Who's Afraid of the "Administrative State"?
Why the paranoid plans of Project 2025 are fundamentally anti-conservation.
Earlier this month I spent some time with Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the 920-page policy platform published by Project 2025. (Highly recommended if you want to ruin your day grok the right’s plans for a second Trump term.) The chapters that address U.S. climate and conservation policy are full of specific, oddly petulant recommendations that would both roll back the current administration’s climate and conservation accomplishments and block future progress. Most alarming to those who care about conservation, though, is Project 2025’s overarching promise to “dismantle the administrative state.”
What is this Orwellian-sounding administrative state? More sympathetically known as the civil service and somewhat less sympathetically known as “the bureaucracy,” it refers to the professionals who staff a government’s many civilian agencies, which on the federal level in the U.S. include the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency. These employees are hired rather than elected or appointed, serve regardless of the political party in power, and are responsible for developing the policies and regulations needed to implement federal laws.
Whether you sit on the left or right or in between, there’s no shortage of reasons to criticize government bureaucracies, and their absurdities, inefficiencies, and cruelties have been skewered by satires ranging from Little Dorrit to Brazil to Problemista.
The radicalized right, however, sees the administrative state as not only flawed but malevolent, and its members now control the conservative movement. In the foreword to Mandate for Leadership, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts condemns the “unelected career bureaucrats” who take advantage of vague legislation to propagate “woke extremism.” For these ideologues, reform will never satisfy; Trump’s current running mate J.D. Vance has said that in a second term, Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state—replace them with our people.”
Which would do nothing to improve bureaucratic efficiency, but would abruptly turn policymaking into a partisan exercise—exactly what Vance claims to oppose.
In their rush to dismantle the government, Roberts and Vance and their allies seem to have forgotten what government is good for. Many of their predecessors in the conservative movement were committed to conservation, and they realized that functional, democratic governments are indispensable to the work: by using public funds to protect the ecosystems the public needs, governments can insulate species and habitats from the short-term pressures of the market and partisan whims. Without the expertise and continuity provided by civil servants, conservation would be entirely contingent — which is to say that it wouldn’t be conservation at all.
Federal policies and regulations can be heavy-handed, and the conservation establishment, accustomed to working from the top down, has long overlooked opportunities to build broad public support for conservation. That combination has led to plenty of justifiable local frustration, and many conservation thinkers — responsible conservatives among them — have argued for the devolution of some conservation authority. The work of Elinor Ostrom suggests that conservation governance should operate like a healthy ecosystem, with authorities from local to international levels working together to protect life at all scales.
But these are real solutions to real problems, and Roberts, Vance, and others on the radicalized right aren’t interested in either. When you’re determined to set fire to the future, frustration is just fuel.
Conservation at Work
For much more on democracy and conservation, read “Autocracies are a Threat to Democracy — and the Planet,” an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum in Atmos.
The Indigenous-led return of buffalo to North American grasslands is one of the most promising efforts in conservation, combining cultural and ecological restoration to powerful effect. I’m heartened by the launch of the Tribal Buffalo Lifeways Collaboration, which formalizes the existing working relationships among tribes, environmental NGOs, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of the Interior.
The conservation technology community WILDLABS has launched The Inventory, a Wikipedia-style platform for researchers and others to share the latest information on biodiversity monitoring and tracking tools. For more on these tools and their implications, check out my New York Review of Books essay “The Digital Planet” and my friend Hillary Rosner’s new report in Yale e360.
One of the persistent criticisms of conservation scientists is that they spend more time identifying problems than developing solutions (resulting in what’s bleakly known as “monitoring to extinction”). So I’m glad to see three researchers from Conservation X Labs — a group I admire for its proactive work — propose what they call the Extinction Solutions Index, a framework for identifying and prioritizing conservation actions.
While reporting a story about monarch butterfly migration for National Geographic [hard paywall, unfortunately] last year, I was both shocked and fascinated to learn that Midwestern pioneer cemeteries, which were protected from the plow, are now home to some of the last fragments of native prairie. This research review in Conservation Biology [open access] finds that cemeteries worldwide are “at least as valuable as some other green spaces for urban biodiversity and mostly native biota.”
Words We Need
One thing I’ve learned from years of writing about conservation is that the English language doesn’t have enough words for it, and those that we do have can be counterproductive. Even the most basic, like “nature,” reinforce the culturally-imposed distinction between humans and our ecosystems. I’ll use this section to recommend some words for wider use. Suggestions welcome!
I love geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s concept of “timefulness,” which she describes as an awareness of Earth’s deep past. A sense of timefulness can help us understand the human-caused planetary change around us, make decisions with implications beyond our lifespans, and see conservation as a means of preserving the possibilities of evolution. Timefulness, I find, is also a reliable source of everyday awe. Read more about timefulness in Marcia’s insightful 2018 book.
Miscellany
Congratulations to Olivia Davis and her colleagues on proposing a much-needed fix to the U.S. Endangered Species Act: a standardized approach to tracking the recovery of endangered species. Read their new paper [open access] in Conservation Science and Practice (and read Olivia’s essay about living and working with endangered species in High Country News.)
This video of Siamese crocodile hatchlings is so dang cute, but it’s also an example of the media’s tendency to spectacularize highly endangered species. How about embracing the adorability (and the ecological importance) of recovering and common species?
In response to my call for a Sen. James Inhofe Memorial Attribution Analysis of the current heat wave, Jason Anthony — author of the excellent Field Guide to the Anthropocene Substack — sent along the Climate Accountability Project’s very useful list of climate criminals. Let’s lay blame where it most belongs.
Thank you so much for the shout Michelle (and also going through that giant policy document for the rest of us haha). Conservation already does not get enough funding as it is, and it's scary to think about what something like Project 2025 would mean for listed species. I'm wondering what we, as scientists and science communicators, can do to at a local level in our communities to galvanize change. I'm really excited to hear about work scientists are doing in terms of dynamically assessing how we perform recovery, like with the Extinction Solution Index, and how that could help practioners in their decision making!
So happy to find you here! I am not professional in the conservation realm but an avid supporter of it. Your column here makes it easy to access this critcal field of interest and science.