In the days since taking office, the Trump administration has issued a flurry of executive orders seeking to enact his campaign pledges on energy and the environment, including guidance to:
- Rescind dozens of Biden administration executive orders, including Executive Order 140008, entitled “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad” (which directed “putting the climate crisis at the center of United States foreign policy and national security”), and others on climate change and migration, clean energy production, and climate-related financial and flooding risk.
- Withdraw from the Paris Agreement and international climate finance commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
- Encourage the exploitation of domestic energy resources (including oil, gas, and critical minerals), loosen environmental regulations on consumer goods, and work to rescind electric vehicle tax credits and pause remaining clean energy and infrastructure spending under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
- Declare a “national energy emergency,” working to speed approvals and bypass environmental regulations for domestic energy projects, excluding solar and wind.
- Stop offshore wind energy leasing and review wind energy leasing and permitting practices.
- Reverse restrictions on energy and natural resource extraction in Alaska.
- Seek to override perceived environmental objections to routing more water from northern to southern California.
These initiatives set back U.S. and global security in the face of climate change, exposing the United States to reduced diplomatic capital, overseas instability risks, economic challenges, worsened domestic resilience, and planning blind spots. The Trump administration and Congress would be wise to mitigate these risks as they implement orders and initiate broader actions on diplomacy, development, defense, immigration, and the civil service.
A Setback for U.S. Security Amid Climate Change
While these executive orders are a mix of rhetoric and concrete policy action that will take shape during implementation, they are a retreat from treating climate change as a national security threat. That worsens the United States’ risks of diplomatic and economic marginalization, overseas conflict and instability, and domestic threats, affecting the stated priorities of even the Trump administration itself (including strengthening the military, countering China, and lowering prices). These risks are the reason scores of nonpartisan military officers, diplomats, and development leaders have endorsed prioritizing climate change as a vital national security threat and upheld objective climate science in the national security process.
Diplomacy and Allies
Diplomatically, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and reneging on climate finance commitments undermines U.S. credibility with allies. Among other things, this complicates competition with China, identified by the Secretary of Defense and State nominees as a preeminent focus. China is already contrasting itself with the U.S. shift, with one outlet controlled by the ruling party’s propaganda department saying the move “calls into question a host of other U.S. commitments” and proclaiming that, “[u]nlike the U.S., China has never ceased its efforts to realize green development” Meanwhile, climate-vulnerable U.S. strategic partners like the Pacific Island nations, which consider climate change their “single greatest threat,” are looking on. As the Trump administration pursues broader revisions to diplomatic priorities, it should still leave room for continued engagement with key partners on their concerns, which include climate-related challenges like food insecurity, shifting maritime borders and sovereignty due to sea level rise, infrastructure and supply chain vulnerabilities, and competition over shifting fish stocks.
Instability Risks
Beyond diplomatic capital, pulling back from climate finance risks neglecting vulnerabilities in strategic and climate-vulnerable states. This deepens a longstanding gap in U.S. policy spanning across the Republican and Democratic parties in delivering on U.S. climate finance pledges, which worsens conflict and instability risks that stymie U.S. goals. For example, climate-resilient agriculture and infrastructure can ameliorate climate change’s propensity to raise food prices, which are a key driver of instability that contributed to overturning governments in Sri Lanka and Haiti in 2022. At the same time, Cabinet nominees to the U.N. (Elise Stefanik) and State Department (Marco Rubio) have rightly recognized the value of efforts like the U.N. World Food Programme on food security and bipartisan efforts under the Global Fragility Act to address the root causes of political fragility, which can help cushion hunger and food price shocks or build resilience to climate-related instability (Stefanik and Rubio were active members of the House and Senate Climate Solutions Caucuses, respectively).
Energy Security
On energy security, the orders intensify a protectionist approach to the dilemmas of geopolitical competition, global supply chains, and the energy transition, with implications for economic competitiveness and stability. They call for the United States to be “the leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals,” to “strengthen supply chains for the United States and its allies,” and “reduce the global influence of malign and adversarial states.” This invokes bipartisan concern about the national security implications of China’s dominance of critical materials important to a variety of both clean energy and defense technologies. But by hamstringing the U.S. electric vehicle market in the same breath, they slow the development of U.S. markets and supply chains for clean technology. This further cedes leadership of a valuable sector some experts expect to be critical to funding national power and military strength in the future economy. New trade restrictions and potential tariffs under consideration could also be employed, but themselves risk price spikes or disruptions in global food and energy systems, which could combine with climate strains and high debt burdens to fuel political crises in strategic partner countries abroad or harm U.S. consumers.
Domestic Climate Resilience
On domestic security, the orders signal blind spots to climate-driven risks by rolling back executive actions on resilience, pausing spending on climate-resilient infrastructure, and emphasizing an inaccurate political claim about California’s wildfires. A climate-blind approach to domestic resilience would undermine military readiness — one executive order tasks an assessment of vulnerabilities in the Department of Defense’s ability to “acquire and transport the energy, electricity, or fuels needed to protect the homeland and to conduct operations abroad.” Such an assessment should certainly include vulnerabilities to extreme weather, including floods, where the administration just lowered standards for flood resilience of federal buildings.
The order on California and subsequent threats to withhold aid to the state inaccurately claim Los Angeles firefighting was hampered by endangered species restrictions on water transfers from the north to the south of the state, an unrelated policy dispute. Politicizing disaster relief also exposes the United States to extremism and mis- and disinformation risks, as seen during Hurricanes Helene and Milton, when false claims about FEMA contributed to extremist mobilization, risks to relief workers, and foreign propaganda efforts. Meanwhile, the National Guard and other components of the U.S. military have responded to more than 100 domestic climate disasters in just the past year. Among other implications, the Trump administration’s orders for the military and Department of Homeland Security to seal the southern border and increase deportations could challenge the bandwidth of the U.S. military to support domestic disaster response. 500 Marines are already redeploying from supporting California wildfire response to the border.
Foresight
Finally, the tone set by the executive orders risks a chilling effect in national security foresight, whereby analysts, planners, and others shy away from addressing topics perceived as politically risky. This reverses how 2021’s Executive Order 14008 generated increased assessment of climate risks, and can leave the United States vulnerable to a wide variety of national security challenges where food, energy, water, and other climate-related factors are relevant. Broader executive actions aiming to exert greater political control over senior government executives and civil servants contribute to this climate. However, improving foresight on interdisciplinary climate and security challenges is key to even core U.S. national interests and military missions, from designing U.S. military hardware to planning for a possible conflict over Taiwan.
What Comes Next?
Day one executive actions are a mix of concrete policy action and political rhetoric, representing the start of a long process that will be shaped by legal challenges, bureaucratic implementation, and potential shifts in the Trump administration’s priorities. This process will also depend on negotiations in a narrowly divided Congress, where some Republican legislators have already signaled a desire to preserve the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits and where there is bipartisan support around priorities like food security and military resilience. Nevertheless, among the many implications, the administration’s misguided retreat from climate action endangers U.S. national security, which would be wise for policymakers of all stripes to recognize and mitigate.
Editor’s note: This piece is part of the Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of the Trump Administration’s Executive Actions