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SCOTT GREACEN:

Hi, and welcome to the Econews Report. I'm Scott Greacen, your host for this week, and I'm joined in the lovely EPIC studio by our guest this week, Congressman Jared Huffman. Welcome, Congressman.

REP. JARED HUFFMAN:

Great to be back with you guys.

GREACEN:

We've also got on the mic number two, Tom Wheeler, EPIC's executive director. We're going to try to tag team this one. So our big topic today is Project 2025. But before we get to Project 2025, I want to talk about the Potter Valley project just for a second, because that's something that is a significant concern, I think, to me and to the congressman, if not to Tom so much. And the big news lately is that Pacific Gas and Electric has announced a six-month delay in submitting a final proposal for dam removal draft plan, a draft plan for dam removal. What do you make of this delay? And should we be concerned? Cause frankly, we are.

HUFFMAN:

Well, it's your job to be concerned, Scott, so far be it from me to try to change that. A little concern is always helpful, especially when you're talking about FERC proceedings that can take decades, and I think that has been one of the concerns all along, back when we were in a relicensing posture, trying to get it relicensed in a good way, and now in a decommissioning and abandonment posture, just making sure this doesn't take forever. And the good news is PG&E certainly seemed to be in a hurry. They were uninterested in delay, because they lose millions of dollars on this project every year. I think they want out from under it as soon as they can get there.

So that was encouraging for those who want this to move. I don't ... I'm not deeply troubled by this six-months delay, if it is a slow-down-to-go-fast proposition, and I think it is, because when they declined to include the new Russian Eel River Authority's Van Arsdale Run-of-the-River Diversion Facility in their decommissioning plan, it was basically, we don't have time to mess it. You guys can do that on your own, but we are in a red-hot hurry to get this done. Which is exactly what we wanted to hear. Which I'm sure is, to some extent, music to your ears. But if, once you get to FERC, all of the Russian river interests and others prevail on FERC that this timeline doesn't work, you've got to slow down to allow us to be integrated, then I'm not sure what you've really accomplished.

So I take this as good news, because not only are they saying we want a six-month delay, they're saying we want a six-month delay in order to take this new fish-friendly diversion and incorporate it into our Van Arsdale dam removal plans. And by the way, things are moving pretty quickly on the fish-friendly diversion front. We got a $2 million grant from the Bureau of Reclamation, that's going to take it to something like 60% or 70% design. So it's not asking the decommissioning to hold up indefinitely or even for a super long period of time, it's just getting things lined up so that it can all move together. That's my take right now. Now, I urge everybody to keep a close eye on it.

GREACEN:

And we have been hearing from the beginning that it's really important, if not absolutely imperative, to bring FERC a finished package, a box with a bow on it, as it were, that gets the job done and doesn't leave any details for FERC to worry about. And to the extent that's what's happening here, I am conditionally willing to go along with it.

HUFFMAN:

GREACEN:

I think.

HUFFMAN:

is and bear in mind we're only talking about Van Arsdale right now. None of this has anything to do with Scott Dam, which is going to move forward quite quickly I believe. There's some other interesting moving parts there. Lake County's got a $900,000 grant from DWR to study impacts, mitigation.

GREACEN:

Well, it better be how to deal with dam removal because that's what DWR tells you.

HUFFMAN:

That would be a reality-based study, and I hope that's what they're doing.

GREACEN:

That's what the department told us they gave them the money for. So that better be what they're doing with it.

HUFFMAN:

Well, and that would be the smart thing for them to do, because this is happening, PG&E is going to remove its dam, Lake Pillsbury is going to go away. And I actually think this can be a very good thing for Lake County if they're trying to make it work, if they're thinking about the benefits of a wild free-flowing river and all of the habitat and possible world-class elk preserve and other things that could be ...

GREACEN:

... mention the transportation and emergency services improvements they desperately need in the upper river. I mean, frankly.

HUFFMAN:

So there's a lot of good things that could come out of a study like that for Lake County. I just hope that that's where they're putting those dollars and not as some sort of a Hail Mary to try to stop this goddamn removal, which won't be successful anyway.

GREACEN:

Glad to hear it. Hold you to it. So let's talk about project 2025. Yes you were recently in the news as The founding chairman of the stop 2025 coalition. Tell us about that. Tell us what this thing is and why we should be worried about it

HUFFMAN:

So Project 2025, if you listeners have not heard of this, you're like most Americans. I just saw a poll that said only 12% of the people have heard about Project 2025. So it's the most important thing that nobody knows about, I think, in our country right now. And I thought I understood kind of roughly what it was, but I got a much more in-depth briefing a couple of months ago by some groups that are doing a deep dive on it, including ACLU, Indivisible, and many other very serious organizations, and it was alarming to me.

