Trump’s Polluter Playground:
Fossil Fuel Insiders Prop Up
Dirty Energy & Derail Clean Power
Alan Zibel and Toni Aguilar Rosenthal / Public Citizen and Revolving Door Project
Introduction
President Donald Trump has spent the last nine months halting the growth of the American clean energy economy in its tracks, dragging the country into a vengeful, backward-leaning energy agenda that does the bidding of his fossil fuel allies and serves the interest of billionaire campaign donors. Consumers and the planet alike will suffer for it.
In recent years, the U.S. has made huge strides in laying the groundwork for a decarbonized economy. Under former President Joe Biden, the adoption of technologies such as electric vehicles, solar power, and battery storage accelerated quickly as the cost of green energy plunged. Now, however, the fossil fuel industry has tightened its control on Washington and is actively working to derail the clean energy transition.
Ironically, the Biden era also saw massive amounts of fossil fuel production and drove huge profit margins for oil companies in the United States. Indeed, no country in world history has produced more oil than the U.S., and domestic production of natural gas is at record levels. Ignoring the data, Trump and his oil and gas industry backers continue to distort the history of the Biden administration to be one of an intense fossil fuel crackdown, a convenient excuse to turn back the clock to a fossil-fueled energy policy that puts America at a disadvantage even as the rest of the world electrifies.
Trump’s domestic policy and tax legislation, passed in July 2025, ends support for renewable and clean energy manufacturing while providing new subsidies and tax breaks to the already heavily subsidized fossil fuel industry. This overt fossil-favoritism signals an end to even the pretense of an “all of the above energy strategy” that alleges to promote both fossil fuels and renewables — a favorite talking point of trade groups, centrist pundits and corporate lobbyists.
Amid a far-reaching retreat from a clean energy economy, Trump and his allies also are fighting to put our public lands up for sale. From removing protectionsfor national forest lands, to attacking national monuments, to opening new drilling opportunities for oil in the Alaskan Arctic, the Trump administration seems intent on handing our public lands to extractive industries, no matter the cost to the public.
As a result, this report seeks to examine the environmentally deleterious policies pursued by this administration, and the corporate cronies instituting them, in three key arenas: the massive expansion of polluting energy, the destruction of public lands, and the sabotage and suppression of renewable energy.
Key Findings
Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project analyzed the backgrounds of 111 executive branch nominees and appointees charged with the nation’s energy and environmental policymaking. The analysis found that President Trump has installed fossil fuel insiders and renewable energy opponents across nine agencies that implicate energy and environmental policy.
These agencies have made dozens of hires from the fossil fuel sector, mining conglomerates, and other polluting industries, as well as others who are well-paid to support a dirty energy agenda, such as corporate lawyers and the staffers from far-right think tanks directly tied to Trump’s dirty energy agenda. As part of our compilation, we also included Republican politicians and political operatives who have attached themselves to MAGA’s dirty energy agenda. That includes:
- 43 former fossil fuel industry employees
- 29 former corporate executives
- 14 former corporate lawyers
- 12 people tied to fossil fuel-funded right-wing think-tanks
- 7 people tied primarily to Republican politics such as elected officials and staffers pushing fossil fuel interests
- 6 from utility companies or the nuclear energy industry
Read the complete report here.
