Episode 4: The Lies

In 2023, the Heritage Foundation published a 920-page blueprint for the next Republican administration, Project 2025.

I've read Project 2025, which is being implemented pretty much to the T, even though someone claimed they never saw it before.

I've read it, too.

The DOGE firings, in the document.

The budget cuts to land management agencies, in the document.

The mandatory leasing provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, in the document.

The gutting of environmental review, the acceleration of logging and mining permits, the reduction of agency authority, all of it laid out in detail.

And Russ Vogt, a Heritage Foundation alumnus, one of Project 2025's architects and Trump's Office of Management and Budget director, has said he's pursuing a very methodical, aggressive offensive to deconstruct the administrative state.

That's the man running the Office of Management and Budget in his own words.

And while they do it, they tell us that dominating global oil and gas markets is the key to our national security, and that we can't afford to regulate the industry.

But US oil and gas producers have never made more money, and that's before the windfall from the Iran war.

When the Biden administration briefly raised the royalty rate, the BLM still set records for lease sales.

Then the One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut the rate so far that the most recent Utah lease sale alone cost taxpayers $230 million in lost royalties.

The hollowing out doesn't announce itself.

There are no shuttered offices, no headlines, just fewer and fewer of the people who keep these places running.

Tia Lehto is watching it happen in her backyard in Durango, Colorado.

I see locally the impacts of gutting the Forest Service.

We lost about a third of the Forest Service employees in my local Forest Service ranger district, and you can see that.

Like, the trails are not being maintained.

The bathrooms are not being cleaned out.

They're already starting to contract with local firms to clean the bathrooms instead of having, like, actual rangers do the job, and, like, that chipping away is how you undermine an institution that's been around for a really long time.

Part of the strategy that the current administration has, and in general has been put forth by anti-public lands proponents, um, is just to render the public lands agencies so diseffective that the general public says, "Well, there has to be a better way for us to do this." This is not unique to the Trump administration, although they have absolutely put it on warp speed.

Sarah Kraekoff describes the strategy behind this deliberate neglect.

The hollowing out of the, uh, civil service, that has its own end, right? The, the, the hollowing and shrinking of the federal government, the elimination of federal expertise means that then the federal government isn't in the way of private interests.

The knowledge Scott FitzWilliams and his deputy carried, sixty years of combined fire experience, takes a career to build.