In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declaring that global warming posed a “clear and present danger” to the United States.
But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the matter.
Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, were high-profile allies of Donald Trump. Mr. Vought, who has railed against “climate alarmism,” and Mr. Clark, who has called climate rules a “Leninistic” plot to seize control of the economy, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives.
The other two, Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, were lesser-known conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate initiatives. Ms. Gunasekara, a onetime aide to the most vocal global warming denialist in the Senate, and Mr. Brightbill, who had argued in court against Obama-era climate regulations, collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming, documents show.
Their efforts are now paying off. In the coming days, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to revoke a determination that has underpinned the federal government’s ability to fight global warming since 2009.
That scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, determined that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are supercharging storms, wildfires, drought, heat waves and sea level rise, and are therefore threatening public health and welfare. It required the federal government to regulate these gases, which result from the burning of oil, gas and coal.
In revoking that determination, the Trump administration would erase limits on greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and industries that generate the planet-warming pollution.
Unlike the swings in federal policy that have become routine when administrations change hands, getting rid of the endangerment finding could hamstring any future administration’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“We are pretty close to total victory,” said Myron Ebell, who helped the first Trump administration set up its operations at the E.P.A. and has been attacking climate science and policies for nearly three decades.
Mr. Ebell said that dozens of conservative activists, lawyers, scientists and others had worked for years to prepare the case against the endangerment finding. But he singled out Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark, Mr. Brightbill and Ms. Gunasekara as the ones who drafted detailed plans of attack that the second Trump administration has largely followed.
“No amount of outside public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy,” he said.
Funding an ‘Arsenal’
When the E.P.A. issued the endangerment finding under President Barack Obama, conservative groups and businesses immediately fought to dismantle it.
But as they lost legal challenges and public concern about global warming began to grow, many corporations withdrew from the battle. By 2017, when Mr. Trump first took office, hundreds of U.S. companies, including oil giants and major manufacturers, had accepted the reality of climate change.
Even Mr. Trump’s top advisers at the time rejected the most extreme demands of those who wanted to challenge the science. Days before Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, his E.P.A. denied a petition from Mr. Ebell’s group to reconsider the endangerment finding.
“There just wasn’t an appetite among any of the institutional crowd,” said Michael McKenna, who worked in the White House on energy issues during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Still, some conservative activists who insisted that the threat of climate change was overblown kept up the fight during the Biden years.
One of them was Ms. Gunasekara, who served as E.P.A. chief of staff during Mr. Trump’s first term and wrote the E.P.A. chapter in Project 2025, the set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term. Another was Mr. Brightbill, a partner at the law firm Winston & Strawn who had served in the Justice Department’s environment division during the first Trump administration.
Ms. Gunasekara is known in Washington for handing a snowball to James M. Inhofe, then a Republican senator from Oklahoma and her boss, on a cold February day in 2015. Mr. Inhofe held up the snowball in the well of the Senate as evidence that the planet could not be warming dangerously.
Mr. Brightbill, for his part, had gained some attention for prosecuting the owners of the Oklahoma zoo featured in the Netflix documentary series “Tiger King.” But his main focus as a federal attorney had been defending the first Trump administration’s repeal of Obama-era climate rules, including a landmark regulation aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from power plant smokestacks.
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In the summer of 2022, as Mr. Biden and Democratic lawmakers were ramping up their climate efforts, Ms. Gunasekara and Mr. Brightbill sought $2 million for a secretive campaign to kill the endangerment finding, according to a funding pitch obtained by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry.
The two wanted funding to draft regulatory documents that a future administration could use to abandon the endangerment finding. They also planned to solicit white papers from favored scientists who did not accept the physics of climate change.
The endangerment finding had helped Democrats wage a “war on fossil fuels,” Ms. Gunasekara and Mr. Brightbill wrote in the funding pitch. Conservatives needed a comprehensive strategy for reversing the finding on “Day 1” of the next Republican administration, they wrote.
The campaign would operate in secret “to prevent media and other conflicted sources from shaming participants and undercutting the work before it is done,” they added.
