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Recent reporting from the Huffington Post shows that oil and gas industry representatives penned the energy portion of the controversial Project 2025 plan. The new reporting revealed that former Interior official William Perry Pendley and oil and gas executives authored the Interior section of the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a future conservative administration, which recommends, among other things, the repeal of the Antiquities Act, which commemorated Emmit and Mamie Till-Mobley’s contributions to the civil rights movement and protected sacred lands near the Grand Canyon from energy development. 

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Project 2025 is designed to wrest control of the government from the American people so corporate special interest groups and the oil and gas industry can get their way. The people behind these proposals reveal Project 2025 for what it is — a dangerous scheme that jeopardizes our environment, democracy, and economy.”

Chris Marshall, a spokesperson for Accountable.US.

While Pendley was the primary author of the Department of the Interior chapter, he ceded writing of the energy section to oil lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma and others. Sgamma is the President of the Western Energy Alliance, whose board is made up of executives and lobbyists for the largest oil and gas companies, including Chevron, Occidental, and Exxon.

Pendley has repeatedly made extreme comments about the agency for which he was chosen to develop Project 2025’s plan and other federal employees. He has a long history of radical rhetoric supporting land transfer extremists, attacking conservationists, and repeatedly going after conservation laws.

As the Huffington Post notes, “Pendley’s dream for the more than 500 million acres of federal land that the Interior Department manages is to effectively turn them into a playground for extractive industries — the same interests he’s spent most of his career representing in court. In fact, when it came to the chapter’s section on energy production across the federal estate, Pendley simply let Kathleen Sgamma ― the president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade association ― and two industry allies write it for him.”

Accountable.US recently launched its Expose Project 2025 campaign to uncover the sprawling dark money network, key funders, and conservative figures behind the extreme Project 2025 effort threatening our democracy. Learn more at ExposeProject2025.org.

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