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In case you wondered what all the political noise is about!

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Project 2025 provides a roadmap for “the next conservative President” to downsize the federal government and fundamentally change how it works, including the tax system, immigration enforcement, social welfare programs, and energy policy, particularly those designed to address climate change.

It also wades deeply into the culture war that has been dividing the country. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the teaching of “‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’” in public schools, and “deleting” terms such as “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “gender equity,” and “reproductive health” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has sought to tie Donald Trump to the 887-page book, which was written in part by the former president’s aides. Harris and Democrats refer to the plan as “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda,” and cite it as evidence (not always accurately) of what Trump will do as president, particularly on hot-button issues such as Social Security, Medicare, and abortion.

For his part, Trump has claimed he knows nothing about the plan, and his campaign said that Project 2025 “should not be associated with the campaign.”

Here, we take a look at the plan: what’s in it, who wrote it and what the candidates have said about it.

Who funded and wrote Project 2025?

The project is being led and funded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank founded in 1973. In addition to Heritage, there are more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board. Among those “coalition partners” are the Center for Immigration Studies, Moms for Liberty, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Tea Party Patriots, Turning Point USA, and America First Legal Foundation, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser.

The project’s policy agenda was published online as a book titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” The book has 30 chapters, each credited to one or more of its 35 primary authors and editors — although the final product includes input from “hundreds of contributors,” the project’s organizers said in a press release.

It’s the ninth edition in the “Mandate for Leadership” series, the first of which was published in 1981, during the Reagan administration. According to its authors, earlier editions have had success in influencing government policies.

“The Reagan administration implemented nearly half of the ideas included in the first edition by the end of his first year in office, while the Trump administration embraced nearly 64% of the 2016 edition’s policy solutions after one year,” the Heritage Foundation said in a press release announcing Project 2025.

Some of the notable authors of this most recent version include Dr. Ben Carson, Christopher Miller, and Russ Vought, who are all former Cabinet secretaries under Trump. Carson, who wrote the book’s chapter on housing, was the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development; Miller, who wrote the chapter on defense, was an acting secretary of the Department of Defense; and Vought, who directed the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the chapter about the executive office of the U.S. president.

Ken Cuccinelli, who was a deputy secretary for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, and Peter Navarro, Trump’s White House adviser on trade, also penned book chapters.

“In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” a CNN review found.

The book is one of “four pillars” that will be available to the next conservative president. The other pillars are:

• A personnel database, which will allow Project 2025 coalition members to “review and voice their recommendations” for appointments.

• A “Presidential Administration Academy” to teach new hires “how the government functions and how to function in government.”

• A second document — “the Playbook” — which will include “transition plans” to allow the next president to implement plans quickly.

What does Project 2025 propose?

Project 2025 attempts to put “in one place a consensus view of how major federal agencies must be governed.”

We cannot summarize all of its proposals, but here are some examples:

Abortion: Project 2025 describes the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, as “just the beginning.”

“Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America,” the book states. “In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.”

The book calls on the Department of Health and Human Services to protect “the health and well-being of all Americans,” beginning at conception, and to end mandatory health insurance coverage of Ella, an emergency contraceptive that Project 2025 describes as a “potential abortifacient.” It also advocates using an 1873 anti-vice law to block abortion pills from being sent via the mail. (More about that later.)

The book also calls for ending federal funding for “Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers and redirect[ing] funding to health centers that provide real health care to women.” As we have written before, Planned Parenthood provides more than abortion services. In its 2022-2023 annual report, Planned Parenthood said it provided 4.6 million tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, 2.25 million contraception services, 464,021 cancer screenings and prevention services (mostly breast exams and Pap tests), and 1.1 million pregnancy tests and prenatal services.

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In the Trump administration’s ongoing race to make the U.S. poorer, sicker, and dumber, one more stomp on the accelerator comes from cuts aimed against its federal advisory committees. Whether on infectious diseases or space exploration, these panels of experts are the unpaid brains behind the brawn of the U.S. government.

