Keep America beautiful by protecting the air we breathe, the land we live on, the water we drink, and the climate we depend upon
The next administration must restore and expand the basic environmental protections that shield our coastlines, communities, and climate from the most predatory forms of extraction. Federal policy has recently shifted toward re-opening the Arctic, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and vast stretches of Alaska to new drilling and mining while weakening clean-air safeguards, weakening zero-emissions vehicle rules, and stripping away climate-risk disclosures that kept financial markets honest.
Reversing this damage is essential not only to protect public health, but to restore a national commitment to clean air, safe water, and a stable climate—foundational public goods that belong to every American. This must start with rolling back the recent rush to expand fossil fuel production on public lands and waters, re-establishing science-based pollution limits, and empowering states that have chosen stronger environmental standards. And because the rapid growth of artificial intelligence is triggering an unprecedented buildout of data centers with enormous energy and water footprints, federal oversight must catch up to the scale of this new industrial sector.
Together, Project 2029 is proposing steps to reclaim the federal government’s duty to protect the nation’s natural heritage, confront climate and pollution threats head-on, and ensure that emerging technologies do not deepen environmental injustice, including:
Restoring offshore drilling restrictions from the presidential memoranda of March 13, 2023, and January 6, 2025, which collectively represented a significant effort to protect over 625 million acres of U.S. federal waters from future oil and gas leasing. Invoking authority under Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, these memoranda withdrew areas including the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea from consideration for oil and gas exploration, development, or production.
Issuing an Executive Order directing the Secretary of the Interior to immediately cease permitting fossil fuel lease sales and the issuance of permits, and ban fracking on federal property while phasing out existing extraction under existing resource extraction laws.
Issuing an Executive Order directing actions to shift from fossil fuels to climate solutions. This should include phasing out and eliminating the Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy, directing the Department of Energy to stop providing loan and guarantee financing programs for fossil fuels, and directing the State Department, U.S. Treasury, U.S. Export-Import Bank, and U.S. Development Finance Corporation to prohibit any U.S. government funds from being used to finance to fossil fuel projects at home and abroad. Actions must also include establishing a new climate-risk mandate for the Federal Reserve and Treasury, requiring the SEC to disclose climate-related financial risks, and ensuring that polluters cannot shift the cost of their wrongdoing onto taxpayers through deductible settlement payments.
Issuing an Executive Order directing the EPA to designate greenhouse pollutants as criteria air pollutants and set a science-based national pollution cap (National Ambient Air Quality Standard, or NAAQS) under the Clean Air Act.
Directing the Attorney General to investigate any legal violations potentially committed by fossil fuel polluters and prosecute illegal actions.
Instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to grant a new Clean Air Act waiver to California for updated zero-emissions vehicle standards. The executive order must direct the EPA to begin an expedited but legally sound review process for a waiver that modifies the 2035 gas car phase-out timeline slightly, thereby avoiding the “substantially the same” restriction triggered by the recent Congressional Review Act (CRA) vote to rescind the current Clean Air Act waiver California was relying upon. The order must cite the 42 U.S. Code § 7543, which affirms California’s right to impose stricter air pollution rules if it receives a waiver, and instruct the EPA to coordinate with California and the 16+ states that voluntarily follow its standards to ensure continuity and consistency in implementation.
Rescinding Executive Order 14154, which pushes for more drilling, mining, and fossil fuel production on federal lands and waters, including the Outer Continental Shelf, eliminates the electric vehicle mandate, targets environmental regulations, cancels numerous climate change executive orders, kills the American Climate Corps, and limits global climate considerations. Additional executive action that repealed green energy tax credits should also be rescinded.
Rescinding Executive Order 14153, which dramatically expanded energy and natural resource development in Alaska by reversing environmental and regulatory protections imposed in recent years. The policy mandates aggressive development of Alaska’s federal and state lands, prioritizing liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects, and directs federal agencies, especially the Department of the Interior, to revoke or suspend dozens of environmental rules and decisions enacted between 2021 and 2025, many of which were designed to limit oil and gas exploration in sensitive areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
Rescinding Executive Order 14260, which directs the Attorney General to identify and block state and local laws that regulate carbon emissions, impose climate-related penalties, or pursue environmental justice goals, thus undermining the ability of states like New York, California, and Vermont to respond to the unique environmental and public health needs of their residents.
Rescinding the "Regulatory Relief for Certain Stationary Sources to Promote American Energy" presidential proclamation, which delays critical environmental protections under the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards by allowing coal-fired power plants to continue emitting hazardous pollutants beyond the already generous compliance window.
Reinstating full National Environmental Policy Act review for data centers. This must include requiring Environmental Assessments or Environmental Impact Statements for federally sited or federally supported data centers, suspending approvals issued under Executive Order 14318 where permissible, and mandating siting analyses that avoid overburdened communities, protected lands, wetlands, and critical habitats.
Directing the EPA to require the cumulative impact of all data centers, including those with on-site fossil generation and those that trigger increased local peaker plant reliance, to meet the Clean Air Act National Ambient Air Quality Standards. For any datacenter exceeding National Ambient Air Quality Standards due to on-site fossil generation or increased local peaker plant reliance, the EPA shall require the datacenter operator or facility owner to secure verifiable emissions offsets and/or establish a community mitigation fund to remediate environmental and public health impacts.
Enforcing water- and energy-use limits for all datacenters by directing the DOE, in coordination with the EPA, to:
Establish maximum allowable water consumption per megawatt of IT load;
Prohibit evaporative cooling in water-stressed basins;
Require renewable or low-carbon electricity supply contracts consistent with guidelines outlined in the since-revoked Executive Order 14057 (“Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs Through Federal Sustainability”).
14. Directing the Department of Justice to prosecute violations of these regulations under applicable regulations statutes, including:
DOE and EPA regulations, as well as NEPA conditions;
Clean Water Act (33 U.S.C. §§ 1251, 1311, 1319) for violations involving water pollution, discharge limits, or failure to report effluent accurately;
Safe Drinking Water Act (42 U.S.C. §§ 300h, 300i) for violations affecting public water systems, contamination reporting, or failure to comply with administrative orders;
Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. §§ 7413) for emissions or energy-use noncompliance that contributes to exceeding National Ambient Air Quality Standards;
18 U.S.C. § 1001 for knowingly providing false or misleading data in compliance filings or water/energy reporting;
State or local water-use permit violations where federally regulated datacenters exceed legally authorized withdrawal limits, with the DOJ empowered to assist in enforcing laws through coordination with state authorities;
15. Invoking Title III of the Defense Production Act (50 U.S.C. §§ 4531–4534) to incentivize domestic manufacturing of energy-efficient servers, advanced cooling systems, and grid-interactive storage. Agencies shall be directed to prioritize contracts with vendors deploying these technologies.
16. Directing the Treasury Secretary, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to require data center operators to disclose climate and water-use risks as material information under securities law. These disclosures shall cover exposure to emissions, water consumption, and climate-related operational risks, ensuring that investors, federal agencies, and other stakeholders can assess financial and regulatory vulnerabilities consistent with requirements in the since-revoked Executive Order 14030 (“Climate-Related Financial Risk”). The SEC shall also monitor and enforce compliance in the secondary financial markets, imposing penalties such as civil fines, injunctions, or rescission of misleading disclosures for failures to report, misstatements, or omissions of material climate and water-use risks.
17. Directing the Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration to require vendors bidding on federal AI or data center contracts to disclose lifecycle carbon emissions, water consumption, and cooling technologies, while giving preference to vendors using 24/7 carbon-free electricity or on-site renewable integration.
