EPA Decided Protecting the Environment Is Just Too Much

March 14, 2025

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by Mark Gongloff (Bloomberg) The agency is abandoning its mission in a misguided effort to boost an economy it will only end up hurting. -- The EPA’s announcement on Wednesday that it would find the narrowest possible definition of the word “water” for regulatory purposes was just one of dozens of ways it plans to attack environmental protections during Trump’s second term in office. Supposedly meant to spark some sort of “Great American Comeback,” these actions would mainly bring back an era of poisoned skies and waters while hurting the very economy they’re supposed to help.

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Wherever the EPA is aiming its dagger, its ultimate victim will be the environment. If it succeeds in gutting the targeted rules, then oil and gas producers, utilities, chemical plants, factories and other major polluters will have freer rein to pump mercury, arsenic and other toxins into our air and water. They’ll be able to spew more of the greenhouse gases that are heating up the planet, creating climate chaos and driving up insurance costs for those same American families. Coal-burning plants and gasoline-guzzling cars will stay in service for much longer, making the climate problem even worse.

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Zeldin, a former New York congressman, admitted climate change was “real,” echoing the vast majority of scientists and most American voters. Now that he’s in the job, the mask is off and climate action has been downgraded to a “religion,” with Zeldin in the vanguard of the Trump administration’s crusade against it.

Along with his assault on environmental rules, Zeldin has asked Trump to overturn the government’s key 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public and are thus subject to EPA regulation. He has revoked $20 billion in grants issued under the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate law in US history. He has asked Congress to take away California’s right to sets its own automobile-emissions standards. He ended the EPA’s environmental justice unit, meant to protect Americans most vulnerable to pollution and natural disasters. He has vowed to slash his agency’s budget by at least 65%.

Hopefully, the slow-grinding gears of bureaucracy will soften or at least delay some of these blows. As Bloomberg News notes, Zeldin doesn’t have a big red MORE POLLUTION button in his office. His agency will have to rewrite these rules, subject them to public opinion and fight the already mounting court challenges from local governments and environmental groups. The process could take years, particularly given the sheer number of rules in question and a rapidly diminishing number of employees available to rewrite them.

As for overturning that 2009 “endangerment” finding, the EPA will have to conjure up some scientific evidence to disprove that greenhouse gases are harming the environment. Good luck with that. Otherwise, it might be tough to convince even the Supreme Court, which decided in 2011 that people couldn’t sue polluters over greenhouse gases because it’s the EPA’s job to regulate them. Project 2025 wants to turn back the clock on that one, but many oil and gas companies probably don’t.

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Already the US is experiencing an insurance crisis because of the rising costs of climate-fueled natural disasters such as wildfires and floods. Environmental protection is economic protection. We’re about to learn that the hard way. READ MORE

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Excerpt from E&E News Climatewire: EPA’s regulatory plans would be ambitious in any administration. But Zeldin’s announcements come after he said EPA would lay off 65 percent of the agency’s workforce.

“If I were an EPA staffer, I’d kind of be looking around me like, ‘Who exactly is going to do all this work?” said Hankins of NRDC. “Because they will have to individually repeal every single one of these regulations.”

EPA is pursuing other lines of attack against climate action.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, EPA announced plans to “terminate” hundreds of Inflation Reduction Act grant awards that are already under contract. That includes eight awards held in Citibank accounts that have been been frozen for weeks. Nearly 400 smaller environmental justice and community pollution control grants were also terminated Wednesday after recipients discovered that their access to the federal government’s grant portal was severed Friday, raising the prospects that EPA could face many additional lawsuits for breach of contract.

Three nonprofits that were awarded a combined $14 billion last year to expand lending for zero-carbon energy, transportation and buildings filed three separate lawsuits earlier this week to recover those funds that had been frozen and have since been “terminated.” Climate United, which was awarded the largest grant of $7 billion, is suing EPA and Citibank, which is administering the program. The Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities each filed suits targeting the bank, but the Coalition for Green Capital expanded its suit Wednesday to include EPA and Zeldin after Citibank disclosed that federal agencies had pressured it to freeze the funds.