So I went to our Democratic leadership, and I said, I think you guys need to do much more to spotlight this, to make it part of our messaging and our planning. And it wasn't happening at the pace I wanted to see, and so I just created this task force. This is just a little bit of a Huffman initiative. I was kind of winging it, and to my great delight, I had colleagues really wanting to be part of it. So we now have 14 members of the House Democratic Caucus. It includes people from leadership, the leaders of the key caucuses across the political spectrum. Every one of our caucuses in the Democratic Party is represented now. And people are just eager to dive into this.

More importantly, we're working with more than a dozen leading outside groups who are gonna bring all of their expertise to the table. We've already started our subject area briefings for the members of the task force. We're gonna roll up the highlights from five or six of those briefings and bring them to the American people in a hearing-style format in September. And I feel like this needs to be a big part of Democrats' closing argument between now and November.

TOM WHEELER:

So I will point out that so only 12% of Americans have heard of Project 2025. We have, yet I don't believe ...

HUFFMAN:

You want me to tell you what's in it? Yeah, so it is nominally a product of the Heritage Foundation, which is of course a rabid right-wing think tank, subsidized by your tax dollars, I should mention, because they pretend to be nonpartisan and a nonprofit.

GREACEN:

To my dismay, I learned when I revisited D.C. for the first time in years that they built this gigantic edifice overlooking Capitol Hill.

HUFFMAN:

in an ominous way. So yeah, we are in the shadow of.

GREACEN:

crystals.

HUFFMAN:

So the Heritage Foundation puts out the document, but they are working with over 100 right wing groups and they're boasting of this unprecedented collaboration. So it's not just them, it's really the whole constellation of right wing groups and it includes the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the group that Mike Johnson used to be a lawyer for that goes around trying to eliminate church state separation attacking abortion rights and other things. So pretty much every one of the leading. The Heartland Institute. They're all there. It's a who's who.

So that part of it is different than what we've seen in the past because Heritage in the past has kind of developed these suggestions for incoming Republican presidents. They did it for Reagan. They did it for Reagan. They always do it. This is much more than just a sort of suggestion or a wish list. How is it different? Yeah, so it's way more specific. It's way more ambitious. It is way more explicitly extreme. So I can give you some examples of that, but let me just start by saying you need to take this very seriously because they're not even pretending that this is just a wish list or suggestion. Steve Bannon is on his podcast saying this is our war plan. This is how we're gonna end American democracy as we know it and remake our federal government. This is how our aspiring dictator Donald Trump is gonna become a real dictator if they get the chance.

So how are they gonna do it? First of all, they're going to decimate the federal workforce and the civil service system. They don't like the civil service system because there are like worker protections and whistleblower protections and things that prevent a dictator like Donald Trump from just ordering, oh, let's say, the National Weather Service to change its hurricane map so that his little Sharpie thing would be accurate. There was no, if there's nothing standing in his way, that's the map you would have seen from the National Weather Service and it goes on and on. So this is what the so-called Schedule F. Yeah, it sounds so innocuous and technical. Schedule F civil service reform and they will tell you that over the last 100 years, the civil service has grown into this unaccountable thing. They don't work for anyone. They're anti-democratic.

They've got their whole narrative to suggest that the civil service system is a threat to democracy, which is complete bunk. The civil service system is there to provide continuity of government so that the pendulum swings of our elections do not disrupt essential functions like your food inspectors and your air traffic controllers and the other competencies that we need to see. Teddy Roosevelt put most of this in place over 100 years ago. So we need civil servants, even when they sometimes don't want to engage in rabid partisan politics and that's the problem that Trump has.

Okay, so Schedule F would call for tens of thousands of civil servants across every agency to be reclassified as political appointees so they would be at will and fireable by Donald Trump and they would be fired. They're already saying that there will be a massive purge. And in their place, how are we gonna repopulate all these agencies? Well, they have an answer to that that's just as disturbing. They've created these right-wing training academies and they are gonna build out this LinkedIn-like database of MAGA loyalists who will then repopulate your federal government. And that is a big part of how they're gonna accomplish their objectives. They're gonna knock down other constraints on executive power. So you've got a whole bunch of agencies in the federal government that have independence and autonomy. Some of it just by the norms and practices that we have embraced and some of it statutorily.

