diff --git a/news/7959.removal b/news/7959.removal
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..dffd57a83ff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/news/7959.removal
@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+Removes shebang from nonexecutable script.
+
+When packaging pip in Fedora, we have realised
+that there is a nonexecutable file with a shebang line.
+
+It seems that the primary purpose of this file is to be imported from Python
+code and hence the shebang appears to be unnecessary.
+
+Shebangs are hard to handle when doing downstream packaging because it makes
+sense for upstream to use ``#!/usr/bin/env python`` while in the RPM package, we
+need to avoid that and use a more specific interpreter. Since the shebang was
+unused, I propose to remove it to avoid the problems.
+
+We have found more shebangs but in vendored packages. I have also opened PRs there:
+https://github.com/ActiveState/appdirs/pull/144
+https://github.com/psf/requests/pull/5410
+https://github.com/chardet/chardet/pull/192
diff --git a/src/pip/_internal/__init__.py b/src/pip/_internal/__init__.py
index 3aa8a4693ff..264c2cab88d 100755
--- a/src/pip/_internal/__init__.py
+++ b/src/pip/_internal/__init__.py
@@ -1,4 +1,3 @@
-#!/usr/bin/env python
 import pip._internal.utils.inject_securetransport  # noqa
 from pip._internal.utils.typing import MYPY_CHECK_RUNNING