The Heritage Foundation eventually agreed to fund some of this work, although it is unclear whether the group provided the full $2 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation, where Ms. Gunasekara was a visiting fellow from September 2022 to December 2024, did not respond to questions.
Ms. Gunasekara said in a text message that she was “extremely proud of the work I and others produced at the Heritage Foundation to rebut junk science and expose the Green New Scam.” She said her work for the group had helped inform “Cooling the Climate Hysteria,” a collection of essays by scholars who reject mainstream climate science. It features a melting ice cube on its cover.
Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, declined to make Mr. Brightbill available for an interview but said in an email, “Jonathan Brightbill brings a deep understanding of energy and environmental issues that make him exceptionally qualified for his role.”
Clinching ‘Total Victory’
While many conservatives lined up against the endangerment finding when it was established, Mr. Clark started to fight its core principles many years earlier.
In 2005, as a 38-year-old Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Clark argued in federal court that the Clean Air Act did not give the E.P.A. the power to regulate greenhouse gases. The Supreme Court rejected that argument in a landmark 2007 case called Massachusetts v. E.P.A., clearing the way for the agency to issue the endangerment finding two years later.
It was a stinging defeat that Mr. Clark was determined to reverse, according to people familiar with the matter and his own remarks on podcasts, panels and other public forums.
His next opportunity came in 2022, when he joined a conservative research organization called the Center for Renewing America. Mr. Vought was running the center from an old rowhouse near the Capitol, where he complained of pigeons infesting the walls. From there, Mr. Vought drew up sweeping plans for a second Trump administration.
Under Mr. Vought’s supervision, Mr. Clark drafted executive orders that a future president could use to swiftly scrap Mr. Biden’s climate policies, according to two people familiar with the matter. He also brainstormed legal arguments that the future administration could use to repeal the endangerment finding, the people said.
Former colleagues of Mr. Clark’s said he was less concerned with reducing the costs to companies of complying with environmental laws than with fighting what he saw as government overreach in the form of climate policies.
Mr. Clark has called climate initiatives part of a plot to “control” Americans” and to undermine the U.S. economy. He has called environmentalists a “crazy climate cult” and compared them to the authoritarian pig characters in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Animal Farm.”
Mr. Clark is “an ideologue with very, very strong views that E.P.A. shouldn’t regulate greenhouse gases,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School and the author of the book “The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court,” in which Mr. Clark figures prominently.
“For the Russell Voughts, the Jeff Clarks, this has been a bee in their bonnet,” Mr. Lazarus said.
At the time that he was hired by Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark was facing a criminal investigation in connection with Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. President Trump preemptively pardoned Mr. Clark in November and the Georgia case was dismissed.
With Mr. Trump’s return to the White House last year, Mr. Clark became the government’s top regulatory official as the acting head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Vought is once again the White House budget director and Mr. Clark’s boss.
In their new roles, both men have focused on ridding the government of green initiatives. And Mr. Clark has pushed E.P.A. lawyers to strengthen their legal arguments for repealing the endangerment finding, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Allie McCandless, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, declined to make Mr. Clark available for an interview or respond to questions about his work. She said in a statement that Trump administration officials were “working in lock step to execute on the president’s deregulation agenda.”
Neil Chatterjee, a Republican who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, said conservative activists had helped sustain the fight against the endangerment finding even after businesses backed out.
“It’s not the corporate interests,” Mr. Chatterjee said, adding, “It’s the pure ideological activists who believe that climate change is a hoax, who believe that this was about transferring wealth and driving socialism and destroying renewable energy and promoting left-wing ideology.”
“This is their moment,” Mr. Chatterjee said.
Steven J. Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser who runs a website that promotes theories saying that climate change is not real, said the years of work of conservative activists might have gone nowhere if a different Republican had won the presidency. Instead, the activists found a receptive audience in Mr. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and a “con job.”
The next challenge is to ensure the repeal of the endangerment finding holds up in court, he said.
“We’ve kept the skepticism alive,” Mr. Milloy said, adding, “I hope we don’t blow it. I don’t know when or if this opportunity will come around again.”
Coral Davenport contributed reporting.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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