EPA on Wednesday also committed to “revisit” its social cost of greenhouse gas emissions — a metric agencies have long used to reflect damage from a ton of climate-forcing pollution.

Zeldin said in a press release that Biden’s EPA used the metric, which it increased to $190 per ton, “to advance their climate agenda in a way that imposed major costs.” He didn’t say whether EPA would stop using a social cost of carbon or propose a smaller one based on different assumptions.

Courts have directed federal agencies in the past to account for climate damages in their regulatory analyses, including by monetizing them. So, opting not to do so in future rules could be legally risky.

“The government has worked with social costs of greenhouse gases values for over 15 years at this point, and to totally ignore those values — which were based on extensive science and economics developed over decades — to ignore that work entirely would be pretty legally fraught,” said Max Sarinsky, regulatory director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University.

But the Trump EPA could opt to change what climate damages it includes in its metric and could use a higher discount rate for future costs, which could reduce the values and make less aggressive policies look more cost-effective.

EPA on Wednesday also pledged to rethink a rule that requires major emitters to report their greenhouse gas output each year. The reporting rule is the basis for EPA’s annual emissions inventory, which it submits to the United Nations each year. It also informs regulations and other policy decisions. READ MORE

Excerpt from E&E Daily: Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said Administrator Lee Zeldin’s plan to challenge the endangerment finding — which gives the agency its authority to regulate greenhouse gases by finding they threaten public health — would be more complicated than a litany of other potential regulatory rollbacks the EPA chief announced Wednesday.

“I think that one is more complicated, to be honest with you, because of the court rulings that led to that,” Capito told POLITICO’s E&E News.

When asked whether the result of the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court case would make it difficult for Zeldin to legally overturn the endangerment finding, Capito responded, “I think that’s why I said it’s more complicated.”

Massachusetts v. EPA established that EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions because they are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

That led to the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding, which concluded that the emissions endanger public health and welfare and could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. READ MORE

Excerpt from Inside Climate News: In a post on the social media site Bluesky, John Walke, clean air director and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the sheer size of Zeldin’s effort may cause it to collapse on itself.

“The same limited #s of EPA air office staff & attorneys work on many of these rules,” Walke wrote. “Some have quit, some have been fired, more will be fired. EPA won’t have adequate resources to write defensible rollbacks.”

Walke’s group, NRDC, prevailed in scores of lawsuits against the regulatory rollbacks of the first Trump administration—in some cases, because it had not followed the long-standing law for public notice and comment of both regulatory and deregulatory actions. But Zeldin showed an awareness of this potential pitfall.

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“The agency cannot prejudge the outcome of this reconsideration or of any future rulemaking,” he said. “EPA will follow the Administrative Procedure Act and Clean Air Act, as applicable, in a transparent way for the betterment of the American people and the fulfillment of the rule of law.”

Zeldin also pointed to recent Supreme Court rulings limiting federal agency authority as providing backing for the plan. The Supreme Court, with a conservative majority bolstered by three Trump-appointed justices, articulated a relatively new doctrine in those cases, saying that on issues of major economic consequence, regulatory agencies cannot act without explicit instructions from Congress.

Congress has never given the EPA explicit instruction to cut greenhouse gases from power plants or motor vehicles, but the agency has relied on the power it was given in the 1970 Clean Air Act to set controls for any pollutant that it finds endangers health and welfare.

In addition to reconsidering the 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gas emissions, the EPA is preparing to rescind all regulations that flow from that decision, including those adopted under President Joe Biden to restrict greenhouse gas pollution from power plants and from cars and trucks. And Zeldin proposed ending the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, the 15-year-old effort to take stock of where greenhouse gas emissions are being produced and the nation’s progress in reducing them.

Zeldin called the reporting program “another example of a bureaucratic government program that does not improve air quality. Instead, it costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream.”

