European Union flag on wall with a crack. Credit: Alexander Borisenko / Alamy Stock Photo
The group behind the radical Project 2025 agenda is increasingly turning its attention to Europe.
The group that drafted a key blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term convened a meeting in Washington D.C. this week to consider proposals for bulldozing the European Union (EU).
The Polish investigative outlet VSquare revealed that the Heritage Foundation gathered hardline conservative groups on 11 March to hear how they would overhaul the current structures of the EU.
The “closed-door workshop” featured a debate on a new paper produced by the lobby groups MCC and Ordo Iuris entitled: “The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the 21st Century”.
The paper proposes dismantling the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. It claims that the “EU is evolving into a quasi-federal state, limiting national decision-making power” and is imposing “ideologically motivated policies on member states, without any mandate”. Under the plan, the EU would cease to function in its current guise, and would instead be renamed the European Community of Nations (ECN).
Kenneth Haar, a researcher and campaigner at the transparency watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory, said it was “quite simply terrifying” to see the Heritage Foundation moving its attention to Europe.”
“Most of the attacks made by the Trump presidency in recent weeks on civil rights, on migrants, on LGBTQ+ rights and more, can be traced back to Project 2025,” he said. “We should be worried about them building up ambitions and strength in Europe.”
DeSmog can also reveal that the Heritage Foundation has been holding private meetings with European politicians in recent months, as the group attempts to forge new alliances on the continent.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Ater a disastrous press conference, it may be Trump, not Zelenskyy, who needs to watch his back | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
From blowing up at Zelenskyy to fast-tracking Executive Orders, what can we learn from Trump’s recent behaviour?
Donald Trump’s presidency has barely entered its second month, and the change he has brought about has already been so significant and so rapid that it is hard to imagine how his administration will evolve in the long term.
The substantial changes are, in part, due to the extensive planning done in anticipation of his winning a second term. The 900-page Project 2025 put together by the Heritage Foundation has provided a blueprint for Trump’s far-right conservatism that, combined with the decision to act very fast, has allowed him to already issue more than sixty Executive Orders – catching opponents off-guard.
Looking to the future may be better helped by understanding both Trump’s behaviour and his overall outlook on life, with two recent examples pointing the way. Some commentators see the president as an unpredictable figurehead who is hardly able to direct affairs, but that doesn’t face up to his being the locus of power for now and, in any case, he has plenty of determined advisers who have been waiting years for his second presidency.
The first example of Trump’s behaviour was shown by his reaction to a tragedy that happened just after his inauguration, when an American Airlines flight and a US Army helicopter collided and crashed into the Potomac River close to Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. All 67 people on board the two aircraft were killed.
While the cause of the crash is still under investigation, within hours Trump had blamed the diversity-linked hiring policies of previous Democrat administrations, claiming they had lowered personnel standards in air traffic control. A tragedy became an occasion for immediate political point scoring.
More recently, we have seen Trump use social media to promote the new ‘Trump Gaza’. The president shared a bizarre AI-generated video in which the area had been ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population and transformed into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Perhaps most telling is the full-colour representation of the main street, which Trump envisages as being dominated by a 60-foot high golden statue of himself.
Together, these instances point to someone who is comprehensively self-obsessed. He might be seen as an egotist or narcissist but certainly has an element of the solipsist in his make-up as well. He is, in other words, beyond egocentric.
But Trump’s impact on the world stage has to reckon with how the world is already changing, especially the rise of the global oligarchy, with vast power concentrated in the hands of a few hundred super-rich individuals. It’s clear that the president views these people as the true exemplars of success – he has formed a singularly powerful group of them around him.
Most notable among Trump’s circle of favoured oligarchs is Elon Musk, who supported his 2024 election campaign to the tune of $277m and has since been given an unofficial role in government and attended Cabinet meetings and Oval Office press conferences.
The wealth of Musk and two other oligarchs close to Trump, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, extends to $905bn, as US Senator Bernie Sanders reminded us last month. Writing in the Guardian, Sanders pointed out that this is “more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 170 million people”, adding that “since Trump’s election their wealth has grown by $217bn”.
This is in line with the findings in Oxfam’s 2025 Davos Report, which last week reported that while the number of people in poverty has remained near stagnant for the past 35 years, extreme wealth is surging. Four more people become billionaires each week, and the world is now on course to have five trillionaires and well over four thousand billionaires within the next decade.
The rising global oligarchy is not easily mapped with precision. Some members of the super-rich stay well out of the public eye, a few become patrons of the arts and philanthropists, but many others are heavily involved in the use of political power.
Though a degree of oligarchic power is evident in many countries worldwide, there are particular concentrations in a handful of nations, particularly Russia, China, India and the US – where Mark Twain’s quip about having “the best government money can buy” still stands.
