A Year of Betrayal: EPA Under Lee Zeldin

Much of the foundation of the EPA’s authority to address climate change rests on the 2009 endangerment finding, which formally determined that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health and welfare. That determination is the basis of the agency’s standards to regulate climate pollution, making it one of the most important environmental protections on the books. 

Yet, in a clear handout to oil billionaires and coal plant owners, Zeldin’s EPA released a proposal in July 2025 to repeal the endangerment finding and to completely eliminate vehicle carbon emissions standards. This would reverse the single-largest action to cut climate pollution in U.S. history. The final repeal was sent to the Office of Management and Budget earlier this month, which means it could be released any day now. 

Given the increasing intensity of hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires caused by climate change, this is a disastrous and deeply cynical move. To justify this illegal and unscientific finding, the EPA has wrongly argued:

• Climate science is uncertain: The EPA repeal relied on a report from a few climate skeptics to challenge the well-established scientific consensus that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. (This report was so thoroughly refuted that the group that authored it was disbanded, and the administration has stopped repeating its arguments.)
• The EPA’s authority does not allow it to restrict pollutants that are not local in nature: Again, this is a cynical and unsubstantiated argument. The Clean Air Act expressly mentions “effects on…weather…and climate” as part of the definition of welfare that the EPA is supposed to protect. And the Supreme Court specifically found that greenhouse gases are a pollutant because they pose a danger to human health and welfare.  

In addition to challenging this core finding and trying to eliminate the vehicle standards, the EPA is gutting or delaying key standards to address climate emissions: 

• It has moved to delay methane regulations for the oil and gas industry, allowing greater quantities of a pollutant that is more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
• It has proposed scrapping carbon pollution standards from power plants, the largest industrial source of carbon dioxide. 

Zeldin has desperately tried to make the case that repealing the standards to curb carbon emissions from cars and trucks would save Americans money. The facts say otherwise. 

The 2024 car rules alone would cut nearly eight billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the next three decades—more than the entire U.S. economy emits in a year. That would mean fewer heart attacks, lung illnesses, and asthma attacks, resulting in $13 billion a year in avoided health care costs. They would also save new car buyers about $6,000 through reduced fuel and maintenance costs. 

In its repeal proposal, the EPA just ignored the climate benefits and downplayed the health benefits of the 2024 standards. But putting its head in the sand doesn’t mean those benefits don’t exist. The majority of Americans want stronger climate protections, but Zeldin’s EPA is listening to oil industry billionaires instead.

The Clean Air Act is one of the most effective public health laws in U.S. history, preventing millions of premature deaths and illnesses annually, and delivering trillions of dollars of economic benefits to the United States. Yet under Lee Zeldin, the EPA has consistently attempted to weaken protections and roll back standards that protect communities from dangerous pollutants.

Zeldin’s EPA helped coordinate President Trump’s unilateral exemptions from hazardous air pollutant standards for more than 180 facilities. That included exemptions for coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturers, commercial sterilizers, taconite iron-ore processors, coke ovens, and copper smelters. These exemptions were issued without any public input or accountability, and will increase cumulative pollution exposure in communities that already face grave health risks.

His EPA is also rigging the math in its analyses to ignore the public health benefits of cutting soot and smog. Less pollution means fewer asthma attacks, less heart disease, and longer lives, all of which are not only good for people but also good for the economy. But the EPA just said it would exclude those economic benefits from its calculations. 

The fact is, the public benefits of cutting pollution far outweigh the costs to industry: 

• The economic benefits from just the first two decades of clean air protections are estimated to be as high as $50 trillion.
• An estimated 205,000 more Americans would have died prematurely without pollution standards adopted after 1970, and millions more would have suffered from serious illness.

The agency’s own analysis confirms as much. The EPA previously found that for every $1 in compliance costs for companies, $77 would be delivered in benefits to the American people. Those benefits are real: lower health care costs, fewer missed days of work and school, longer lives, and overall healthier communities.

The EPA’s mission is to protect people, not polluters. By pretending health benefits don’t count, Zeldin’s EPA is clearing the way for more pollution and setting the stage for families and communities to pay the price.

Safeguarding America’s waterways, wetlands, bays, and lakes is essential to protecting the environment and providing Americans access to safe drinking water. Yet under Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA has moved to narrow the scope of protections under the Clean Water Act, leaving wetlands and waterways more vulnerable to pollution while reducing federal oversight. At Zeldin’s direction, the EPA has:

• Proposed to radically limit which water bodies are protected from pollution and destruction.
• Given coal-fired power plants an unnecessary and lengthy delay before they would have to comply with limits on toxic discharges.
• Moved to restrict the authority of states and Tribes to ensure that federally permitted projects, such as oil and gas pipelines or hydropower dams, do not undermine water quality (This will make it harder to deny or modify projects that pollute or degrade rivers, wetlands, and drinking water sources).