With its signature disdain for anything smacking of smarts or competence, the Trump administration now aims to destroy or neutralize them. In a February 19 executive order, Donald Trump directed his staff to compile a list of “Federal Advisory Committees that should be terminated on grounds that they are unnecessary.” The order directly terminated the HHS Advisory Committee on Long COVID (a syndrome afflicting 23 million people in the U.S. right now) and the Health Equity Advisory Committee, which sought to help underserved people access care like blood pressure medication or postpartum treatment, through Medicare and Medicaid. Since then NOAA has closed several of its advisory panels, NSF closed a dozen, NASA has consolidated its wildly disparate astrophysics, biological and physical sciences, Earth science, heliophysics and planetary sciences panels into one body, and the U.S. Geological Survey closed its new scientific integrity body, alongside five others at the Department of Interior that included a climate adaptation panel. “This means that you, the public, will be more at-risk of being harmed because the scientific integrity and misconduct issues that were prevalent before will continue to persist,” wrote integrity panel member Jacob Carter. He called the committee’s cancellation, “an indicator that this administration has no intention to uphold scientific evidence in its decisions.”He’s right; contrary to the executive order, these committees matter. Cutting away advisory panels hurts everyone and leaves the U.S. government uninformed when making critical decisions that affect millions of lives, alongside a public left in the dark about what advice agencies do receive. These advisors, a “fifth arm of the government,” have long served as a thorn in the side of polluters and lobbyists, putting them under siege for decades, and doubtless in the gunsights of the giddily for-sale Trump administration. A 2021 Ecology Law Quarterly review found past end runs around advisory committees were linked to lead pollution, fracking contamination of drinking water, and worse air quality.

Federal advisory committees operate under a 1972 law, which governs the roughly 1,000 expert committees advising federal agencies on evidence-based practices on issues like boating safety or railroad retirement benefits at a yearly cost of $400 million. The panels are a bargain, providing by law “fairly balanced” expert advice that includes disclosing financial conflicts of interest and providing information openly to the public. The best-known examples from the pandemic were those FDA and CDC panels that voted on the safety and rollout of COVID-19 vaccines to much attention.

History repeats when it comes to attacks on advisory panels. In 2019, Trump ordered a one-third cut in the number of them. The order took aim at science panels at NASA, the NSF, and the Energy Department, in particular. The first Trump administration’s sheer incompetence kept many of those kinds of closures at bay. His then EPA chief resorted to stuffing a clean air panel with industry stooges instead, and an antiabortion advocates panel lacking any scientific credibility was whipped up to eliminate fetal tissue research at NIH.

Now, however, the crush of executive orders and disregard for Congress seen in the first 100 days of the new regime make things look even more dire. The dangerous, unqualified HHS chief Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has forced out top FDA vaccine official Peter Marks, who oversaw the vaccine panel that held steadily to public health principles during the pandemic, refusing to bend to Trump’s demand for an “October Surprise” vaccine to save himself in the 2020 election. All Department of Homeland Security advisory committees members were fired in January, halting a probe into a massive Chinese breach of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

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The US Department of Education is resuming collection efforts on defaulted student loans starting on Monday. If you’re more than nine months behind on your student loan payments, that means your wages could be garnished as soon as this summer.

It may sound scary, but wage garnishment to pay off a debt isn’t new. Currently, some Americans have their wages garnished to pay back taxes, child support, and other debt, including student loans. It just might feel “new” since there were protections in place to allow borrowers in default time to catch up since the COVID-19 pandemic. But starting in May, payments will begin to come due.

“This is actually the norm,” said Elaine Rubin, a student loan expert and corporate communications director for Edvisors. “If a loan is in default, then actions will be taken to then collect on the default loan.”

Student loans are considered in default after you’ve missed 270 days of payments (excluding payment pauses). It’s estimated that 5 million borrowers are in default and will have their loans sent to collections next week. If you’re one of them, here’s what you need to know.

When will the government start garnishing wages for student debt?

There’s less than a week left to pull your loans out of default, with the administration indicating it plans to restart collection efforts on May 5. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll see a hit to your paycheck starting next week. The Department of Education has to notify you 30 days ahead of your wage garnishment.

Expect your defaulted student loan account to move from your current servicer to a private collections agency around the beginning of May and wage garnishment to begin about one month later, Rubin explained.

Will SAVE borrowers have their wages garnished? 

There’s a lot of confusion on Reddit and social media about how wage garnishment will affect SAVE borrowers. If you’re enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education plan, your loans have been placed in an administrative forbearance since last summer. With SAVE on hold, millions of borrowers have not been required to make payments, which has led to some wondering if that means their loans are in default.