Between Trump’s personality and his billionaire associates, the best guide to the next four years is to simply assume that ‘self’ and ‘wealth’ will be the president’s constant driving forces. It is not a happy prospect and will require persistent opposition, combined with repeated expressions of more positive ways forward. But is there anything that might limit him as he works to remake the US?
The first answer might just be his very associates. Many incredibly wealthy people are used to getting their own way, which could easily lead to disagreements sufficient to unbalance the administration. That will be much to the dislike and anger of Trump, who may well end up causing great disruption as he finds and disposes of the scapegoats who can keep the blame well away from him.
Then there is internal opposition stemming from numerous legal challenges that are already being mounted, many of them in recognition of the mass use of executive orders, which may undermine the authority of Article II of the US constitution.
Trump is also likely to run into problems due to the huge and vast array of experience and knowledge that will have been lost as a result of his administration’s decision to fire many thousands of federal employees from the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Forestry Service, National Parks, US AID and elsewhere. This is eventually likely to lead to numerous mistakes and delays right across government.
Then there is the matter of US foreign policy, where the ‘Trump Gaza’ fiasco is the clearest possible indicator that Trump just does not have a clue how many people feel. Beyond that, though, is the question of Trump’s view of Vladimir Putin. It is becoming uncomfortably clear that either the Russian president has some kind of hold over Trump or else Trump really does see him as simply another very powerful and hugely rich person just like himself – a kindred spirit in a new oligarchic world of disorder.
This leads to one other question: how long will Trump even be in the White House? A clue may come from Friday’s notorious press conference with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. People across the world will have seen clips of Zelenskyy being hung out to dry by Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, but watching the entire 45-minute video, not just the blow-up, reveals a rather different element.
The conference was largely good-natured for the first 35 minutes, with Zelenskyy comfortably holding his own and Trump even praising Ukraine while doing his usual trick of claiming to be the greatest American since George Washington. It is only at the end that Vance moves in aggressively on Zelensky in a manner seemingly designed to get Trump to lose his cool.
Perhaps it is Trump, not Zelensky, who should be worried when reflecting on the experience – and who should watch his back. It may have been on the last day of February but Vance’s behaviour was not too far from the Ides of March.
“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Elon Musk told the thousands attending the far-right Alternative for Germany party’s rally on January 25. France 24 English/YouTube
The tech billionaire is invigorating groups in the U.S. and Europe aiming to sabotage climate action, a DeSmog media analysis shows.
In December, a Chicago-based organization called the Heartland Institute, which for decades has attempted to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change, devoted an episode of its daily podcast to Elon Musk.
As recently as 2022, Heartland figures had ridiculed the Tesla CEO as a member of the “billionaire climate elite” based on Musk’s claim that as a top manufacturer of electric vehicles, his company was “doing the most to solve climate change.”
But perhaps, the podcast guests speculated, Musk was finally “abandoning the climate cult.”
The episode was recorded after Musk had given upwards of $277 million to get Donald Trump elected president, argued that “we don’t need to rush” on addressing climate change, and vowed to cut $2 trillion of federal government spending. One guest on the show was cautiously optimistic, saying: “I’m coming around on Musk.”
Heartland, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, isn’t the only anti-climate group embracing Musk these days.
DeSmog journalists in the European Union, the UK and the United States reviewed public materials from prominent climate deniers referencing Musk over recent months. Taken as a whole, these podcasts, opinion pieces, social media posts, newsletters, YouTube videos, and interviews with legacy media reveal an unmistakable trend: Musk’s public embrace of right-wing populists is invigorating a transatlantic movement aiming to spread doubt about the reality of climate change and sabotage action on the crisis.
His interventions ahead of Germany’s elections on Sunday have energized the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which says that climate policy “threatens our freedom,” a January poll suggests.
His courtship, along with Trump, of hardline leaders in Europe threatens to torpedo hopes of progressive climate action by the EU, think tanks warn.
And in the U.S., Musk’s ongoing war against the federal bureaucracy “erodes our collective ability to adapt to climate impacts,” Amanda Fencl, director of climate science for the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, has warned.
Some longtime climate deniers are thrilled, however, recognising that even a brief endorsement from Musk to his 217.9 million followers on X — the social media platform formerly called Twitter, which he bought in 2022 — can confer instant visibility and excitement.
“We welcome Elon Musk into the climate red pill group,” Climate Depot executive director Marc Moranostated in December, using a phrase popular among Trump supporters that refers to rejecting liberal viewpoints.
Musk, contacted via Tesla, did not respond to a detailed list of questions about his shifting climate views.
‘Windmills of Shame’
When Germans vote for a new government on Sunday, the EU’s most populous country is widely predicted to shift to the right. Leading the polls at about 29 percent of voters is the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, which intends to prioritise economic growth over accelerated climate measures endorsed by the ruling Greens and Social Democrats, or SPD.
