Robert Wilkie, who served as Donald Trump’s veterans’ affairs secretary, recently told a Heritage Foundation event that the former Republican president would slash climate spending if he’s elected for a second term, DeSmog can reveal. 

Addressing the conference on September 17 in Budapest, Hungary, Wilkie said that he wasn’t speaking on behalf of the Trump campaign, but that he expects “the executive orders will flow killing the budgets for climate change activities” if Trump is re-elected in November.

Joe Biden’s administration has invested heavily in clean energy via the Inflation Reduction Act, signed in 2022, which has pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to the development of green technologies. 

The Heritage Foundation is an ultra-conservative group that authored the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, which proposes replacing green investment with the further deregulation and subsidization of the oil and gas industry. 

The event was co-hosted alongside the Danube Institute – a Hungarian think tank supportive of the country’s hard-right nationalist leader Viktor Orbán, that has received funding from his government via the non-profit Batthyány Lajos Foundation (BLA). 

Wilkie spoke on a panel alongside Jim Carafano, who was part of Trump’s first term transition team, Péter Sztáray, Hungary’s state secretary for security policy and energy security, and former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott – a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group. 

Abbott used the panel to encourage Trump to withdraw the U.S. from “all the climate, cultish things”, and claimed that “climate and emissions obsessions … are doing so much to damage the economic strength and the social cohesion of the West.”

If he’s elected, Trump has promised to once again withdraw the U.S. from the flagship Paris Agreement, which established an international goal to limit warming to 1.5C. The Republican candidate has cast doubt on the scientific consensus that fossil fuels are causing climate change, and has encouraged fossil fuel executives to raise $1 billion for his campaign because he would slash environmental regulations and “drill baby drill” for more oil and gas. 

He has also pledged to rescind any “unspent” funds under the Inflation Reduction Act should he be elected in November.

Project 2025

Project 2025 is 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.

It also 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. 

Wilkie, who served as veterans’ affairs secretary from July 2018 to January 2021, is a former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The Project 2025 chapter on veterans’ affairs was authored by Brooks D. Tucker, who served as his chief of staff in the department.

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, if he wins the election. An investigation published by ProPublica and Documented revealed that 29 out of 36 speakers in Project 2025 training videos are former Trump administration employees. 

Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s new book, Dawn’s Early Light, features a foreword by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, JD Vance. Roberts himself wrote the foreword to the Project 2025 document and currently leads the project. 

However, Trump has attempted to distance himself from the agenda in recent months following criticism of its proposals. Despite claiming in early July to “know nothing about Project 2025”, Trump has said that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The Heritage Foundation has extensive ties to climate science deniers and fossil fuel interests. The group received over £4.9 million between 1997 and 2017 from groups linked to 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 group 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”.