“It is confusing, because they haven’t been making a payment and believe that it could be at risk of defaulting,” said Rubin. “If you’re not required to make a payment because you’re in an approved forbearance, a deferment, or you actually have a $0 IDR payment, technically, you’re making a payment in that situation.”

The best way to check if your loans are in default is to visit StudentAid.gov or your loan servicer’s website to check your loan standing.

How will I know if my wages are being garnished?

You can check to see your current loan standing on the StudentAid.gov website or by logging into your loan servicer’s website. If your loans are in default and the Department of Education begins the collections process on your debt, you’ll receive a letter in the mail from the department 30 days in advance. This letter will contain your options, including the ability to voluntarily reenter repayment or object to having your wages offset.

How much can the government pull from my paycheck?

The federal government will pull a percentage of your take-home pay (the amount you receive after deductions) to put toward your student loan debt — up to 15%. It won’t take all of your paycheck. Your tax refund or Social Security benefits could also be garnished.

Can I prevent my wages from being garnished?

Yes, there are steps you can take to avoid wage garnishment, but they may not be feasible for everyone.

“As far as 100% preventing it, not everyone is going to be able to do that,” Rubin said. The two best options for most borrowers will be applying for a loan rehabilitation or direct loan consolidation. The third is to pay your loan in full, which Rubin acknowledged will not be possible for most borrowers. 

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CLIMATEWIRE | Time magazine selected Elon Musk as its “person of the year” in 2021 after the billionaire entrepreneur upended the car market, reinvigorated the space industry, and funded a $100 million competition for climate technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air and sea.

But Musk won’t attend Time’s event in New York City on Wednesday to fete the winners of that groundbreaking contest. The $50 million grand prize will go to Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup founded three years ago that works with crushed rocks and subsistence farmers to soak up climate pollution.

It’s unclear why Musk, an environmental hero turned MAGA diehard, is skipping the capstone event for a climate contest bankrolled via his eponymous foundation. Neither he nor Time responded to requests for comment. The XPrize will be announced at the Time100 Summit, the magazine’s annual event featuring 100 influential people.

In addition to running electric-vehicle-maker Tesla and the aerospace firm SpaceX, Musk is leading President Donald Trump’s effort to downsize the federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency has slashed climate funding for research, projects and agencies.

“We live in very complicated times,” said Nikki Batchelor, who led the Musk-funded carbon removal competition at the XPrize Foundation. Prior to joining the nonprofit, she worked as an innovation adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development — the first federal bureau effectively shuttered by Musk. (Musk has no ties to the three-decade-old foundation aside from being a donor.)

“He was one of the leading voices trying to push clean energy forward and think about innovative solutions to tackling climate change,” she said of Musk, the world’s richest person. “We’ve continued on with that.”

Batchelor spoke with POLITICO’s E&E News before XPrize publicly announced the final carbon removal contest winners, each of which removed at least 1,000 tons of CO2 in a year and provided a business plan for how they’ll reach 1 million tons annually. Since 2019, carbon removal companies have locked away about 650,000 tons in total, less than the annual emissions of two natural gas power plants.

The runners-up were NetZero, Vaulted Deep, and Undo Carbon, which netted prizes of $15 million, $8 million, and $5 million, respectively. Undo Carbon uses an enhanced rock weathering approach similar to Mati to remove CO2 from the air faster than the natural carbon cycle. NetZero and Vaulted Deep both lock away CO2 by preventing carbon-rich organic matter from biodegrading.

Commercializing carbon removal technologies is important because the world is unlikely to reduce the burning of oil, gas, and coal quickly enough to prevent the buildup of dangerous levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. As a result, climate scientists have concluded that it will be necessary in the coming decades to increase the Earth’s carbon removal capacity by billions of metric tons annually.

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“The Department will also authorize guaranty agencies that they may begin involuntary collections activities on loans under the Federal Family Education Loan Program,” per the press release. There is the disclaimer, though, that “all FSA collection activities are required under the Higher Education Act and conducted only after student and parent borrowers have been provided sufficient notice and opportunity to repay their loans under the law.”

Involuntary collections are “one of the harshest consequences borrowers can face when federal student loans fall into default,” says Ken Ruggiero, co-founder and CEO of Ascent Funding, an education loan provider. This occurs typically after 270 days, or close to nine months, of missed payments.

“It’s an aggressive, automated system that often catches borrowers off guard and deepens their financial hardship,” says Ruggiero. “In addition to the financial hardship, the student borrower is often embarrassed when their employer is notified and then implements wage garnishments.”

