The Worst White House Assault Ever: 300 Strikes at Environment and Public Health—and Counting

Less than seven months in, the Trump administration has launched the worst White House assault ever on the environment and public health, with a staggering 300 actions or proposals that directly threaten protections for American families and communities, both urban and rural. 

At NRDC, we’re documenting these attacks by category, summarizing the harm they do, and monitoring the state of play of each on our White House Watch: Tracking Attacks on Our Environment & Health. 

Far from defending the nation and its people from existing and emerging risks, the Trump administration has turned the federal government into a direct threat to clean air and water, public lands, healthy wildlife, productive croplands, and human health. 

The administration has slammed U.S. climate progress into reverse, taking at least 40 separate actions that undercut the nation’s ability to understand, confront, and cope with the consequences of a widening crisis from extreme weather that contributed to at least 568 deaths and more than $182 billion in damages in the last year alone. 

Just last week, the Trump administration said it would yank a successful program that helps low-income and moderate-income households pay for rooftop solar systems, slashing energy bills for those who are least able to afford them. What possible excuse could there be for making it harder for these families to light, heat, and cool their homes? Oh, right: to help pay for tax cuts that mostly benefit the nation’s wealthiest people. 

The fact is, Americans in every corner of the country will pay a grievous price for this administration’s reckless and backward-looking actions. 

We’ll pay more for electricity just as demand skyrockets to power energy-guzzling data centers. We’ll have less choice in the kinds of cars we drive, even as the administration’s tariffs drive up sticker prices. 

We’ll suffer more lost days at work and school, even premature deaths, as the result of pollution that harms public health. And we’ll pay in worsening climate disasters, which are already inflicting rising costs and mounting dangers on every community in the country. 

Rural Americans will pay an especially high price for the administration’s senseless actions to cancel or curtail federal research and direct funding that help make forests less susceptible to wildfires, help farmers improve soil health and water quality, make crops more resistant to heat and drought, and improve pest management and other practices that directly impact a farmer’s livelihood. 

Here are just some of the current impacts:

• Businesses have canceled, closed, or scaled back more than $22 billion worth of new factories and clean energy projects, with a loss of 16,500 jobs, in red states and blue, as the administration and its allies in Congress have scuttled successful clean energy incentives. It’s part of the administration’s larger campaign to reverse national gains in solar and wind power, electric vehicles, advanced batteries, and the like—the building blocks of a modern economy.
• Families are poised to pay more at the gas pump as the administration works to rescind clean car standards that were set to save drivers some $23 billion in fuel costs through 2050 and to avoid burning 70 billion gallons of gasoline.
• Dangerous air pollution is set to rise after the administration decided in April to allow nearly 70 coal-fired power plants to skirt commonsense clean air standards and dump more mercury, arsenic, benzene, and carbon pollution into the air we breathe.
• Fishermen, homeowners, farmers, policymakers, and others are wondering where they’ll turn to for reliable information to inform important decisions and long-term plans after the Trump administration eviscerated U.S. climate monitoring and research, much of it regarded as the gold standard for climate science worldwide; U.S. influence has been sidelined in international efforts to confront the climate crisis and help shape the rules of the road for a global clean energy market worth a record $2.2 trillion this year. All this at a time when the International Court of Justice ruled that nations have a legal obligation to protect the environment from greenhouse gas emissions and may be held liable for reparations if they fail to act.
• Essential protections against the dangers of climate pollution have been jeopardized by the administration’s illegal effort to revoke the 2009 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and general well-being. 

Three takeaways:

• First, slashing commonsense environmental and health protections doesn’t cut costs. Safeguards enforced by the EPA more than pay for themselves, as 6 in 10 Americans understand. EPA standards deliver up to $12.50 in public benefits for every dollar invested in compliance, according to a White House report that the first Trump administration produced. Taking the environmental steward off the beat simply enables fossil fuel companies and others to shift the costs of their pollution onto the public. That runs counter to what we teach every kindergartener: Don’t blame others for the mess you make—clean it up.
• Second, in an election dominated by public perceptions about issues like the state of American democracy, the cost of living, and immigration, voters didn’t ask for this unconscionable assault, but someone else did: the billionaire oil and gas donors Trump solicited to bankroll his campaign.
• Finally, much of what the administration has proposed runs counter to sound science and the laws that Congress has duly passed to protect the environment and public health. We and others are challenging the administration, in court where necessary, to compel it to stick to the science and follow the law.