Less certain is the influence that the surging far-right AfD will have on the next German government. On X, Musk has openly endorsed and platformed the party, which wants to ditch Germany’s climate commitments.
As migration and economic stagnation dominate German politics, the AfD is now polling close to 21 percent — potentially doubling the 10 percent of votes it won in the last national elections in 2021. The party states that the level of human contribution to global warming is “not scientifically proven,” and opposes state support for renewable energy and electrification of heat and transport, while advocating for Germany’s gas and coal power sectors.
The CDU says that it will not form a coalition government involving the AfD, and maintains its commitment to Germany’s 2045 net-zero emissions target. But despite its opposition status, the AfD is already shaping national political discourse — and even decision-making.
While the CDU and Germany’s other mainstream parties have traditionally refused to vote with the AfD due to its extreme stances on immigration and Germany’s Nazi past, the CDU broke this so-called “firewall” last month by voting with the AfD on a resolution to restrict migration.
Musk has sided with the AfD on its hard-line immigration stance and nationalist messaging. In December, Musk openly endorsed the party, shocking liberal Germans by writing on X that “only AfD can save Germany.” He went on to join a 9 January livestream with the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, who has attracted controversy for Islamaphobic remarks, such as in a 2018 Bundestag speech when she said “burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knifemen, and other ‘good-for-nothings’ will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state.”
In terms of climate policy, Weidel has suggested that if the AfD takes power in Germany, it could dismantle wind turbines, recently calling them “windmills of shame,” The wind sector produced a third of the country’s electricity last year.
During their conversation, both Musk and Weidel expressed support for nuclear power — with Musk also saying he was a “big fan” of solar energy — and Weidel stating that Germany’s CO2 footprint was “obnoxiously very very high.” Both steered clear of the AfD’s official climate-denialist party platform.
Then, less than two weeks later, Musk sparked a global furore by raising his arm to the crowd at Trump’s January 20 inauguration in a gesture that many likened to a Nazi salute. The Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, a German organisation which advocates against right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism, saw no ambivalence in Musk’s move, describing it as a “Hitler salute.” Musk responded to the outpouring of criticism by posting on X: “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
Five days after Trump was sworn-in, Musk ramped up his support for the AfD by addressing a party rally via videolink. He urged supporters to “take pride” in being German over “some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything”, and told them that there’s “too much of a focus on past guilt” — remarks condemned by Polish prime minister Donald Tusk.
YouTube Influencer
Musk had previously enjoyed support from Germany’s centrist parties. When Tesla opened a multi-billion dollar electric car factory in the State of Brandenburg in 2022, the move was billed as a boost to both the country’s manufacturing sector and climate credentials. But during his January livestream with Weidel, Musk expressed his disdain for the bureaucratic procedures needed to build the Tesla factory, which he said amounted to “25,000 pages”.
Musk’s public support for the AfD can be traced back to his interactions with Naomi Seibt, a 24-year-old German influencer who built a sizeable social media following attacking “climate alarmism” and cultivating a brand as the anti-green doppelganger of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. Her rise to prominence was aided by the Heartland Institute, which featured her in a YouTube video it published in February 2020. Seibt has since told Reuters that the organisation had paid her $4,000 a month for three months as a “scholarship.” (Seibt no longer appears to be affiliated with the group).
German influencer Naomi Seibt appears on the Heartland Institute’s YouTube channel on February 11, 2020. Credit: Heartland Institute/YouTube
When Seibt posted on X last June that she’d voted for the AfD in the EU elections, which saw the formerly fringe party rise to 16 percent of the total vote — its best-ever result — Musk began sending her private messages asking for more information, according to Seibt. “And then he started following me,” Seibt told the BBC, noting that “it took him many months to decide to support the AfD.”
Musk’s backing could boost a party that’s heavily critical of the country’s decarbonization efforts. A January poll of German voters from the U.S.-based Democracy Institute think tank suggested that 28 percent of respondents say they are “more likely” to vote AfD due to Musk’s support, while 23 percent said it made their support “less likely.”
Germany’s center-right and center-left leadership have condemned Musks’s interventions. Friedrich Merz, head of the CDU, told The Wall Street Journal last week that Musk would face consequences for boosting the AfD. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a member of the centre-left SPD, last month called Musk’s support for European far-right parties “disgusting.”
The new Trump administration is already mirroring the billionaire’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, U.S. Vice-President JD Vance met with Weidel, the AfD co-chief, on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich, while snubbing Scholz.
With the U.S. playing a major role in German trade and security, this budding transatlantic alliance could bode poorly for climate action in Europe’s biggest economy.
Neither Seibt nor the AfD responded to questions.
Courting the European Far-Right
Musk’s electrifying impact on the AfD builds on his years of dabbling in far-right politics in other European countries.
