Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Refocus EPA research using the 2018 Back-to-Basics NAAQS memo

Not started

439 13. Environmental Protection Agency · abridged

“Refocus its research activities on accountable real-world examinations of the efficacy of its regulations with a heavy emphasis on characterizing and better understanding natural, background, international, and anthropogenic contributions for key pollutants. It should embrace concepts laid out in the 2018 “Back-to-Basics Process for Reviewing National Ambient Air Quality Standards” memo to ensure that any science and risk assessment for the NAAQS matches congressional direction.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The 2018 memo has not been put back. EPA's own description of how it reviews the NAAQS, last updated 2025-12-11, is the standard multi-document process — Integrated Science Assessment, Risk/Exposure Assessment, Policy Assessment, CASAC review of drafts of each — with no reference to the 2018 “Back-to-Basics” memo, its combined documents or its five-year deadline. A Federal Register full-text search for “Back-to-Basics” across all agencies in the window returns six documents, every one of them a Justice Department antitrust filing or a Transportation drug-testing rule. Nor has EPA announced any refocusing of its research on background, international and natural contributions.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Queries: Federal Register full-text “Back-to-Basics” with the EPA agency filter (count 0) and across all agencies (count 6, all unrelated); and the 878 EPA final and proposed rules we keep and search, gathered for the air asks, searched for “back to basics”, “natural background” and “international transport”.
  • EPA’s research posture did change in the window — ORD was dissolved into the program offices (#1165) — but that is a different ask, and none of the reorganization documents mentions the 2018 memo or the research emphases this Quote names.
Action
reinstate
Object
2018 “Back-to-Basics Process for Reviewing National Ambient Air Quality Standards” memo
ID
1170