They don't like any of that and so they wanna weaponize the Department of Justice, for example, make it so President Trump can tell them who to prosecute, who to investigate, who to jail. They wanna get rid of the FBI entirely. If you have any FBI left when they're done, Donald Trump will tell them who to investigate and how to do it under this unitary executive consolidation of power. Agencies like the FCC and the FTC, so that's communications and trade, will be brought under complete White House authority so Donald Trump can dictate which corporate mergers go through. He can dictate which parts of the broadband spectrum get allocated for different corporate interests, basically for him to have this incredible control over handing out gifts to corporate America or punishing corporate America, part of his consolidation of power. And it goes on from there. Then you get into the culture war part of Project 2025, which is also quite extreme.

GREACEN:

And this kind of brings us to what I was hoping would be kind of our drill down moment, which is Project 2025 lays out this incredibly extreme agenda across the entire federal government. It's got 20 plus chapters for individual federal agencies, each of which is 50 some pages long, 900 pages in total. So there's enormous detail in here, but it's suffused with what seems to me a ferociously anti-environmental agenda, a deeply paranoid, almost pathological hatred of climate science, of environmental efforts. And that seems to kind of infect the entire document. But I was hoping we could spend just a little time talking about like the Department of the Interior and what it says about what should happen there as sort of an example.

HUFFMAN:

All of your worst fears about the fossil fuel industry's agenda and the anti-environmental agenda, they're all in there, for sure. But to some extent, that's nothing new, because I've been dealing with that the whole time I've been in Congress, and this is kind of what Republicans always bring.

GREACEN:

Well, and in fact, the guy who's nominally the author of the section on the Department of the Interior, William Perry Pendley, has been in public office since the Reagan administration in many ways. And the agenda he brings, this sort of cowboy- Hates public land, hates environmental regulation, yeah. It goes back practically to Bernardo Devoto and the middle of the last century when the grazing interests were really trying to get rid of national forests and public lands generally.

HUFFMAN:

Yeah, they want to devolve it back to the states, if not the private sector, and monetize it. Yeah, but again, none of this is new.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. Our guest this week, Congressman Jared Huffman. Our big topic today is Project 2025.

HUFFMAN:

We've seen this so many times before. The new parts of Project 2025 to me are the explicit attacks on democratic institutions and democracy itself. And science. And science, certainly.

GREACEN:

to me.

HUFFMAN:

that's part of the civil service reform to

GREACEN:

It also goes back to like what we've seen from this party and the lies that Trump built his birther campaign on, the lies about science that preceded even the COVID pandemic, especially about climate science, but then the COVID pandemic and all the lies we've seen around that. It seems to me we've got this very, very strange place to put the federal government as against the kinds of science you don't like. We'll say the science that works, the science that...

HUFFMAN:

The government has supported a lot of good science that has become inconvenient to the MAGA worldview, right? Whether that is climate change, whether it's public health, whether it's clean air, clean water...

GREACEN:

And how can this work as a culture war? How can this work as a political agenda, to just build a foundation of lies?

HUFFMAN:

I don't think it will work, but they're telling us in every way this is what they're going to try to do. So yeah, this is crazy extreme and dystopic. Our job is to make sure people understand what's in it and that it's not an idle threat. This is literally what they're going to try to do. And I hope that's enough to get people off the couch and to the polls and the best way to stop this is to stop it in its tracks in November.

GREACEN:

So on the specifics a little bit, what we keep seeing in the document is we're going to roll back the entire Biden administration agenda in terms of the inflation reduction act, clean energy transition to a climate safe future. Like we just want to get rid of all of that. But the flip side of it is, as you said, the old agenda of let's log it, burn it, use it. we have an obligation to extract all of the fossil fuels. What happens if we do that?

HUFFMAN:

That's the rhetorical question. It's not good. We cook the planet and we got to probably get on Elon Musk's spaceship and hope there's room for us on Mars.

GREACEN:

It's just, I'm not often at a loss for words. Yeah. But...

HUFFMAN:

They don't think about those things, though, Scott. I mean, some of these people behind, this Russell Vaught guy who was in Trump's OMB, this is a true believer Christian nationalist. They literally believe that God will not let us cook the planet, that there will be some divine answer, or that it's all sort of a glorious end days thing as part of the apocalypse and the rapture and all these other things. So that's scary when people like that potentially have actual power in this country and make policy, not just for climate and energy, but for foreign policy and war making and all kinds of other things.