In December 2023, Musk appeared as a guest of honour at an annual convention in Rome hosted by the Brothers of Italy, the right-wing populist party of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who had said earlier that year that “ultra-ecological fanaticism” was an economic threat.
Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party, also attended the 2023 convention. He had recently predicted that Spanish citizens would hang their current Socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, by his feet, remarks that were so controversial that some Brothers of Italy members asked for his invitation to be withdrawn, the Spanish newspaper El País reported.
But whereas Abascal’s presence threatened to create divisions at the event, “Elon Musk’s case is somewhat different, arousing only enthusiasm and selfie fervor,” noted El País. “The tycoon is nowadays the darling of almost all those on the ultra-right who seek media and economic backing, and a cutting-edge image.”
A month later, in January 2024, Musk again signalled his interest in European politics.
With German farmers protesting the end of government diesel fuel subsidies and a new tax on agricultural vehicles, Anthony Lee, who had stood for the European Parliament as a candidate for Free Voters, a German conservative populist party, gave an interview to right-wing Dutch influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek. Lee told Vlaardingerbroek that politicians “want our land to build industry, houses. Houses for refugees, whoever, I don’t care what for.”
After Musk reacted to the video on X, writing “Support the farmers!” Lee said in a video message that “I think it’s just awesome that Elon Musk himself tweeted this…This is only possible because we stand together.” The video was viewed over 200,000 times. Lee did not respond to a request for comment.
A year later, Musk was rubbing shoulders at Trump’s inauguration with a who’s-who of right-wing European politicians, including Spain’s Abascal, France’s Éric Zemmour and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, all of whom have questioned the science and urgency of climate change.
Analysts with the independent European Policy Center think tank in Brussels sees the inauguration guestlist as a worrying sign that Trump and Musk are helping strengthen “ideological ties between significant radical forces on both sides of the Atlantic.” They are concerned about the impact a second Trump administration may have on a host of EU-wide initiatives, including a raft of climate reforms known as the European Green Deal.
“The most concerning possibility,” the analysts argue, is “Trump’s probable exploitation of far-right leaders or governments to block EU policies or advance his agenda.”
Musk’s Shift to ‘Climate Skeptic’
For years, Musk enjoyed a reputation as a crusading green energy entrepreneur on a mission to render the internal combustion engine obsolete, celebrated by climate activists and cleantech investors alike — despite growing signs of his right-ward political leanings. As recently as last August, the online news outlet E&E News ran a story speculating that “Musk might be the only person Trump listens to on climate.”
But Musk’s politics and business interests seemed to decisively converge during a 2024 meeting of Tesla executives in Palo Alto, California, where he shelved plans to develop a more budget-friendly compact car that could be marketed to lower-income customers around the world, according to a report in the Washington Post. This had previously been a key part of Tesla’s plan to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
Instead, Musk approved a plan worth billions of dollars to purchase computer chips that could improve Tesla’s luxury vehicles, the Washington Post report said. Musk had shifted from calling for “a popular uprising” against the fossil fuel industry in 2016 to stating that there were more important global problems to address.
In a livestream with Trump last year, Musk stated that “we don’t need to rush” in fixing climate change.
This also happens to be the message of Bjørn Lomborg, a longtime Danish climate crisis denier (and apparent “friend” of Trump administration energy secretary Chris Wright) whose 2023 book Best Things First argued that there were more important global priorities to address than climate change. According to a recent edition of Lomborg’s newsletter, the Canadian conservative influencer Jordan Peterson shared a copy of Lomborg’s book with Musk in 2024.
Within U.S. denial networks, some leaders link Musk’s shift to the flourishing of anti-climate messages on Twitter after the billionaire purchased the platform, and renamed it X. “I mean, there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of climate skeptics on X/Twitter, and they’re constantly posting content that we put out here,” the Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts argued on the group’s podcast. “Musk has had to have seen some of this stuff.”
Musk’s former critics in climate denial circles now see him as the best bet for implementing their most extreme ideas. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been attempting to shut down key climate-related agencies like the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.
On the website of the conservative group CFACT, prominent denier Paul Dreissen — who previously accused Musk of holding “sanctimonious” views on “the alleged climate crisis” — has offered policy suggestions to the billionaire as he wages war on the federal bureaucracy: End subsidies for renewable energy; terminate funding for environmental and climate justice programs; and require applicants for climate research funding to “provide computer codes and analyses so that reviewers can view and evaluate their work.”
Parts of Musk’s plan seem to rely on two recent, pro-industry Supreme Court decisions to unwind regulatory authority long held by federal agencies — an overarching goal of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 initiative, retooled with Musk’s Silicon Valley spin.
