Mandy M. Gunasekara has had roles at the Independent Women’s Forum and the Heritage Foundation, two conservative organizations. The Independent Women’s Forum is known for couching anti-trans goals in feminist language and for otherwise opposing women’s rights. The Heritage Foundation, the lead group behind Project 2025, is known for climate denialism and a strong rightward shift since Jim DeMint became president in 2013. She also served as the chief of staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Trump administration. Previously, she worked for Senator Jim Inhofe and handed him the snowball he used as a prop on the Senate floor when mocking climate change.
In keeping with the Mandate for Leadership’s general policy goal of reducing the role of federal government by handing over its powers and responsibilities to state and local governments, Gunasekara writes in her chapter on the EPA that under the next conservative president the agency “will take a more supportive role toward local and state efforts,” which “will include the sharing of federal resources and agency expertise.” Reading between the lines, this means that should a conservative become president, the EPA will be severely weakened, allowing polluters to operate freely in red states, while blue states that try to enforce their antipollution laws and regulations will face legal challenges.
Gunasekara has a long record of employing conservative misrepresentations and outright falsehoods.
In the Mandate for Leadership, she accuses the Biden administration of making an “assault” on the energy sector, for example. This is in reference to enforcing laws and regulations regarding pollution, especially that caused by the fossil fuel industry, which is not an assault.
Gunasekara is a committed climate denialist. According to the DeSmog web site, she is linked to the creation of the pro-Trump, dark money nonprofit Energy 45 Fund and is a “member of the CO2 Coalition, a group directed by climate change denier William Happer that portrays carbon dioxide as ‘a nutrient vital for life’ and advocates for more of it in the atmosphere.” She is also credited with being “the chief architect” of Trump’s “Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan” while she served in the Trump administration. (Open Secrets mentions some of the deceptive rhetoric found on the Energy 45 Fund’s website, and the Electrek web site is willing to simply call some of Energy 45 Fund’s statements false.)
According to DeSmog, “Gunasekara is also a senior fellow at Life:Powered, a pro-fossil-fuel initiative created by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mentioned this affiliation when Gunasekara appeared at a committee hearing as a Republican witness in support of oil company ExxonMobil, amid litigation regarding the firm’s efforts to mislead the public about climate change. Gunasekara testified that the hearing was part of a ‘politically-motivated campaign’ to smear the oil industry, and argued that any global warming would be manageable, The Guardian reported.”
Media Matters characterizes Gunasekara as “Fox’s newest favorite climate misinformer” who aims to “put a positive spin on Trump’s disastrous climate agenda.” According to Media Matters, she “penned an op-ed for FoxNews.com…which bashed the Green New Deal as ‘Karl Marx’s Christmas list’ and chastised Democrats for moving “so far to the extreme that eating meat is murder, but killing a baby moments after birth is a choice.”
(A digression is in order here. Gunasekara is not alone in her use of the slanderous lie that Democrats favor or practice killing babies after birth. Other conservatives, including Donald Trump and Kari Lake, have also told this lie. Also, Marx lived before we had developed our current understanding of human-caused climate change, so it is deceptive, to say the least, to link him to any policy addressing climate change. Finally, while presumably some vegans are Democrats, and some of them might liken meat-eating to murder, it should be noted that it is not vegans who have resorted to such tactics as violent protests at steakhouses or well-funded campaigns to outlaw the eating of meat in a quest to impose their views on others.)
Gunasekara has garnered the attention of well-known science explainer Bill Nye. In a video clip, he notes with dismay: “she and her husband…have…two young kids, and they’re going to inherit this Earth and they are going to have to interact with their parents when their parents have been strong advocates of putting more carbon dioxide in the Earth.”
Dawn Stover, a contributing editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has also taken Gunasekara to task for her statements on climate. In an article titled “Declining US greenhouse gas emissions: a Republican fairy tale,” Stover writes: “I rarely hear something as brazenly false as the claim made by Republican climate strategist Mandy Gunasekara at a luncheon plenary on October 11. Speaking to hundreds of reporters attending the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference, Gunasekara said Republicans have an environmental ‘success story’ to tell about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” Checking on this claim, Stover points out that “While US emissions declined slightly during Trump’s first year in office, they spiked in 2018, according to independent research.” “Welcome to the Trump world of ‘alternative facts,’ where global warming is not a problem. Because up is down,” Stover goes on to say, calling a Gunasekara’s claim a “flagrant falsehood.”
Another claim in the climate denialist inventory is that measures to limit fossil fuel use and increase renewable energy use adversely affect the poor. As Scientific American puts it in an article titled “There’s No Evidence for Claims That Environmentally Friendly Investments Are Bad for the Poor,” “There is no evidence for Republican claims that considering the environmental impacts of investment is bad for the poor—part of the party’s growing opposition to environmental, social and governance investments.”
The topic of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investments has become a bugaboo of the right, and Gunasekara has taken a notable step in an attempt to demonize ESG. As recounted in an article in the New Republic, Gunasekara claimed at a congressional hearing that ESG “promotes forced gender transition for children.” (Let the obvious be stated: gender transition is not forced on children, and the gender transition of children, which is a medical issue, has nothing to do with corporate and investment policy.) Gunasekara’s claim prompted Democratic congresswoman Becca Balint to ask Gunasekara: “Do you actually believe this garbage?”
Gunasekara has established herself as a climate denier and purveyor of various falsehoods that many on the right are fond of. In this she fits in with others involved in Project 2025.