Here is what student borrowers should know about involuntary collections, and the advice experts offer:

What can be withheld under involuntary collections?

Through involuntary collections, the government can garnish wages, withhold tax refunds, and seize portions of Social Security checks and other benefit payments to go toward paying back the federal loan.

According to the Treasury Department, for those who have defaulted on their federal loans, the Treasury Offset Program can withhold to 100% of federal tax refunds, up to 15% of federal salaries, up to 15% of Social Security and Railroad Retirement benefits, up to 25% of federal retirement payments, 100% of payments to vendors, and 100% of travel payments for federal employees

Wage garnishment, which the Education Department’s announcement said will begin late in the summer, is when your loan holder can order your employer to withhold up to 15% of your disposable pay to collect your defaulted debt, without taking you to court.

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Thirty-five years ago today, a revolutionary new era of astronomy began when the Hubble Space Telescope, tucked onboard the space shuttle Discovery, blasted off Earth into history. The next day, a robotic arm tipped the telescope into orbit from the shuttle’s cargo bay. Within a month, Hubble had truly begun its mission, gazing out at the cosmos for NASA and the European Space Agency with its 2.4-meter-wide starlight-gathering mirror—the largest ever launched to space at the time.

In the years since, Hubble has gathered more than 1.6 million observations and 430 terabytes of data. The telescope has revealed that supermassive black holes nestle at the heart of most large galaxies, Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may be shooting plumes of water out into space, and, in the distant future, our Milky Way galaxy will likely collide with our neighbor, Andromeda.

But the  mission almost flopped.

The Hubble Space Telescope was decades in the works, even making a cameo appearance in a Superman comic in 1972, before it reached space in 1990. But after Hubble’s deployment, as the telescope began operations, astronomers realized its vision was blurry and traced the issue to a tiny imperfection in the telescope’s mirror.

Astoundingly, that mirror is still in use today aboard the observatory. Fortunately, Hubble was uniquely designed to be serviced in orbit by astronauts. NASA’s first (and most urgent) servicing mission flew in December 1993; during five separate spacewalks, astronauts installed a new primary camera able to counteract Hubble’s blurred vision, as well a bulky new apparatus that corrected the light that fed into the observatory’s original suite of instruments. 

Additional shuttle missions in 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2009 also visited the observatory, extending its lifetime and expanding its view each time with new hardware and better instruments. 

The results have been nothing short of breathtaking. Hubble’s position well above most of Earth’s atmosphere allows it to see the cosmos unhindered by the tempests and turbulence that all ground-based observatories face. That privileged vantage point has profoundly shaped our understanding of the solar system and universe around us. 

In our own neighborhood, Hubble has studied the changing weather on the outer planets, discovered moons orbiting Pluto, and watched the once-in-a-lifetime impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter scar the giant planet with dark spots as big as Earth. It has even glimpsed the sun, in a feat it was most definitely not designed to attempt.

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From Alzheimer’s to cancer, earwax can contain valuable indicators to a person’s health. Now scientists are analysing its chemistry in the hope of finding new ways of diagnosing diseases.

It’s orange, it’s sticky, and it’s probably the last thing you want to talk about in polite conversation. Yet earwax is increasingly attracting the attention of scientists, who want to use it to learn more about diseases and conditions like cancer, heart disease, and metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes. 

The proper name for the gloopy stuff is cerumen, and it’s a mix of secretions from two types of glands that line the outer ear canal: the ceruminous and sebaceous glands. The resulting goo is mixed with hair, dead skin flakes, and other bodily debris until it reaches the waxy consistency we all know and try our best not to think about. 

Once formed in the ear canal, the substance is transported by a kind of conveyer belt mechanism, clinging on to skin cells as they travel from the inside of the ear to the outside, which they do at a speed of approximately one 20th of a millimetre every day.

The primary purpose of earwax is debated, but the most likely function is to keep the ear canal clean and lubricated. However, it also serves as an effective trap, preventing bacteria, fungi and other unwelcome guests such as insects from finding their way into our heads. So far, so gross. And yet, possibly due to its unpalatable appearance, earwax has been somewhat overlooked by researchers when it comes to bodily secretions.

That’s now starting to change, however, thanks to a slew of surprising scientific discoveries. The first is that a person’s earwax can actually convey a surprising amount of information about them, both trivial and important.