However, the EPA website for the program states that “this data can be used by businesses and others to track and compare facilities’ greenhouse gas emissions, identify opportunities to cut pollution, minimize wasted energy and save money.”

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The planned rollback of environmental protections goes far beyond greenhouse gases, and includes lifting restrictions on mercury and air toxics, particulate matter pollution, regional haze and smokestack pollution that crosses state borders. The EPA will seek to roll back a 2023 “Good Neighbor” rule that required upwind states to reduce pollution affecting their downwind neighbors, part of Zeldin’s plan to give more authority to states in what he called “cooperative federalism.” In his video message, Zeldin said these moves would “fulfill President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, revitalize our auto industry, restore the rule of law and give power back to the States.” He called them “suffocating rules that restrict nearly every sector of our economy and cost Americans trillions of dollars.”

Trump and his team are placing a bet on regulatory rollbacks as a way to at least temporarily lift the U.S. economy and save consumers money, even while economists and industry groups are warning that other aspects of his policy are likely to drag down GDP and increase costs. Tariffs on metals and on major U.S. trading partners are likely to drive the price of cars up, for example. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group for automakers, has said Trump’s tariffs could boost the sticker prices of new cars by up to 25 percent. READ MORE

Excerpt from E&E News Greenwire: The actions also closely mirror Project 2025, the conservative blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that Trump once claimed to know nothing about.

Zeldin announced a deregulatory blitz last week, targeting over a dozen rules on water pollution, air quality and planet-warming emissions. He also said EPA would reconsider a 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and the environment, one of many recommendations in Project 2025.

But while an EPA spokesperson said Zeldin has not read Project 2025, environmental advocates said they aren’t surprised to see the blueprint taking shape at the agency.

“During the election, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, which was very unpopular among voters for being so extreme and so focused on polluter interests,” said Matthew Davis, vice president of federal policy at the League of Conservation Voters. “We’re now seeing the Trump administration and some of the very authors of Project 2025 implementing those changes.”

Project 2025 is a 900-plus-page guide for overhauling U.S. policy, promoting conservative ideas, gutting the federal workforce and expanding presidential powers.

Over 150 people who contributed to the project worked in Trump’s first administration, on his 2016 campaign or on his transition team, according to a tally from The New York Times last year.

The blueprint’s EPA chapter was written by Mandy Gunasekara, who was chief of staff at the agency during Trump’s first term. She did not respond to a request for an interview and is not currently at EPA.

Other EPA chapter contributors have taken on key posts with the new administration.

Aaron Szabo is Trump’s nominee for assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation and has been working as a senior adviser to Zeldin since January; Scott Mason IV is regional administrator for the South Central U.S.; and Justin Schwab is general counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Project 2025 contributor Russell Vought is now leading the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The appointments are notable given Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 when it seemed like a political liability last year. Two polls from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and NBC News released in October and September, respectively, found that most people surveyed had a negative view of the blueprint.

Trump claimed in September 2024 that he had not read Project 2025 and did not know who was behind it. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico Pro Greenwire: President Donald Trump's wild-card pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency has emerged as one of the most devoted public champions for his efforts to demolish the Biden agenda — and MAGA world is taking notice.

Lee Zeldin’s crusade to revoke more than $20 billion in already-doled-out climate grants has taken the EPA into uncharted legal territory, provoked a spat inside the Justice Department and left some environmental nonprofits fearing possible bankruptcy. He’s made dozens of appearances on conservative television outlets such as Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax — proclaiming the “death of the green new scam” on Laura Ingraham’s primetime show — while using his own videos on X and EPA’s YouTube channel to call for rolling back “suffocating” regulations and defanging the “climate change religion.”

Zeldin has also praised Elon Musk and embraced Trump’s call for slashing 65 percent from his own agency’s budget, a target that he insists will cut waste, bring back auto jobs and boost U.S. energy dominance. The Sierra Club has denounced the proposed cuts as “sabotage.” READ MORE