GREACEN:

So one of the most important pieces of federal law for me and Tom, I know, and probably for you too, is the Endangered Species Act. I know you worked with it in your previous capacity. Yeah, they hate it. Yeah. And they say that the ESA is used to seize private property, prevent economic development and interfere with the rights of states over their wildlife populations. That's the, yeah. So it's basically just wants to crush it and do away with it.

HUFFMAN:

Project 2025 is basically the Kristi Noem School of Animal Welfare.

GREACEN:

But I noticed in there one really alarming idea, an order to the Fish and Wildlife Service to develop a conservation triage program.

HUFFMAN:

haven't focused on this detail of it. Tell me more about that.

GREACEN:

That's about it, but like my reaction was a what now?

HUFFMAN:

I don't know what that means.

GREACEN:

Well, triage is, of course, a concept from medicine that says you take the people who you can help. The worst first. You help them. Those you cannot help, you have to leave aside. And those who can be helped but don't need it immediately...

HUFFMAN:

Well, that makes sense, they want...

GREACEN:

today

HUFFMAN:

I don't want to let a lot of species blank out. They're okay with that.

GREACEN:

And they're saying pretty overtly, like, we can't afford to keep these species around.

HUFFMAN:

which they are saying it out loud in ways that are so arrogant. The hubris is amazing. The ESA does actually have a mechanism for situations where it doesn't look like you can save a species, and the economic and other costs of doing so, which is being too- It's called the God Squad. It's called the God Squad. It's in there. I've been before it, yeah, yeah. But that's not good enough for them. They want to actually accelerate the triage and the extinction.

GREACEN:

I guess a last question for you, Congressman. On all of these fronts, and especially on the environmental front, what would we be doing if the other party hadn't lost its mind? What would we be doing if you had partners in DC who would work with you?

HUFFMAN:

Gosh, there's a lot we could be doing. It's it's depressing to think about the missed opportunities There's so much good work that could be happening right now. I I don't think we can get back to that until we Force this fever to break here And I think the only way to do that is with a resounding win in this election the country's so dang divided what I don't want to do is sort of limp through this election with maybe a a Wounded second-term Joe Biden and a narrow Democratic majority in Congress and they simply rebrand project 2025 is project 20 29 Or whatever it may be. We've got to get past this dysfunction and well, you know, we talked about the Anti-democracy part we talked about the anti-environment part There's one more piece that I need to Alarm people about and that is your individual liberties and freedoms and the culture war and The end of church-state separation that is all in there in a big big way And I just want to make sure that folks are aware of that. Yeah It is quite extreme. They're talking. I mentioned bringing these independent agencies under Donald Trump's Dictatorial power. Well, the FDA would be one of them and guess what? He's going to tell the FDA to do under this roadmap with rescind your approval of Mephistopheles So that you no longer have medication that can be sent through the mail to allow abortion There will be a nationwide abortion ban if they get their way They're gonna dust off the these old morality codes from the 1870s the Comstock Act Which itself has this old dormant anti-abortion revision, which they would use to end Reproductive choice in this country and do a lot more they would declare all sorts of things obscene in a criminal way So that librarians and teachers and others could be prosecuted for talking about things that make them uncomfortable like gender identity and just about anything else that Russell Vaught and the other Fire-breathing Christian nationalists don't want teachers and librarians talking about pretty dystopic

GREACEN:

by the Southern Baptist Convention, basically. Right. Yeah, I guess what I was trying to get you to articulate there, and forgive my attempt at manipulation, but the fact that the Biden administration has gotten a lot of great stuff going, and we really ought to be doing a lot more like that.

HUFFMAN:

It's on infrastructure.

GREACEN:

It pains me as an enviro of my particular ilk to like say the government's doing good things, but like we are we're

HUFFMAN:

You're so right, but we're at this point politically where if the Democrats are for it, the Republicans almost reflexively just decide they have to be against it, even if it's something good. I mean, we called it bipartisan infrastructure law, Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act. We call it the bipartisan infrastructure law. I sit on the Natural Resources Committee. Only one of that committee's Republicans voted for it, and that was Don Young, and he passed away. He's not even with us anymore. Most Republicans voted against it. We had a handful in the House that actually supported this nominally bipartisan infrastructure law. They're all running around taking credit for the projects that are getting funded. You know, vote no and take the dough, but to answer your question, there's just almost no space left to do anything big and transformative in a bipartisan way, because, and this is not a both sides thing. This is the MAGA Republican Party, and you could trace this back in lots of ways. Some people say it was Newt Gingrich, but I see certainly roots of it in Mitch McConnell saying that the only thing I want to accomplish is keep Barack Obama from having a second term.

