribal
members can’t carry out certain ceremonies. Herbs they relied on are
gone.

More deregulation of federal land would mean “total desecration,”
Holley says.

Everyone should worry about the immense de-watering miners do to clear
the mine shafts, according to Holley. “Water is essential,” he
says. “Mines are getting rid of water, while many of the western
states, even huge cities, are running low on it. It’s crazy.”

Congressional Republicans have submitted dozens of bills intended to
achieve the land-oriented goals of Project 2025, whether or not they
win the White House in November, according to Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva
(D-Ariz.), Ranking Member of the House Natural Resources Committee.
Grijalva says the bills’ purpose is clear: “fast-tracking polluter
profits, no matter the human or environmental cost.”

ECOLOGICALLY SOUND ALTERNATIVES

It doesn’t have to be that way, Holley says. He points to Ormat
Technologies, a global geothermal-energy company. “Before they go
out on the land [in Nevada], they come to [our] tribe,” he says.
“They explain where they will go and what they will do to harness
this renewable energy. They ask if the tribe has concerns. They have
offered to set up hot-water baths for tribal members to use for
traditional prayers, Holley says.

While some tribal nations work with sympathetic businesses, others
have their own ecologically minded enterprises. The Rosebud Sioux
Tribe, in Mission, South Dakota, is using wind and solar power and
other means to build a clean-energy economy. The tribe educates its
young people about the technologies and the cultural values they
support. The Southern Ute Indian Tribe, in Ignacio, Colorado, has a
methane-capture operation that sequesters the powerful greenhouse gas
emanating from area coal seams and converts it to electricity. In
doing so, the tribe helps mitigate climate change while meeting its
own energy needs.

_Tribal Business News_ reports
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Indian country is poised for a “clean-energy surge.” Driving this
are federal investments. These include $2 billion from the
Environmental Protection Agency for expanding Native access to
renewable technologies, including solar, wind, geothermal and biofuel.
The Department of Energy has just given $88 million to bring renewable
energy to the Northern California Yurok, Hoopa and Karuk tribes.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Energy Agency offers symposia for tribes,
including a recent one on ways to “reduce carbon footprints, create
economic opportunities and foster environmental stewardship.” In
May, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and Colorado School of Mines
offered an energy-related program with tribal sovereignty as the major
focus. The Biden-Harris administration has also announced new national
monuments and protections for tens of millions of acres of public
land, including 28 million acres recently set aside in Alaska.
The administration’s widely reported goal is “30 by 30,” or
conserving 30% of the nation’s lands, waters and oceans by 2030. 

Alaska Native Tara Sweeney is credited as a contributor to the Project
2025 chapter that includes Native land issues. Sweeney ran the Bureau
of Indian Affairs during the Trump administration and is now Vice
President of External Affairs for the oil company ConocoPhillips
Alaska. The chapter in question claims deregulation is essential for
tribes; otherwise they must “choose between food and fuel.”

_Barn Raiser_ asked Sweeney to comment on today’s tribal energy
businesses and collaborations, the sizeable federal investments,
tribes’ interest in producing energy that aligns with their cultural
values and their apparent disinterest in deregulation. At press time,
Sweeney and the ConocoPhillips newsroom had not responded to requests
for comment.

THE ENTIRE STORY

Tribal energy businesses are among the many Indigenous enterprises
making sustainable use of the environment. The Menominee Indian Tribe
of Wisconsin has lived in that area for thousands of years. Its
reservation features a beautiful, healthy forest that supports its
successful timber-products company, Menominee Tribal Enterprises. The
150-year-old conservation group American Forests calls it “one of
the most historically significant working forests in the world.”

 
Tribal citizens canoeing on the reservation of the Menominee Indian
Tribe of Wisconsin.  (Credit: Guy Reiter  //  Barn Raiser)
Big companies and politicians derive their power from stoking
division, says Anahkwet, who also goes by the name Guy Reiter. He is
the head of Menikanaehkem, a community group on the Menominee
reservation. “They look at places where poverty is a major thing and
exploit that. They promise jobs, they promise this, they promise that.
In reality, they don’t do any of it. They don’t care about the
community. It’s about profits over people.”

Reiter says he and other Menominees don’t see a conflict between a
successful business and care for the environment, and identify fully
with the living world around them. “I am it, and it is me,” Reiter
says.

“So what do we do?” he asks. “We love one another, take care of
each other.” If you believe in a higher power, you understand that,
Reiter says. “You and I are in this together … We all share in
this beautiful earth.”

For Indigenous people, carrying this belief into the future means
involving youth in their traditions—not in theory but hands-on.
Holley and his grandson Julius Jr. sit in a remote Nevada desert camp
flintknapping, or shaping, arrowheads. The two are surrounded by
relatives and their people’s ancient landscape. Everything around
them informs their work as they chip the stone—the jests, the
stories, the aroma of cooking meat, the plants, the animals, the
nearby sweat lodge, the easygoing lesson and the tactile interaction
with the stone.

 
Flintknapping with Joseph Holley, right, chairman of the Te-Moak
Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians, and his grandson Julius Holley Jr.
(Joseph Zummo)
The deep past is as much a part of the experience as the present. In
the desert, Western Shoshone children “might see an old dwelling off
to one side, a stream where ceremonies took place and flakes chipped
off by ancestors when they worked stone,” Holley says. “The
children can then look at our modern camp and see that it reflects the
old one, with places to sleep, cook, gather, work and pray. They
understand that they are part of the entire story.”
 

_[STEPHANIE WOODARD is an award-winning journalist who writes on human
rights and culture with a focus on Native American issues. She is the
author of American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for
Self-Determination and Inclusion
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_This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide
collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in
which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it
faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org
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* Project 2025
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* public lands
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* Deregulation
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* US National Identity
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* 2024 Elections
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* Donald Trump
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* MAGA
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* Native lands
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* Indigenous peoples
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* big oil
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* mining
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* extractive industries
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* Department of the Interior
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* Bureau of Land Management
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* National Park Service
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* Fish and Wildlife Service
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* Tribal waters
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