For example, the vast majority of people of European or African descent have wet earwax, which is yellow or orange in colour and sticky. However, 95% of East Asian people have dry earwax, which is grey and non-sticky. The gene responsible for producing either wet or dry earwax is called ABCC11, which also happens to be responsible for whether a person has smelly armpits. Around 2% of people, mostly those in the dry earwax category, have a version of this gene, which means their armpits have no odour.    

However, perhaps the most useful earwax-related discoveries relate to what the sticky stuff in our ears can reveal about our health. 

Important clues

In 1971, Nicholas L Petrakis, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, found that Caucasian, African-American and German women in the USA, who all had “wet earwax”, had an approximately four-fold higher chance of dying from breast cancer than Japanese and Taiwanese women with “dry” earwax.

More recently, in 2010, researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology took blood samples from 270 female patients with invasive breast cancer, and 273 female volunteers who acted as controls. They found that Japanese women with breast cancer were up to 77% more likely to have the gene coding for wet earwax than healthy volunteers.

Nevertheless, the finding remains controversial, and large-scale studies in Germany, Australia and Italy have found no difference in breast cancer risk between people with wet and dry earwax, although the number of people in these countries with dry earwax is very small.

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(Credit: Emmanuel Lafont/ BBC)

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The exercise is all over social media: A trainer will kneel on a bench, then slowly lower himself forward at the knees until head and chest are within inches of the floor. Then he’ll somehow power back up, having completed the full “Nordic curl.”

The popularity of the move has inspired a new class of gym equipment—specialized benches made for Nordic curls—and sparked a new love affair with an oft-neglected muscle group: your hamstrings. These are the main muscles worked during the full Nordic.

Building them up can insulate you against injuries, power you to run faster, and complete your physique, too. “Hamstrings are very aesthetic,” says Dr. Mike Israetel, a strength training expert and content creator. “And they actually require very little volume to train effectively if you use good technique.”

Interest in those hamstrings has helped push leg day back into prominence. For most gym-goers, leg day has long been a day to dread, filled with vicious exercises, like squats and deadlifts, that torch your entire body. “It hurts at a deep, systemic level,” Israetel says. “It’s malaise writ large.”

That’s due to the sheer size of the muscles involved: The quadriceps (front thigh), adductors (inner thigh), and hamstrings are among your largest muscle groups, demanding huge amounts of oxygen during any session. They also need large loads to challenge them, so your spine and core are heavily recruited, too. Moves like squats and lunges are the equivalent of an “all units” alarm for your entire nervous system.

It’s the stuff that “I survived #legday” memes are made of—but gutting out these sessions will fuel total-body gains. All those heavy lunges, for example, are like a free workout for your abs. And any set of deadlifts not only builds your glutes but also hones forearm strength and layers muscle onto your back. Plus, you’ll burn major calories on leg day, in part because of the sheer weight you’re moving.

It all makes leg day worthwhile, no matter your fitness goal, even if you never attempt the Nordic curl.

Must-Do Hamstring Moves

Stiff-Legged Deadlift

How To Do It: Meet the finest hamstring exercise out there. Stand holding a barbell at your hips, knees bent just slightly, then push your butt back and lower your torso until it’s nearly parallel to the floor. Keep the bar near your shins as you do this. Pause, then stand back up.

Reps & Sets: Do 3 or 4 sets of 8 to 10 reps.

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Andrew Hetherington

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Nestled in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the slash-and-burn playbook for the federal government that the Trump administration is following while saying it isn’t, is a call for American “science dominance.”

There is no such thing. And what the project means by the term—turning the Department of Energy into a handmaiden of the coal, oil and natural gas industry—betrays not only the taxpayer but science itself.

Science isn’t a winner-take-all, zero-sum game of flag football. Whether during the cold war or the era of Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, the bedrock of science has been international cooperation. People pursue scientific knowledge not solely for the sake of lording our spoils over everyone else. The monetary value of research is not the only reason why humans engage in asking why of the world around us.

Science breeds diplomacy. It counters division. It tells us what is, not what we want things to be. Science enables democracy. The way the Trump administration is approaching it, by cutting funds for projects that run afoul of conservative values, such as ones related to diversity, or calling for research into claims that have already been debunked, which is the case for the idea that vaccines are linked to autism, defies all this. If that approach succeeds, it will make us a poorer nation in every sense of the word.