If successful, these cuts will dismantle decades of clean air and water protections, and hamstring the country’s ability to respond proactively to the worsening climate crisis, said Fencl, the director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida in October 2024, but caused deadly and destructive flooding hundreds of miles from the coast due to extreme rain. At least 219 people died, and the damages are estimated at $78.7 billion. Credit: PBS NewsHour/YouTube.
“Our infrastructure systems are not going to withstand the climate impacts we’re expecting, and taking away the government’s spending in these spaces really erodes our collective ability to adapt to climate impacts,” Fencl said.
Raising the UK’s Political Temperature
Since throwing his fortune and social media influence behind Trump, Musk has teased the possibility of attempting a similar campaign in the UK.
In December, Musk met with Reform UK leader Farage, who also co-founded and formerly led the Brexit Party, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The two were in talks about Musk offering a £100 million (over $125 million) donation to Reform, The Times of London reported. Farage has said he finds it “extraordinary that people call carbon dioxide a pollutant, and Reform UK’s latest party manifesto recycles a long-debunked claim that “scientists disagree as to how much” human activity is causing climate change. So such a donation would have been a major investment by Musk in transatlantic climate denial.
Then, in January, Musk used X to call for the release of Tommy Robinson, a far-right British influencer serving an 18-month contempt of court sentence for making false accusations about a Syrian schoolboy. When Farage rejected his calls to join forces with Robinson, Musk tweeted that, “the Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”
Farage was not sufficiently swayed by Musk’s comments to support Robinson’s return, although he struck a conciliatory note by saying the tech mogul didn’t know “the full story” about the provocateur’s criminal past. By the end of January, Farage was signalling to the press that his rift with Musk was over, telling The New York Times that the billionaire was still open to donating to Reform UK. “We’ve got very similar goals on some areas, slightly different emphases in others,” Farage said, adding that Musk was sharing valuable information about how Trump won over swing voters during the U.S. election.
Farage is also collaborating with the Heartland Institute, which has claimed credit for working with hard-right parties in Austria and Hungary to attempt to stall the EU’s Nature Restoration Law, which sets targets for restoring damaged ecosystems, as well as other green policies. Farage helped launch the pro-Trump institute’s new UK-Europe branch in December.
Farage’s newly formed Reform UK won just five of the 650 seats in the lower house of parliament in last year’s elections, and was unsuccessful in generating a backlash against the country’s net-zero emissions goal. Nevertheless, the party appears to be pushing the historically weakened Tories to the right on climate change — echoing Farage’s previous strategy to rally support for the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Regardless of how much tangible backing Musk might provide to right-wing figures in the UK, his winning bet on Trump, and assault on federal government spending, has inspired Farage and his allies with a sense of the possible. “There’s a heck of a lot we’ve learned from that we will implement over the next few years,” Farage told The New York Times.
Some European leaders are looking for ways to neutralize Musk’s efforts to sway voters.
In January, as Musk posted false allegations that UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer had let child sex abusers escape justice, France called on the European Commission to take action against Musk and X for election interference. According to The Financial Times, Musk was also investigating how to get Starmer out of office before the country’s next election, and replace his center-left government with right-wingers.
Members of the European Parliament, who are elected representatives of their respective nations, are also criticizing the Commission for failing to use its authority under the EU’s Digital Services Act to investigate and fine Musk and X, as well as other major social media platforms, for spreading disinformation.
Asked about Musk’s tirade during a public event in January, Starmer did not name the billionaire directly in his response. “Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they’re not interested in victims,” said Starmer. “They’re interested in themselves.”
Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Conservative MP Priti Patel speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2021. Credit: GB News / Facebook
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint proposes sweeping anti-climate policies.
New Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel earlier this year welcomed into Parliament a radical U.S. organisation behind Donald Trump’s hard-right plan for a second term as president.
As reported by DeSmog, Conservative MP Patel met with Kevin Roberts and Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation in March, praising the pair on her Facebook page as “our friends across the pond” who stand for “Conservative values and beliefs at home and abroad”.
Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, while Gardiner is the director of its ‘Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom’.
The Heritage Foundation is an ultra-conservative group that authored the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Donald Trump term, which proposes a range of radical anti-climate policies, including slashing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrapping investment in renewable energy, and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency.
Project 2025 has been accused of being “extreme” and “authoritarian” for setting out a plan to rapidly “reform” the U.S. government by shuttering bureaus and offices, overturning regulations, and replacing thousands of public sector employees with hand-picked political allies of Trump. The agenda also proposes radical tax cuts, and a crackdown on reproductive rights.
On Wednesday (6 November), following Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, Roberts sent an email on behalf of the foundation, saying that: “starting now, we will execute our plans to dismantle the administrative state.”
At least 140 authors of Project 2025 worked for the last Trump administration, according to CNN, while several are expected to hold positions in the next Trump White House.
Patel also gave a speech about national security to the Heritage Foundation, hosted by Gardiner, in November 2021. Patel was at the time serving as home secretary, and her address was published on the UK government website.
