The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is embarking on the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history, targeting thirty-one rules for reconsideration or repeal. Among these are standards for air quality and limits on emissions of particulate matter, greenhouse gases, and carcinogenic chemicals. Announcing the plan, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin described current regulations as “suffocating.” It’s clear whose suffocation Zeldin is most worried about: not the thousands of Americans who die prematurely from pollution-related causes every year, or the children and older adults who suffer hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks connected to particulate matter, but rather the polluters themselves, who are “suffocated” by scientifically informed regulations that hurt their profits.
Zeldin appears to be ignorant of the mission of the agency he now leads. The supposed benefits of the changes he’s proposed are not about achieving cleaner air or water; instead, they are intended to “unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, [and] revitalize the American auto industry.”
One crucial proposed rollback is of the 2009 endangerment finding, which concluded that greenhouse-gas emissions threaten public health and are therefore subject to EPA regulation. The rule is the basis of all subsequent greenhouse-gas regulations, including those on vehicle and power-plant emissions. Repealing it would, in Zeldin’s words, “driv[e] a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion”—that is, it would be a giant step backward, contradicting decades of research and reversing the modest progress made under the previous administration. But the agency is likely to trip over itself as it steps back: actually changing the rules is a complicated process that involves actors outside of Trump’s administration. The EPA would need to provide scientific justification for the rollback, and the science is not on its side. It would also need to hold a comment period and respond to public feedback (the original 2009 finding considered more than 380,000 comments). Rushing the process would open the agency up to lawsuits. The Supreme Court decided just last year in Ohio v. EPA that the EPA’s failure to appropriately respond to a comment justified blocking the agency’s “good neighbor” rule (also a target on Zeldin’s list). The same process that has often slowed the adoption of necessary regulations may now be used to protect them.
Zeldin’s agenda is perfectly in keeping with the Trump administration’s broader approach: kneecap the government, and then complain that it doesn’t run well. Treat the work performed and funded by federal employees as illegitimate, rather than essential. Delay policy implementation by constantly changing the instructions about whether and how programs can move forward. Undermine the EPA with complicated attempts to prevent it from protecting the environment, all while cutting its resources.
Zeldin has promised to slash the EPA’s budget by 65 percent, and he plans to dissolve the agency’s entire research arm and fire the scientists who work there en masse (if the courts allow it). Those scientists are responsible for understanding threats to air, land, and water; eliminating their ability to address the problems won’t make the problems disappear. Likewise, Zeldin’s proposed rollback of emissions-tracking requirements will make businesses less accountable, but it won’t make the effects of their pollution any less real for the people breathing in soot.
While he lays off workers and freezes grants that support local communities, Zeldin brags about the jobs his policies will supposedly create in the private sector. In contrast to those hypothetical jobs, the EPA is full of people with real jobs that serve the public interest. As for inefficiency, the agency’s biggest waste of resources isn’t the toxicologist who monitors an industrial site or the construction worker who uses grants to build green infrastructure—it’s the administrator who has dedicated himself to sabotaging his own agency.
