Trump’s Assault on the State of Our Health and the Environment

The Trump administration, round two, is waging the worst White House attack in history on the environment and public health, putting families and communities at growing risk—in rural areas and urban centers alike—squandering decades of hard-won progress and handicapping workers and companies in the clean energy transition.

In little more than a year, the Trump administration has:

• Taken a wrecking ball to the commonsense safeguards we’ve relied on for decades to defend clean water and air, healthy wildlife and lands, and oceans and coastal communities.
• Smothered sound science and told us to ignore what we all see with our own eyes—the rising toll of raging wildfires, storms, flooding, heat waves, and drought.
• Given new meaning to the term presidential power grab by slamming the brakes on $25 billion worth of offshore wind projects, from Massachusetts to Virginia, even as household electricity bills have surged 10 percent.
• Anchored our future to the dirty fuels of the past, sidelining our workers and companies in a global clean energy industry that attracted a record $2.3 trillion in investment last year.

According to a detailed accounting by NRDC, the Trump administration has, since coming into office, taken or proposed more than 420 actions that threaten the environment, public health, and our ability to confront climate change.

We’re not talking here about tinkering around the edges.

These are measures that:

• Put millions of miles of streams and more than half the nation’s wetlands at risk by gutting the Clean Water Act and rolling back standards that protect drinking water.
• Dramatically increase dangerous air pollution by, among other things, granting scores of coal-fired power plants, copper smelters, chemical manufacturers, and others a free pass to spew toxic contaminants into the air.
• Expose more than a billion acres of ocean waters and vast tracks of public lands and Arctic wilderness to the catastrophic risks and ongoing harms of oil and gas drilling.
• Drive up costs to consumers and reduce showroom choice by abandoning clean car standards that were poised to spur domestic manufacturing and save drivers billions of dollars a year at the pump.

Not all of the administration’s reckless assaults will prevail. Much of what’s proposed is illegal; some have already been turned back in court. If the administration gets only part of what it’s seeking, though, enduring damage will result. Everyone, though, will pay the price, tallied in more pollution in our air and water; more emergency room visits, lost workdays, and premature deaths; and more wildlife gone and habitat destroyed.

We’ll pay, also, with more runaway climate disasters that have left millions of people across the country unable to afford, or even to access, basic homeowner’s insurance. Major disasters caused $115 billion worth of damage nationwide in 2025 alone. 

The Trump administration’s response? “No problem.”

Just this month, the administration moved to rescind the legal basis for safeguards that curb climate pollution. The 2009 endangerment finding—upheld, repeatedly, by the U.S. Supreme Court—rested on scientific proof that this pollution is a threat to public health and welfare. Over the past 17 years, the evidence has only grown. It’s now “beyond scientific dispute,” the prestigious National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded this past September. 

Last week, NRDC joined a broad coalition of health and environmental groups in suing the administration over its attempt to abdicate its responsibility to address the climate crisis. We expect to win because the administration hasn’t followed the law. 

Who, exactly, asked for all this?

It certainly wasn’t the voters. 

Roughly 6 in 10 Americans (57 percent) say the U.S. government is doing too little to protect the environment. Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) say environmental quality is in decline. Across the nation, people experience for themselves benefits that far exceed the cost of compliance with environmental safeguards—by more than 30 to 1 in the case of the Clean Air Act. And across the American West, more than 8 in 10 voters (84 percent) say the rollback of protections for lands, wildlife, and water is “a serious problem.”

The public doesn’t want to eviscerate the commonsense safeguards and destroy the institutions we depend on to defend the environment and public health. Someone else, though, does: The oil and gas billionaires whom Trump solicited to bankroll his campaign and other industrial groups in the administration’s favor

A little more than a year in, big polluters are getting what they want from this administration. The rest of us are paying the price.