This news comes as the Conservative Party realigns itself after the election of new leader Kemi Badenoch, positioning itself as having better relations with the incoming Trump administration.
In her first Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week, Badenoch called on Labour not to oppose a Trump address to Parliament, and asked whether Foreign Secretary David Lammy had apologised to the Republican for labelling him as a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” in 2020.
Patel was appointed to Badenoch’s new shadow cabinet earlier this week, alongside Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, who also has ties to the Heritage Foundation.
In February, Jenrick – who came second in the recent Tory leadership election – gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC entitled, “Securing Sovereign Borders in an Age of Mass Migration”.
Project 2025 proposes new sweeping restrictions on immigration into the U.S., while setting the foundations for mass deportations – a key promise of Trump’s 2024 campaign.
After being introduced by Roberts, Jenrick praised the foundation, and described meeting with and learning from Heritage while working as an intern for Condoleeza Rice, who served as secretary of state under Republican President George W. Bush.
Jenrick also praised the event’s co-host Gardiner, whom Jenrick described as “the special relationship made flesh”. He said Gardiner, who writes a regular column for the Daily Telegraph, “creates links between conservatives here and in the UK”.
As revealed by Democracy For Sale and Byline Times, Donald Trump and U.S. Republican campaigns received more than $45 million (£35 million) from donors who have funded the influential network of hard-wing Tufton Street think tanks in the UK.
“That senior Conservatives would take time out to travel halfway around the world to give talks at a pro-Trump think tanks is very revealing,” said Peter Geoghegan, editor of Democracy For Sale. “We need to be aware that the dark money that fuelled the likes of the Heritage Foundation is washing up in Britain, where secretive Tufton Street think tanks refuse to declare their donors but take millions from pro-Trump U.S. conservatives.”
A Heritage Foundation spokesperson previously told DeSmog: “Project 2025 is a coalition of conservatives who wrote ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’ which was published in April 2023, before any candidate declared a run for office. Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”
Project 2025 and Climate Denial
Project 2025 proposes replacing green investment with the further deregulation of the oil and gas industry.
Speaking at an event co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation and the Hungarian Danube Institute in September, key Trump ally Robert Wilkie – who served as U.S. veterans’ affairs secretary from 2018 to 2021 – confirmed that his former boss would “kill” climate budgets.
The Heritage Foundation received over £4.9 million between 1997 and 2017 from groups linked to the fossil fuel giant Koch Industries. The brothers behind the company, Charles and the late David Koch, have been the principal funders of climate denial groups in the U.S. since the 1980s.
As revealed by DeSmog, advisory groups working on Project 2025 have received at least $9.6 million from Charles Koch since 2020, along with at least $21.5 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is funded by the Mellon oil and banking fortune.
The Heritage Foundation has disputed these figures, though has not offered its own calculations. A spokesperson previously told DeSmog: “Heritage research is independent and accurate, these numbers are not.”
At a 2022 Heritage Foundation event, Nile Gardiner said: “I do think the British government needs to rethink the whole green energy agenda. It’s not a conservative agenda, in fact it’s a socialist agenda”. He added: “I think net zero has become basically a form of religion, and anyone who questions the dogma on this immediately is accused of being a heretic.”
As DeSmog has reported, Kemi Badenoch has regularly criticised the UK’s green ambitions, describing herself as a “net zero sceptic” during her Conservative conference speech in October.
During the leadership contest, Badenoch published a 40-page manifesto that cited the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a U.S. group led by former advisors to Trump, which has likened climate science to believing the earth is flat.
Jenrick has also attacked net zero policies and has advocated for increased fossil fuel extraction, including the development of new coal mines.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark RichardsOrcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels. Second version, corrected text.
More than $120 million from a few ultra-wealthy families has powered the Heritage Foundation and other groups that created the plan to remake American government.
Since 2020, donor networks linked to just six family fortunes have funneled more than $120 million into Project 2025 advisory groups, a DeSmog analysis has found.
More than 100 nonprofits led by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that has engaged in climate change denial and obstruction for decades, have signed on as advisors to the Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” document — a plan to rapidly “reform,” or radically alter, the U.S. government by shuttering bureaus and offices, overturning regulations, and replacing thousands of public sector employees with hand-picked political allies.
In its official Project 2025 materials, Heritage Foundation leadership repeatedly draws attention to the size and diversity of its advisory board, suggesting that its numerous “coalition partners” are part of a broad, “movement-wide effort” representing a variety of independent viewpoints.
“Project 2025 is unparalleled in the history of the conservative movement—both in its size and scope but also for organizing [so many] different groups under a single banner,” the organization wrote in an October 2023 press release.
But an analysis of financial disclosure forms shows the same small group of donors supporting Project 2025’s advisors again and again — hardly a sign of ideological diversity. Of the 110 nonprofits formally supporting Project 2025, almost 50 received major donations from the same six sources of wealth since 2020.