By halting federal funds to scientific research, canceling university grants and threatening to deport immigrant scientists, the Trump administration is restricting the flow of ideas. By trying to legitimize debunked scientific ideas and allocating taxpayer dollars to research into those debunked ideas, the administration sows discord and undermines the role of public health in preventing sickness and disease. By canceling global aid for public health projects, the administration is shunning the U.S. role in global health. And in their push for energy dominance, Trump and his allies are kicking years of negotiation over climate change to the curb.

By becoming insular, by cutting out the world, we stand to lose our best and brightest minds in science and the exchange of ideas that leads to innovation. Our country is a scientific and economic powerhouse precisely because we have been so open and collaborative for so long. China’s academic scientific output, as measured by publications in Nature journals, has surpassed that of the U.S. How can cutting federal science funding help the administration’s intellectual war with China? How can the U.S. further its national interests if we shut out ideas and people? How does democracy survive if we stop research and the flow of information?

In setting the stage for the role of the U.S. government in science, Vannevar Bush told President Harry Truman in 1945 that “scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.” He noted the federal government’s role in supporting agricultural research and said, “The time has come when such support should be extended to other fields.”

From the 1950s on, the U.S. government has been the largest funder of scientific research in the nation, not to mention the world. Those dollars have helped develop countless drugs, and a wide assortment of military and domestic machinery, and they have paid the salaries of millions of researchers. Those dollars have saved people and helped industrialize nations the world over.

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CLIMATEWIRE | One of the biggest mysteries surrounding President Donald Trump’s EPA is how it plans to revoke the endangerment finding — the lifeblood of most climate regulations.

Hints about its strategy may have been hiding in plain sight for a month now, ever since EPA announced a slew of deregulatory actions in a single afternoon.

Experts said EPA may be betting that it can upend the scientific finding, which paved the way for the nation’s rules on climate pollution on cars, power plants, and across other sectors, without taking direct aim at the overwhelming evidence that greenhouse gases are driving up global temperatures.

Instead, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and other officials whom the president tasked in January with undoing the finding could raise questions about whether a sector — or even the whole country — contributes enough climate pollution globally to warrant regulation.

They may also try to redefine how air pollution can harm the public — a necessary predicate for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

“Maybe they’ll change their mind, but they seem to have an idea of how they want to go about revoking the finding,” said Jeff Holmstead, who served as EPA’s air chief under President George W. Bush.

Jettisoning the endangerment finding could allow the Trump administration to tear out U.S. climate rules by the roots, helping it avoid years of painstaking work to finalize replacement rules that would likely be weaker, according to experts. It would also make it harder for future presidents to regulate other sectors that are contributing to climate change, because the scientific finding would have to be resurrected first.

Experts see hints of that strategy in a relatively detailed press release the agency issued last month, when it announced a barrage of steps it plans to take to roll back climate rules.

Holmstead called the document “very telling.”

He and other experts say the administration may take aim at the cost increases that regulations have on energy and other pillars of Americans’ lives, not at atmospheric science directly. That could allow EPA to skip the cumbersome process of assembling panels of contrarian scientists to build an alternative record on the indisputable link between human emissions and global warming

“They can probably get it out in the next few months,” Holmstead said of a proposed endangerment finding that focuses on regulatory costs. “They won’t need to spend a lot of time — and Federal Register pages — reviewing the science.”

EPA did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but Zeldin offered new details in a combative press conference last week about how he intends to revise the finding. He said the agency plans to undertake a formal rulemaking process with public comment.

“There isn’t a set timeline here,” Zeldin said, in response to a question by POLITICO’s E&E News. “As we go through the process with regards to the dozens of different actions that we are going to start rulemakings on, they each will follow the Administrative Procedures Act, and we’ll make sure that the actions that we take on everything are as durable as possible.”

That indicates the endangerment finding won’t be killed overnight using an executive order, as Trump effectively did earlier this month on rules requiring showerheads to use less water.

But EPA could still move quickly to revoke the finding.

“It’s going to get done,” said Michael McKenna, an energy lobbyist who led Trump’s transition team at the Department of Energy in 2017. “It’s just a question of when and what it looks like, and how long is it going to take.”

McKenna noted that some people in Trump’s orbit have been thinking about how to revise the endangerment finding for more than 15 years, since it was finalized under President Barack Obama, who issued the first rules based on it.

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