GREACEN:

And who was Denny Hester anyway, and why does he have a rule?

HUFFMAN:

It has just gotten worse and worse and worse from there. And so we're now at the point where, I mean, jeez, border security? Yeah. Here we were with a bipartisan border security thing coming out of the Senate, and Donald Trump decides it would make Joe Biden look good, and he puts out the order, and all the Republicans run from it. And we can't even do that. So, no, I don't think there's, I don't wanna peddle false hope that we will anytime soon be able to do big environmental, clean energy, climate action on a bipartisan basis. First, we've gotta crush this mutation of the Republican Party and get back to having a sensible conservative party in this nation. Once we do that, we'll get back to bipartisanship, and I'm looking forward to that. Right.

WHEELER:

Well, I'll add that.

HUFFMAN:

Yeah, you've been quiet over that time.

WHEELER:

I'm manning the soundboard. So, Congressman, where can people find more information about Project 2025 and the risk?

HUFFMAN:

Yeah, so they can follow me on social media. I'm gonna be dribbling out all kinds of information on this. I think you're gonna see the mainstream media starting to talk about it a lot more, and I think our task force rollout has actually helped to spur some of that. So I'm booked through the weekend on cable TV. I was just on a whole bunch of podcasts, including yours today, thank you. So we're gonna be talking about this a ton. And some of the leading outside groups that are talking about this a lot are like Accountable.us, Democracy Forward, the ACLU, the Brennan Center is doing some good work on this. It's an impressive group, and we're working very closely with many of them on our task force. In September, that's gonna be the big one, because that hearing that we have with the task force will be a rollup of all of the highlights that we think people need to know. And this is the hard part of it. We just scratched the surface in our conversation today about Project 2025. There's so much more, and you can overwhelm people. So we're gonna try to distill it, we're gonna try to make it digestible and present it to the American people. And I hope all of your listeners and lots of others will follow that.

WHEELER:

All right, and we'll also have links to all the things that Congressman Huffman just said on the lostcoastoutpost.com, so check it out there. Thank you, Congressman.

GREACEN:

Thank you very much for your time today and all your work.

HUFFMAN:

Thanks for having me.

WHEELER:

Well, Scott, that was that was a great, great show. Thanks for again, Congressman Huffman for coming on.

GREACEN:

Yeah, I wish we could have had him longer. He had a flight to catch, but we're lucky, I think, to have the kind of access we do to the kind of leaders we have here on the North Coast. Absolutely. I didn't manage to slip it into the interview, but I often tease the congressman by calling him one of our top environmental leaders in Congress, because I think there's a case to be made that he's the second best environmentalist in Congress, but no lower. Raul Grijalva of Tucson has been there longer and done more and is just fantastic and is amazing. So it's no slur on Jared to say he's the second best, but he is an amazing advocate, and I think the leadership he's showing on Project 2025 is just one aspect of the kind of leadership we've seen from Jared on all these fronts, frankly.

WHEELER:

So the thing that scares me about Project 2025 is you and I both worked all the way through the Trump administration. And I think at the beginning of the Trump administration, he was not very effectual.

GREACEN:

They sucked. They were very, very bad at government. And it took them a long time to figure out where the tools were, where the levers were. They did bring in some people. David Bernhardt, the former general counsel of Westland's water district, who's very capable, but he was not the first secretary of the interior.

WHEELER:

They had to run through a number of people who weren't crazy enough. Ryan Zinke wasn't crazy enough for ...

GREACEN:

Or he's too corrupt and too much of a buffoon.

WHEELER:

Yeah, it's something. And so the thing that worries me now is that they have the MAGA camp well-established, they have the pool of resources, and now they have a place.

GREACEN:

Braining camps that congressman described, yeah. And what they have in this project 2025 mandate for leadership document is a pretty detailed, quite lengthy set of quite specific policy prescriptions to which they will hold one another. That's the idea.

WHEELER:

All right. Well, thank you listeners. And we'll talk to you next week about more environmental news from the north coast of California. See ya.