Many of the organizations the six families funded also have close ties to Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, DeSmog found. Trump has repeatedly denied involvement in or knowledge of Project 2025, though that position conflicts with a growing number of news reports — a disavowal made more awkward by the fact that Vance wrote the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light, a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts that describes his Project 2025 vision. DeSmog’s review of Project 2025’s financial backers found additional links to Trump, Vance, and key figures in their orbit that had not been previously known.
These six donor networks, linked to the family fortunes of a handful of wealthy industrialists, have spent years working to loosen environmental regulations and promote climate change denial. Though Heritage describes Project 2025 as a mainstream effort to “return government to the people,” its funding sources suggest something far less populist: a vehicle for the obsessions of ultra-rich donors on the far-right fringe, pushing an agenda to reshape American democracy and overturn regulations needed to maintain a livable climate.
Representatives from the six donor networks did not respond to DeSmog’s outreach on this story. The Heritage Foundation did not reply to a request for comment.
The Coors Family At least $2.7 million to Project 2025 groups since 2020
In 1972, Joseph Coors, grandson of Coors Brewing Company founder Adolph Coors, kick-started the Heritage Foundation with an initial gift of $250,000. For years, he supported the conservative think tank’s growth, ultimately funneling his funds through the Adolph Coors Foundation, the nonprofit he started with his brother Bill in 1976.
“There wouldn’t be a Heritage Foundation without Joe Coors,” former Heritage president Edwin J. Feulner wrote in a 2003 tribute.
Joseph Coors meets with Ronald Reagan in 1981. Credit: Wikipedia
The tradition continues today, with billionaire Peter H. Coors — retired beer magnate and Adolph’s great-grandson — at the helm. The Adolph Coors Foundation funded 22 Project 2025 advisory groups between 2020 and 2023, including $300,000 to the Heritage Foundation. Vance has been connected to Heritage since at least 2017, when he wrote the forward to that organization’s “Index of Culture and Opportunity” and gave a keynote address at a Heritage event promoting the report.
Of the Project 2025 groups, Coors funded Hillsdale College, which The New Yorker called “the Christian liberal-arts college at the heart of the culture wars,” most heavily, with nearly $900,000 in donations since 2020. Former Heritage staffer James Braid, today Vance’s deputy chief of staff and legislative director, spent 10 months as a James Madison fellow at Hillsdale College in 2021. Braid appeared on camera in a Project 2025 training video recently obtained by ProPublica and Documented. Braid was also an advisor at American Moment, another Project 2025 group.
The Coors Foundation gave an additional $5.9 million to DonorsTrust, a not-for-profit that describes itself as a philanthropic partner for conservative and libertarian donors — and that gives hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative causes annually, including to numerous Project 2025 advisors, as well as other organizations that downplay or deny the science and urgency of climate change.
Charles G. Koch At least $9.6 million to Project 2025 groups since 2020
In terms of raw numbers, Charles Koch — the CEO and chairman of Koch Industries, a sprawling conglomerate with an oil refinery focus — isn’t the biggest donor to Project 2025 groups in the past few years. But his support for the vast fundraising apparatus that powers conservative charities, including dozens of the initiative’s coalition partners, goes back decades, and his influence can’t be underestimated. A review of public financial disclosures by Greenpeace found that the network of charitable foundations linked to Koch and his late brother, David Koch, donated more than $165 million to climate-change-denying groups between 1986 and 2018. That includes more than $23 million to 16 nonprofits that Project 2025 lists among its advisors.
Throughout the 1990s, Koch Industries was also a “vital supporter” of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Project 2025 advisor. A membership group that connects more than 2,000 state legislators to over 300 corporations and private foundations, ALEC calls itself “a forum for stakeholders to exchange ideas”; New Yorker investigative journalist Jane Mayer, in her book Dark Money, describes it as an enormously successful effort “aimed at waging conservative fights in every state legislature in the country.” Foundations linked to Charles G. Koch donated more than $1.2 million to ALEC since 2020, Desmog’s review found, mostly through his Stand Together Trust.
Koch’s largest donations to Project 2025 groups since 2020 included $3.8 million to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a climate-change-denying nonprofit with close links to both the Heritage Foundation and the Trump administration. In 2018, Trump tapped Brooke Rollins, TPPF’s CEO since 2003, for a post at the Office of American Innovation; in 2020, he named her to lead his administration’s domestic policy strategy. By 2019, there were so many connection points between TPPF and the Trump administration that Politico’s E & E News wrote a story about it.
Rollins was succeeded at TPPF by Kevin Roberts, who had been promoted to CEO by 2021, when he left to become president of The Heritage Foundation. Koch-linked nonprofits also donated $845,000 to Heritage since 2020.
Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein At least $13 million to Project 2025 groups since 2020
The Uihleins are co-founders of Uline, a company that sells shipping and packing supplies — including its ubiquitous brand of cardboard boxes — and other bulk business goods. They donate heavily to conservative causes through the Ed Uihlein Foundation, named after Richard’s father, a packaging company entrepreneur whose grandfather was an original founder of the Schlitz beer company.
Among its donations to 13 different Project 2025 groups since 2020, Uihlein’s largest grants went to the Foundation for Government Accountability ($6.6 million), a limited-government think tank that has railed against “the Biden administration’s radical climate agenda,” and the American Cornerstone Institute ($2.5 million), founded by neurosurgeon and former Trump cabinet member Dr. Ben Carson. Carson has called climate change “irrelevant” as recently as 2015.
Outside the nonprofit sphere, the Uihleins are major donors to the Trump campaign. An analysis of Federal Election Commission data showed that the couple donated $10 million to Make America Great Again, Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, in May 2024.
The Scaife Family At least $21.5 million to Project 2025 groups since 2020
Richard Mellon Scaife died in 2014, but his contribution to conservative causes is still felt today. A billionaire heir to the vast Mellon fortune, which was created thanks to his progenitors’ exploits in oil and aluminum production, banking, and other industries, Scaife provided years of critical financial support to the Heritage Foundation, starting in 1973. A 1999 article in the Washington Post called him the “funding father of the Right.”
Today, two foundations Scaife once controlled — the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Allegheny Foundation — continue to give heavily to conservative causes, including to numerous organizations involved in climate change denial. DeSmog’s review found that Scaife family foundations gave $4.1 million to the Heritage Foundation since 2022, while also contributing to 22 other Project 2025 advisory groups.
Scaife foundations also donated an additional $1.2 million to the State Policy Network, an ALEC-linked group that supports conservative nonprofits that oppose government regulation, including 25 members of Project 2025’s coalition.
Barre Seid At least $22.4 million to Project 2025 groups since 2020
The enigmatic industrialist Barre Seid primarily built his fortune through his company Tripp Lite, an electronics manufacturer specializing in surge protectors. He is reportedly a major benefactor supporting the Heartland Institute, a Project 2025 advisor organization that The Economist called “the world’s most prominent think tank supporting skepticism about man-made climate change” — a description Heartland approvingly quotes on its website.
In late 2020, Barre donated 100 percent of Tripp Lite’s shares to Marble Freedom Trust, a nonprofit controlled by Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard A. Leo. In early 2021, Leo sold the shares, netting $1.65 billion. The amount is said to be “among the largest — if not the largest — single contributions ever made to a politically focused nonprofit,” according to The New York Times.
Since May 2020, Marble Freedom Trust has donated $100 million to Concord Fund, also known as the Judicial Crisis Network, a Leo-linked nonprofit. In that time, Concord has donated $22.4 million to eight Project 2025 groups, giving most heavily ($11.9 million) to Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
Seid also gave $2 million to Independent Women’s Voice, the sister organization of Independent Women’s Forum, a Project 2025 advisor. During her time as director for the Independent Women’s Forum’s Center for Energy and Conservation, Mandy Gunasekara, a former Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency official, authored Project 2025’s chapter on restructuring the EPA — with recommendations that include “cutting its size and scope” dramatically.
The Bradley Family At least $52.9 million to Project 2025 groups since 2020
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation was originally established in 1942 by brothers Lynde and Harry Bradley, founders of the Allen-Bradley company, which made its fortune manufacturing a wide range of electronic products. Their descendants have continued to financially support the foundation for years to come, including with a reported $200 million gift in 2015.
But it was Michael W. Grebe, who served as CEO of the foundation between 2002 and 2016, who cemented its reputation as a conservative powerhouse, steering donations to a network of activist organizations like The Heritage Foundation, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and the Heartland Institute (all Project 2025 coalition partners). The current chairman is James Arthur “Art” Pope, CEO of the North Carolina grocery chain Variety Wholesalers, a longtime Koch ally.
The Bradley Foundation and a second philanthropic vehicle it supports, the Bradley Impact Fund, donated over $50 million to 29 different Project 2025 advisors since 2020. That’s not including an additional $56 million to DonorsTrust, which a 2013 Mother Jones investigation dubbed, along with its affiliate group Donors Capital Fund, the “dark money ATM” of the U.S. conservative movement. The Bradley Foundation’s Project 2025-linked donations include more than $7.7 million to Turning Point USA, a “powerful ally” of the Trump presidential campaign, which promotes conservative causes on university campuses and is funded in part by the fossil fuel industry. Its single largest donation was $27.1 million in 2022 to Project 2025 advisor Turning Point Legal, founded by former Trump advisor, and past president of a coal lobby group, Stephen Miller.
