Hobbling the Protectors
The MAGA assault on Environmental Enforcement (#6 of 6 posts on the Trump ecological wreckage)
Lee Zeldin—you may recall—occupies the office normally assigned to America’s #1 protector of our environment. For fifty-five years, environmental leaders have worked at that desk, implementing policies to protect the nation from harmful pollutants. Their track record is impressive, if often underappreciated: They have reduced common pollutants from cars and trucks by 99 percent, doubled the number of clean water sources, removed toxic lead from gasoline, cleaned up Superfund toxic waste sites, restored the Earth’s ozone layer, and worked to address the climate crisis.
But EPA Administrator Zeldin is different. He is President Trump’s man in charge of destroying the federal agency charged with these very tasks. You may recall the day back in March when he gleefully announced plans to dismantle federal air quality and carbon pollution regulations: “Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” exulted Zeldin. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.”
Well, there is this one little problem with dismissing climate change as a “religion”: All the science, all over the world, proves that it’s real, that it’s caused mainly by fossil-fuel emissions, and that it’s a threat to the survival of many species, including our own. So, what could poor Zeldin and the MAGA machine do with all that science—understood even by most school children? You know already: They could silence it. They knew—there was too much funding, supporting too many scientists, gathering too much data, publishing too many reports, read by too much media, which informed too many voters about the gravity of the crisis that threatens them and their children. That would have to change. And it began within hours of Trump’s inauguration.
A couple of days ago, I fleshed out that story in detail.
But many of the steps they’ve taken to silence the science have fit nicely with their one remaining strategy. They had already endowed “drill, baby, drill!” with “emergency” status, circumventing the legal guardrails and granting polluters subsidies and incentives. They had already abandoned all international efforts to preserve a livable climate. They had already mobilized the whole of government behind burning more and more fossil fuels. They had already undermined the national transition toward a clean economy by shackling renewable energy. And with their attack on science well underway, only one thing remained: Cripple environmental enforcement.
March 12, 2025: one among many very bad days on our planet.
This would not be difficult. If the MAGA administration could fire or silence those tasked with informing the public, it could also fire or neutralize those tasked with protecting it. Their plan—hobbling the protectors—features three interconnected initiatives:
nullifying the standards that regulators must enforce to protect the public;
attacking non-federal regulators who might step up to protect the public in the absence of federal enforcement; and
hollowing out regulatory authorities, leaving few, if any, capable of doing the job.
Nullifying the standards:
On the first day of his presidency, Donald Trump laid out a plan to nullify a comprehensive list of environmental standards that have protected countless lives for decades. In a first-day order titled “Unleashing American Energy,” he directed all agency heads to review all regulations and policies to identify anything that burdens fossil-fuel exploration, development and extraction, and suspend, revise or rescind them. Since that time, we have faced a blizzard of executive orders and agency determinations that have attempted to do just that. As recently as June 11, the Trump EPA unveiled a plan to rescind policies phasing out greenhouse gases from power plants by the 2030s, and to allow power plants to continue to emit more mercury and other toxins, causing neurological damage in children and a range of health risks to adults. Because power plants account for roughly one-quarter of U.S. climate -warming pollutants, the plan crushes all hopes that the U.S. will meet its commitments under the 2016 Paris Agreement to reduce its carbon emissions 50-52 percent by 2030. This result is of no consequence to Zeldin. In announcing the plan, he dismissed the worldwide program of cutting atmospheric carbon concentrations as “the climate change cult.”
But during the roughly five months between those two events, the administration has loosed a series of devastating salvoes against environmental standards protecting the public. In early March, Zeldin set the stage for a torrid assault on agency protective measures, announcing plans to dismantle 31 federal air quality and carbon pollution regulations ranging from soot standards and power plant pollution rules to the core “endangerment finding”—the scientific and legal underpinning of the Clean Air Act. Among these, the repeal of the endangerment finding which determined that greenhouse gases endanger the public welfare is perhaps the most dangerous. If there is no endangerment finding, then the EPA cannot regulate greenhouse gases to protect the public from runaway climate disruption. Within days, the EPA announced it was rolling back limits on wastewater discharges from coal-fired power plants containing arsenic, lead, mercury and other heavy metals. At the same time, the EPA announced plans to roll back limits on coal ash wastes containing those same toxic heavy-metal pollutants. A week later, Trump signed an order blocking the implementation of a fee on excess methane leaks from oil & gas operations. Under a 2022 law, those fees would be assessed and used to assist companies install emissions-reducing technologies. The president’s order anticipated a subsequent Republican move to rescind the law entirely. Also in March, the EPA announced that it would be rolling back air quality particulate matter standards protecting Americans from asthma, cardiovascular diseases, cancer and premature death. In mid-March, the EPA announced plans to rescind existing vehicle emission standards. Later that month, the EPA announced plans to narrow its authority to protect streams and wetlands from pollution in many states. Finally, in March the President disbanded the interagency working group on the social cost of greenhouse gases, ordering agencies to rely on costs estimated formulated more than two decades earlier. This is significant because the social cost of carbon emissions informs decisions made by every regulatory agency regarding the costs and benefits of environmental regulation. Using cost assumptions more than twenty years out of date assures that regulatory benefits to society will be underestimated, resulting in lax or eliminated regulation.
In April, the EPA announced plans to roll back regulation of methane leaks from oil & gas extraction, processing, transmission and storage. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Under these rulings, its discharge into the atmosphere from both existing and new sources would now be largely unregulated. The EPA also announced that it would be reconsidering its rule regulating the release of benzene, a known carcinogen, from roughly 130 petroleum refineries. Also in the EPA’s crosshairs is the Good Neighbor provision of the Clean Air Act that directs the EPA to protect downwind states from interstate air pollution released by upwind sources, potentially allowing polluters to emit toxins with impunity.
In mid-April, the Trump administration took three more major steps to remove protections against toxic pollution. First, it granted two-year exemptions to 68 coal-fired power plants from mercury and other toxics emissions limits. The exemption covered the nation’s nine worst emitters of mercury, a powerful neurotoxin posing serious danger to children. Second, the president issued an order requiring agencies to affix “sunset” provisions to their pollution regulations, assuring that protections will expire with the passage of time unless explicitly renewed by Congress. This order would effectively make protections temporary by default, undermining long-term planning and leaving the public vulnerable to sudden rollbacks. On the same day, the president issued a rule rolling back the implementation of the Endangered Species Act, making it easier for polluters to act without regard for the habitats of the most vulnerable species.
In May and June, the assault on environmental protections gained further momentum. In mid-May, the EPA announced a delay in compliance deadlines or outright recission of rules protecting drinking water from PFAS “forever chemicals.” A week later, Trump withdrew marine monument protections, opening 495,000 square miles of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine Monument to commercial fishing. Days later, the Department of the Interior (DOI) announced plans to revise and potentially roll back protected national monument status granted to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, among other monuments. And at the end of the month, the DOI announced plans to review and restart offshore oil and gas leasing programs which had been blocked by the Biden administration.
In early June, Trump issued an order prohibiting the issuance of offshore wind energy leases. While global offshore wind installations generate 33,000 megawatts of power, the U.S. accounts for only 172 megawatts, with further development now stopped cold. On the same day, the Trump administration announced plans to rescind protections covering the Alaska “National Petroleum Reserve,” treasured for its environmental value. On June 11, the EPA announced a rule to repeal existing carbon pollution standards for new and existing electric power plants. The same day, the EPA proposed the repeal of mercury and air toxics standards for coal- and oil-fired power plants, effectively rendering permanent the temporary exemptions granted to mercury polluters in April.
The list ends here only because we have approached the present time. It is clear that the onslaught is continuing, with damage to every aspect of protection for the environment and human health if it is deemed—in Trump’s view—to impede the unleashing of American “energy dominance,” unfettered by consideration of the impacts on health and environmental quality.
Attacking the non-federal regulators:
The Federal government, of course, is not the only institution with power to protect people from harmful polluters. State and local governments have always had a major role to play in this arena. In fact, the Clean Air Act guarantees the right of each state to go beyond federal minimum standards, including state laws capping carbon emissions. In April, however, the President issued an order directing DOJ to identify any state laws protecting citizens from polluters and stop their enforcement if Attorney General Bondi finds them to be “burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.” In the view of this administration, the Federal standard, as it is decimated by Trump’s onslaught described above, must be the only standard, unless the Attorney General should decide otherwise.
On May 1, the DOJ did exactly as ordered, filing suit against New York and Vermont in an effort to overturn their more protective climate and environmental laws. The Natural Resources Defense Council argues that this is patently illegal:
“Targeting state climate laws with federal lawsuits tramples on constitutional principles and long-standing states’ rights. States have the authority to go beyond federal standards to protect their residents from pollution. These lawsuits aim to protect polluters—not people—and would undermine states like Vermont and New York working to hold bad actors accountable.”
The federal attacks have emboldened oil & gas interests in litigation against state regulation. Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr, now representing Gulf Coast oil companies against the State of Louisiana, cites this executive order in opposing local communities seeking compensation for their loss of land to the encroaching Gulf of Mexico due to offshore oil operations. The strategy is now clear: Rescind as many federal protective powers as possible, and assure that no other standards can be used to protect the public.
Hollowing out the federal regulators:
Whether or not the federal environmental standards can ultimately be revoked and state protective agencies subdued, the Trump administration is employing a third strategy largely within its control: starve the federal regulatory institutions by mass firings and draconian budget cuts. Less than a month into the Trump administration, the EPA fired 388 of its staff. As noted previously, in mid-March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin laid out a plan to eliminate the Agency’s science research capacity, firing more than 1,100 scientists and dissolving its largest department, the Office of Research and Development, eliminating 75 percent of the people who work there, leaving the agency increasingly beholden to analyses provided by regulated industries themselves. Zeldin then announced his intention to reduce the agency’s budget by 65% in the coming years. The 2026 budget passed by the House already reflects a 55% cut in EPA funding. And after passage of the “Big, Beautiful” budget act, Trump asked Congress to cut EPA funding by 54%. While budget cuts do not always translate proportionately into headcount cuts, this can only mean that the EPA’s 15,000-member workforce will be significantly reduced, and its enforcement resources drastically constrained.
If the Trump and Zeldin are successful, therefore, many of the nation’s environmental standards will be revoked or rescinded; state and local regulators will be sued and subdued; and what remains of current environmental standards will be weakly enforced or ignored altogether by agencies—most notably the EPA—reduced to a shell of their former selves.
THE END?
Hang on, hang on, hang on! Yes, we’ve covered all six of the six facets of Trump’s environmental wreckage.
The bogus “energy emergency,”
Supercharging fossil fuel pollution,
Abandoning the global climate response,
Undermining clean energy,
Silencing the science, and now,
Hobbling the protectors.
But we need to take a deep breath, and think about what this means for us all. I’m going to take a few days, and put together an epilogue, some final reflections for us all to think about. I’ll need a bit of time. So, please—watch this space! God bless you, and thanks for wading through the toxic muck with me.
Please stay with me one more time!