Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Sparks

Trump’s OMB Pick Wants to Purge the Government of ‘Climate Fanaticism’

Re-meet the once and future director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.

Russ Vought.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

President-elect Donald Trump spent the Friday evening before Thanksgiving filling out nearly the rest of his Cabinet. He plans for his Treasury secretary to be a hedge fund manager who’s called the Inflation Reduction Act “the Doomsday machine for the deficit”; he’s named a vaccine safety skeptic to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and his pick to head the Department of Labor is a Republican congresswoman who may want to ease the enforcement of child labor rules if confirmed.

And — in one of the most consequential moves yet for America’s standing in the fight to mitigate climate change — Trump also named Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The decision comes as no surprise — Vought served as deputy director of the OMB under Trump in 2018 and took over the top job in 2019, serving until the end of Trump’s first presidency. The strategic communications group Climate Power had been sounding the alarm on his potential return to the office since this spring, which included sharing their research on him with me.

Unlike many Trump administration nominees, who tend to be loyalists with limited experience in the offices they’re appointed to oversee, Vought is noteworthy for having thought long and hard about how to “purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people,” Joe Spielberger, the policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, an independent and nonpartisan watchdog group, told me when I covered Vought’s agenda earlier this year.

Vought plans to do so mainly by reinstating Schedule F, a job classification that would designate at least 50,000 career civil servants as “at-will” political employees, including climate scientists National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others who sit on committees like the Clean Air Scientific Advisory. In Vought’s words in his chapter of Project 2025, “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” (In a recent conversation with Tucker Carlson, the pair speculated about being able to “fire them all.”) Vought already tried this once, at the end of Trump’s first term, and Biden swiftly reversed it upon taking office.

Beyond gutting America’s scientific corps, possibly for generations, if confirmed, Vought will immediately make his presence in the Trump administration felt, having spent the past few years secretly drafting “hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans,” according to reporting by CNN and based on undercover video released by the Centre for Climate Reporting, which recorded a candid conversation with former OMB director about his plans under false pretenses. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought told his interviewers. “And we are working doggedly on that,” including by “destroying their agencies’ notion of independence.”

Though Trump (and his campaign) tried to deflect the influence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 roadmap for his presidency, insisting he is an independent thinker not beholden to anyone, the president-elect’s appointment of Vought and other Project 2025 authors such as Brendan Carr, Tom Homan, and John Ratcliffe to powerful posts in his administration renders those denials specious, to say the least. More crucially, it suggests a certain intellectual deferral to Vought, enthroning him as one of the key architects of Trumpism 2.0. Through his Christian nationalist group, Center for Renewing America, Vought has spread his framework for solidifying executive power (and eliminating its checks and obstacles) throughout Washington’s right-wing intellectual circles, giving him a powerful base of support.

All this from the OMB, though — one of the, let’s face it, more boring offices of government? As Vought knows, however: If you control the budget, then you do everything.

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Sparks

The Trump Administration Helped a Solar Farm

In the name of “energy dominance,” no less.

Solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration just did something surprising: It paved the way for a transmission line to a solar energy project.

On Friday, the Bureau of Land Management approved the Gen-Tie transmission line and associated facilities for the Sapphire Solar project, a solar farm sited on private lands in Riverside County, California, that will provide an estimated 117 megawatts to the Southern California Public Power Authority.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Sparks

These 21 House Republicans Want to Preserve Energy Tax Credits

For those keeping score, that’s three more than wanted to preserve them last year.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Those who drew hope from the letter 18 House Republicans sent to Speaker Mike Johnson last August calling for the preservation of energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act must be jubilant this morning. On Sunday, 21 House Republicans sent a similar letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith. Those with sharp eyes will have noticed: That’s three more people than signed the letter last time, indicating that this is a coalition with teeth.

As Heatmap reported in the aftermath of November’s election, four of the original signatories were out of a job as of January, meaning that the new letter features a total of seven new recruits. So who are they?

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Sparks

The Country’s Largest Power Markets Are Getting More Gas

Three companies are joining forces to add at least a gigawatt of new generation by 2029. The question is whether they can actually do it.

Natural gas pipelines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Two of the biggest electricity markets in the country — the 13-state PJM Interconnection, which spans the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, and ERCOT, which covers nearly all of Texas — want more natural gas. Both are projecting immense increases in electricity demand thanks to data centers and electrification. And both have had bouts of market weirdness and dysfunction, with ERCOT experiencing spiky prices and even blackouts during extreme weather and PJM making enormous payouts largely to gas and coal operators to lock in their “capacity,” i.e. their ability to provide power when most needed.

Now a trio of companies, including the independent power producer NRG, the turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, and a subsidiary of the construction firm Kiewit Corporation, are teaming up with a plan to bring gas-powered plants to PJM and ERCOT, the companies announced today.

The three companies said that the new joint venture “will work to advance four projects totaling over 5 gigawatts” of natural gas combined cycle plants to the two power markets, with over a gigawatt coming by 2029. The companies said that they could eventually build 10 to 15 gigawatts “and expand to other areas across the U.S.”

So far, PJM and Texas’ call for new gas has been more widely heard than answered. The power producer Calpine said last year that it would look into developing more gas in PJM, but actual investment announcements have been scarce, although at least one gas plant scheduled to close has said it would stay open.

So far, across the country, planned new additions to the grid are still overwhelmingly solar and battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration, whose data shows some 63 gigawatts of planned capacity scheduled to be added this year, with more than half being solar and over 80% being storage.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow