An EPA Without Science

On March 12, six weeks into his tenure leading the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin announced a suite of thirty-one “historic actions.” Together, the accompanying press release proclaimed, they constituted “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in US history.” Some of those actions, such as rolling back emissions limits on cars and power plants, were widely anticipated and resembled past efforts by Republican EPA administrators to loosen rules on industrial polluters. 

Others went further. Zeldin revealed that the EPA will “reconsider” the 2009 “endangerment finding,” its determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare, which underpins the agency’s regulation of carbon dioxide and other climate-warming pollutants under the Clean Air Act—a radical move that the first Trump administration considered but ultimately decided against pursuing. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” said Zeldin. Soon after that piece of rhetorical violence, the EPA confirmed that it will no longer require power plants and other industrial facilities to report their greenhouse gas emissions.

Just ten months ago, the EPA’s leaders were instead celebrating the “historic $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund…made possible by President Biden and Vice President Harris’ Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest climate investment in history.” Zeldin’s 180-degree turn away from those priorities fits a broader pattern: the second Trump administration has spent the past three months flipping the missions of various federal agencies on their heads. The leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services is promoting vaccine skepticism. The Department of Education is now focused on dictating what schools cannot teach. And the Environmental Protection Agency is now committed wholly to dismantling decades of environmental protections.

Officials have signaled that there will be little enforcement of water and air pollution rules. In late March, the agency invited industrial polluters to apply for exemptions from longstanding air pollution limits by simply writing an e-mail, an offer promptly accepted by the owners of the nation’s dirtiest coal-fired power plant, in Colstrip, Montana. Chemical plants, too, will be given exemptions from certain controls on their toxic air pollution. 

A former Long Island Congressman with a sparse record on environmental issues but a reputation as a workhorse, Zeldin is enthusiastically presiding over the complete erasure of his agency’s climate-focused policies. He has said remarkably little about the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, but he is outspoken about the urgency of removing the shackles that past Democratic administrations have purportedly placed on American businesses. His public remarks and press releases are peppered with phrases like “Powering the Great American Comeback” and “Unleashing American Energy,” and he has zealously promoted Trump’s agenda of “Energy Dominance”—shorthand for boosting oil, gas, and coal production and consumption at the expense of renewables.

In a late February cabinet meeting, Trump predicted that Zeldin would “be cutting 65 or so percent of the people from environmental,” using the shorthand he often deploys to describe the EPA. But later that day the White House issued a clarification of Trump’s offhand remark: the 65 percent cut referred to the agency’s budget, rather than its 15,000-strong workforce. A presidential executive order did direct nearly all agencies to come up with plans for “reductions in force” (i.e., mass layoffs) by mid-March, but Zeldin and his aides have moved more slowly and deliberately than have some of their peers. Thus far about a thousand EPA employees have departed, either through voluntary resignations or firings. The new leadership seems to be following a different playbook than the heavy-handed approach that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he has purged 20,000 employees from various agencies (one quarter of the department’s total workforce), or the extreme DOGE-driven staff cuts that have virtually wiped out the US Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

EPA veterans worry that this is because Zeldin is quietly laying the groundwork for a transformation that goes beyond the regulatory rollbacks and staff cuts the agency faced during the first Trump administration under the leadership of Scott Pruitt, a clownish coal lobbyist from Oklahoma who became embroiled in bizarre scandals over an expensive security detail and an alleged attempt to procure a used mattress from the erstwhile Trump International Hotel. Zeldin’s plans for reorganizing the agency suggest that the Trump 2.0 EPA is pursuing a more far-reaching project: an overhaul that could undercut the ability of future administrations to regulate all kinds of pollution, from new “forever chemicals” to greenhouse gases to conventional air pollutants. To enact his “historic” rollbacks in a way that survives judicial scrutiny, Zeldin will need staffers with legal, economic, and scientific expertise to make them durable. Mass layoffs and deregulatory actions work at cross purposes. 

This tension may explain the agency’s current attack on its own Office of Research and Development (ORD), the in-house division tasked with conducting the independent scientific analyses that underpin the EPA’s regulations on a wide range of harmful pollutants. In late March news leaked of internal plans to dissolve the ORD and fire or reassign up to 75 percent of its staff. Diminishing the obscure ORD could be a way to severely undercut the agency’s power to rein in polluters by jettisoning or transferring a relatively small number of experts whose work buttresses most of the agency’s regulations. To Chris Frey, who served as an EPA assistant administrator and the head of ORD for most of the Biden era, the intent is clear: “This is trying to excise science out of the EPA.”

*

President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, with broad bipartisan support. There was widespread recognition of the need to curb the excesses of heavy industry. With rivers in Ohio catching fire and urban skylines barely visible through choking smog, the nation’s pollution problem had become impossible to ignore. As a student at Columbia Law School in the late 1960s, David Hawkins experienced the multiday smog events that regularly plagued New York City in that era. Even on the good days, air pollution could be extreme. “Every morning, I looked at the black smoke belching from incinerators in apartment buildings and the thick layer of soot on the windowsill,” he told me. 

Those experiences helped inform his decision to become an environmental lawyer. He went to work for the Natural Resources Defense Council and, in 1977, joined the Carter administration as an assistant administrator at the EPA. Hawkins was tasked with devising and implementing rules and programs to reduce air pollution under the Clean Air Act. By any measure, the act is one of the most cost-effective pieces of legislation in modern history. An analysis of the law’s 1990 amendments alone concluded that their benefits exceed their costs by a ratio of 30 to 1 (and at the upper end of estimates, by as much as 90 to 1). Each year the law prevents more than 200,000 premature deaths, 17,000,000 lost days of work, and millions of asthma attacks. 

During his tenure at the EPA, Hawkins often fielded the demands of representatives from power companies and the automotive industry, who objected to what they saw as onerous requirements to clean up sulfur dioxide or particulate pollution. After his stint in government he returned to the NRDC, where he spent the next four decades protecting air quality rules. He saw firsthand how industry attempted to use lobbying or litigation to push back on any limits on their freedom to pollute—a pattern that persisted through every administration. During Trump’s first term those long campaigns yielded concrete results, including rollbacks both of vehicle emissions standards and of caps on mercury and other toxic air pollution from coal-fired power plants. 

It’s no secret why industry has labored mightily to weaken these and other EPA rules. Polluters don’t pay for the full economic damage of their pollution. Those costs are socialized and dispersed—the “externalities” of economics textbooks. Some of the benefits of corporations’ polluting activities (such as generating electricity or making cars) are also widely shared. But the bulk of the financial benefits are concentrated in relatively few hands. And even the incremental loss of those benefits is acutely felt by executives and shareholders, who have every incentive to shape the rulebook to their advantage. The EPA was created to balance the scales a bit in the public’s favor. It has largely succeeded—to the point that, today, there’s an element of surreality to the extreme pollution from wildfire smoke that has in recent years descended on cities like Los Angeles and New York. Thanks to the EPA, most Americans—unlike David Hawkins—had never experienced air quality that poor. 

There are real costs to that forgetting. An analysis by the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit founded by EPA alumni, estimated that twelve of the rollbacks Zeldin announced on the “greatest day in deregulatory history” could lead to 200,000 premature deaths over the next twenty-five years and wipe out $254 billion in economic value. For each dollar in costs they impose on industry, these twelve rules—including various caps on soot, carbon, and methane emissions from cars, trucks, and power plants—generate more than six dollars from avoided illnesses and healthcare costs and higher productivity.

“The economic benefits are hard for the public to value,” says Hawkins. “Most members of the public don’t read these lengthy economic tomes that show benefit ratios of thirty or forty to one. But I think people value the fact that they can go to a river nearby and swim or fish safely. If we get more beach closings, and warnings about pollution in rivers, people will respond to that…. Look at all the opinion polls—nobody is saying we think the air or water is too clean.”

*

There are various ways to understand Trump’s first hundred days in office: as a retribution tour (see the targeting of law firms connected to the January 6 prosecutions); as a performative spectacle for his core supporters (see the White House social media feed, full of sadistic video clips and photos of shackled deportees); and as a sustained assault on independent sources of authority (see the threats to revoke universities’ tax-exempt status, impeach federal judges, and push mainstream news organizations out of the press pool). The EPA hasn’t generated nearly as much attention as Trump’s remaking of the Department of Justice or the State Department. But all of these interpretations can find support in the agency’s actions thus far. 

The highest-profile gambit of the Zeldin era has been the effort to claw back funding awarded last year to affordable housing and climate-focused nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, an EPA program set up under the Inflation Reduction Act. To justify freezing $20 billion in climate and clean energy grants that had already been disbursed, Zeldin has seized on an undercover video recorded by the right-wing provocateur group Project Veritas, in which a former EPA official compares efforts to quickly distribute IRA funds before Trump took office to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.” The FBI even launched a criminal inquiry into the grantmaking process. Denise Cheung, the veteran head of the criminal division in the US Attorney’s Office, resigned in protest, saying she had been pressured into investigating a grant recipient despite a lack of evidence. In April another federal judge ruled that all of this was unlawful and ordered the EPA to immediately release the funds. The agency appealed; the funds remain frozen.

The Inflation Reduction Act was President Biden’s signature achievement. Attacking it with such aggression—not just freezing funding but sending FBI agents after grantees—signals the EPA leadership’s full embrace of the president’s project of erasing his predecessor’s legacy. Some of Zeldin’s other actions have been less consequential but similarly symbolic. The agency cut a million dollars’ worth of media subscriptions that had allowed employees to access publications like Politico’s E&E News, an environmental policy–focused trade outlet that is essential reading for environmental policymakers and lawyers. It shuttered a museum highlighting the EPA’s history on the first floor of its headquarters, touting the $600,000 it would save in annual operational costs. These steps trimmed a negligible amount from the agency’s $9 billion budget, of course. But going after the press and targeting the Biden administration’s “partisan pet projects” like the museum (which opened in 2024) in the name of cost-cutting plays well to the Republican base and, more importantly, to the only audience that matters: Donald Trump. 

In an op-ed on Fox News’s website, Zeldin derided the EPA museum for wasting taxpayer money on “self-congratulatory displays” that failed to give proper recognition to the agency’s achievements under Republican administrations:

This museum exemplifies a broader pattern we’ve uncovered—resources being diverted from the agency’s core mission to fund initiatives that advance partisan ideologies under the guise of environmental stewardship. Imagine the progress EPA could have made by funding the replacement of lead pipes, or cleanup of superfund sites languishing on the National Priorities List, or state and local efforts to boost air monitoring and other efforts to improve air quality.

Just the month before, Zeldin’s EPA had terminated grants under a different provision of the IRA that would have, among other things, helped underserved communities replace lead pipes (even though its own lawyers had reportedly warned that some of those cancelations were legally improper, according to The Washington Post). The EPA has, at last count, canceled at least 781 grants made during the Biden administration; most are related to environmental justice initiatives. One gave $440,000 to a nonprofit in Washington state’s Methow Valley that operates air quality monitors and helps local residents weatherize their homes to keep out wildfire smoke. Another canceled grant of $19.9 million had been awarded to Springfield, Massachusetts—a city with one of the highest rates of asthma and emergency room visits in the country—to fund air quality monitoring and home energy retrofits in lower-income neighborhoods. The letter sent by the EPA to Springfield officials explained that “the objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”

One of the now-closed museum’s displays told the story of the 1982 fight by Black residents of Warren County, North Carolina, against the dumping of toxic PCB-laden soil in their community—protests that gave birth to the environmental justice movement. In 2022 EPA Administrator Michael Regan—the first Black man to lead the agency and a “proud son of North Carolina”—traveled to Warren County to announce the launch of the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. The agency’s establishment of this national-level office was viewed by community leaders and veteran policymakers as an historic milestone: a forceful acknowledgement that marginalized communities have long borne disproportionate burdens from pollution, and that the government hadn’t done enough to address them.

On March 11 Zeldin ordered that office closed, along with the environmental justice divisions in each of the agency’s ten regions. On April 21—the eve of Earth Day—EPA leadership told 455 environmental justice staffers they’d be fired or reassigned. Among them were agency experts on children’s health who develop guidance to help teachers, parents, and local officials prevent kids from being exposed to environmental toxins. Children’s health coordinators at all the EPA’s regional offices were notified that they’d be fired or moved to different divisions. The shuttering of these children’s health programs is yet another way to understand the actions of the second Trump administration: its war on the administrative state has become, effectively, a war on the future. 

*

In her 2011 book The Submerged State, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler argued that government programs can be vulnerable to ideological attacks because of their relative invisibility in citizens’ lives. Her research focused on initiatives like the mortgage-interest tax deduction and Social Security and Medicare, but the insight applies just as well to regulations that keep pollution out of the air we breathe and the water we drink. 

Few government agencies or offices are more submerged than the ORD. Its staffers study the effects of pollutants on human physiology and investigate methods for removing them from water, air, soil, and food systems. They do toxicity assessments to understand the hazards of exposure to certain chemicals and particulate matter. Congressional statutes require the EPA to act on the best available science when it issues rules. It would be difficult to do that if the ORD faces huge disinvestment, says Frey. According to House Democrats, there are internal plans to dismiss 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other specialists at the office. Without those experts, cleanup at thousands of toxic Superfund sites around the country would be compromised. Americans won’t necessarily notice the loss of the ORD right away, Frey says. But in the aftermath of a disaster like a chemical plant explosion or train derailment, the effects could be felt immediately. When a train loaded with hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023, EPA investigators arrived the next day; ORD scientists helped them assess the risks that locals faced from spilled vinyl chloride and other toxins. 

“The bottom line, for a member of the public, if you think about everything the agency does to protect your health, whether when you drink water or breathe air or come into contact with soil at a formerly contaminated site, there’s a lot of science behind all of that,” Frey says. That scientific work is designed to be independent, shielded from political pressures and outside influence, but also relevant for policymaking: the ORD’s studies inform the standards that are developed by the EPA’s water, land, air, and chemicals offices. “The proposal to move ORD scientists into policy offices takes away that critical separation and makes it easier for political leadership to say, ‘Here’s the answer we want,’” says Frey. “I think that’s the goal.” He says the best way to understand the axing of the Office of Research and Development is as “part of this frontal assault on the science enterprise of the entire federal government” launched by the Trump administration. “Without that science, what’s going to be the basis of those decisions?” Disbanding the ORD would create a vacuum into which industry-funded research will likely flow.

In mid-April acting deputy administrator Chad McIntosh told a meeting of the American Chemistry Council that the EPA’s leadership was still working on its reorganization plans, particularly for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention and the ORD. Sure enough, a few weeks later, on May 2, the EPA announced a new organization structure, and invited ORD staff to apply for roles spread across other agency offices, including 130 newly created positions in the agency’s chemicals office to help process reviews of new chemicals and pesticides. Their new boss is a former executive for the American Chemistry Council.

On that same day the Trump administration released its proposed budget, which showed remarkable hostility to science in all its forms. The Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health would lose nearly half their funding; the National Science Foundation would lose about 57 percent. (The NSF is being punished, the explanatory text in the budget explained, because it “has funded “climate; clean energy; [and] woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.”) After the State Department, the EPA came in for the biggest reduction of all federal agencies: a loss of $4.9 billion, more than half its total budget. That includes wiping out $235 million in funding for the ORD. 

*

Clean air and water remain, of course, quite popular. Trump seems to understand this, which is why his standard response to any question having to do with the environment is “We will have the cleanest air and cleanest water.” The EPA itself also remains broadly popular with the public. Recent polling found that large majorities of both Trump voters and all voters support the agency’s work and agree with maintaining or increasing its funding. 

And yet recent surveys show that, even while support for the EPA’s mission remains solid, a majority of Americans also support efforts to reduce the government’s regulatory footprint. The hollowing out of the EPA would have a less conspicuous effect on Americans’ lives than would the erosion of, say, the Postal Service or the National Park Service, both of which garnered overwhelming public support in recent polling by the Pew Research Center. People notice immediately if medications don’t arrive on time in their mailbox or their summer vacation to Yellowstone is marred by overflowing toilets.

By comparison, in the same way that few Americans understand that the Covid-19 vaccine would not have been possible without enormous support from the National Institutes of Health, few appreciate how the alphabet soup of EPA programs—such as its administration of National Ambient Air Quality Standards—prevents asthma or lengthens their lives. “A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die,” the activist, novelist, and science communicator Hank Green recently observed. “The number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.”

Former EPA officials told me that they worry most about wasted time—not just over the next four years but well beyond. “It seems to be the intentional agenda: ‘We’ve got all these people and can’t fire them all. But we can direct them to work on undoing stuff, rather than doing stuff,” Hawkins postulated Earlier this week, Zeldin announced that EPA would rescind limits on four types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water—rules that were also lauded as “historic” when they were issued last year. Scientists at ORD have done pathbreaking work to categorize thousands of PFAS chemicals and understand the risks they pose. “These challenges will remain and get worse,” says Frey. “Taking away all the tools in the toolbox for the next administration to address these problems—that will have to be rebuilt, and that will take time.”

After leaving the EPA, Frey returned to his old job as a professor of environmental engineering at North Carolina State. He worries, too, about a brain drain, a devastating loss of expertise that will set the EPA’s work back decades and push away young scientists like his students, who might otherwise have opted for careers in civil service. The ongoing rollbacks and layoffs, he explained, are not just “undermining our current scientific capabilities but discouraging the further continuation and growth of science and technology in the US to address these problems.” It could take more than a generation to rebuild that lost capacity, even as threats posed by climate change and toxic forever chemicals compound over time.

This is where the goals of Trump’s EPA and the interests of industry—traditionally closely aligned with Republican administrations—might potentially diverge. Industry doesn’t like chaos. It’s bad for business, which requires long-term investments in costly equipment, assembly lines, and power plants. Corporate leaders like a light regulatory touch, to be sure, but they also like “regulatory certainty.” In Andrew Wheeler, the (other) coal lobbyist who took over from Pruitt as EPA administrator for the bulk of the first Trump administration, industry actors had a close ally. It remains to be seen if corporate voices can sway Trump loyalists like Zeldin in the same way. But if the Trump 2.0 goal is to hamstring the regulatory powers of future administrations—to drive a “dagger” into the heart of science-based rulemaking—then a certain amount of chaos is a feature, rather than a bug. 

In recent weeks Zeldin’s dagger has been driven even deeper. On May 5 EPA leadership informed staff of plans to eliminate the agency’s Climate Change division—including its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program—and its Climate Protection Partnerships division. The latter includes the wildly successful Energy Star program, which has kept more than four billion metric tons of greenhouse gases from reaching the atmosphere since its launch in 1992. With its widely recognized labels on energy efficient appliances, Energy Star has saved consumers and businesses more than $500 billion on their utility bills, which helps explain why manufacturing firms and even the Chamber of Commerce lobbied Zeldin to preserve it—to no avail. The program delivered a return on investment of more than 1,000 to 1. 

David Bookbinder is the director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit launched in 2002 by a former EPA enforcement official who had resigned in protest against efforts by his boss, George W. Bush, to weaken air pollution rules. Bookbinder, a veteran environmental lawyer, was an architect of the legal case that led to the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that underpins the EPA’s now-endangered “endangerment finding.” He gets daily inquiries from other environmental lawyers asking what he thinks will happen under Zeldin—both to that ultimate source of the EPA’s carbon-regulating authority and to other critical programs—but he says there is no historical precedent to draw on. “I have no bloody idea what’s gonna happen,” he tells them. “By the time Lee Zeldin finishes dismantling EPA, there will be nothing left. It will take twenty years to put it back together.”