The agency has also retreated from strong protections against “forever chemicals” (PFAS), despite widespread contamination and clear links to serious health effects such as cancer, immune system disruption, and nervous system damage. 

Zeldin, who as a member of Congress supported stronger PFAS protections, has:

• Moved to rescind four of the six PFAS drinking water standards and to delay the other two (the EPA had found that these standards would have saved 9,600 lives and prevented 30,000 serious illnesses).
• Proposed to dramatically roll back reporting requirements for chemical manufacturers, which would leave the government, scientists and the public in the dark on PFAS levels.
• Slow-walked the agency’s assessment of the health threats posed by forever chemicals–contaminated sewage sludge, which is widely used as fertilizer.
• Cut PFAS research budgets and staff, and terminated grants for PFAS research.

PFAS contamination of drinking water is widespread, with preliminary testing showing that more than 73 million people use water above the EPA’s threshold. The agency has estimated that when fuller monitoring is done, up to 105 million people will be found to have tap water contaminated with PFAS in excess of the EPA’s standards. By weakening clean water safeguards and stalling action on PFAS, Zeldin’s EPA is shifting pollution costs from corporate polluters onto families, communities, and local governments.

The EPA has also begun to weaken oversight and protections for other toxic chemicals. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) requires the agency to determine whether chemicals pose an “unreasonable risk” based solely on scientific evidence—not industry costs. 

Yet Zeldin has brought in senior staffers from the chemical industry and, under their leadership, the EPA has proposed changes that would weaken this science-based framework by:

• Changing the threshold at which certain chemicals, such as formaldehyde, are considered dangerous. (Note: There is no threshold at which exposure to formaldehyde is safe.)

A similar pattern has emerged with other toxic chemicals, where the EPA has:

• Delayed the phaseout of the last remaining uses of raw asbestos in the United States.
• Stalled planned reporting deadlines for companies to submit unpublished health and safety data for 16 toxic chemicals.
• Prioritized industry lobbying over scientific findings, fast-tracking safety reviews to rush approval of dangerous chemicals under the guise of “innovation.”

These actions tilt the balance in favor of industrial polluters, but they do nothing to protect average Americans from the real health problems created by dangerous chemicals.

The agency’s effectiveness is not solely determined by its policies—it is also dependent on its ability to enforce them. Zeldin has weakened the EPA by targeting the people responsible for carrying out the agency’s mission. Over the summer, more than 140 EPA employees signed a letter criticizing his leadership and warning that his actions were recklessly dismantling critical protections.

Rather than engaging with those legitimate concerns, Zeldin:

• Placed the signatories on administrative leave.
• Later terminated their employment, despite long-standing federal protections for employees speaking in their personal capacity.

This sent a chilling message to career scientists and public servants at the EPA: “Keep quiet or lose your job.” That should never be the policy of a public agency, especially one tasked with protecting public health.

Staffing cuts between 25 and 33 percent, the largest in history, have crippled the agency's capacity to protect our air, our water, and our health. It has made it harder to conduct critical inspections, review permits, and monitor safeguard compliance. It means less expertise from chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists at an agency charged with protecting all of us.

Communities across the country applied for federal grants to cut pollution, prepare for stronger storms or hurricanes, and develop cleaner, healthier energy sources. Zeldin has tried to put an end to those efforts. 

Between 2023 and 2024, more than $37 billion in grants were awarded to support community-led projects focused on public health, clean energy, disaster resilience, and economic opportunity. The EPA has since canceled, frozen, or clawed back many of these grants. Canceled grants include:

• A Community Change grant in North Carolina to test drinking water at homes and public buildings; distribute water testing kits; replace lead pipes in houses, churches, and community centers; and restore wetlands to reduce flooding and improve water quality.
• A collaborative problem-solving project in Arizona to address indoor air quality and heating safety in Hopi and Navajo communities, expand Indigenous workforce training, and improve energy access through safe, efficient heating solutions.
• A Community Change grant in Alaska to remove asbestos, lead, and mold from community buildings; upgrade insulation and heating systems; install solar power, and provide workforce training in carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, and solar installation.

These decisions have hit hardest in already burdened communities. Meanwhile, the attempted cancellation of the $7 billion Solar for All program leaves nearly a million residents frozen out from a program set to provide $52 billion in energy cost savings for Americans over the next 20 years. The EPA has also frozen nearly $20 billion in awards through the National Clean Investment Fund Program and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator, which has stalled investments in projects that would:

• Produce and save enough electricity to power up to 2.2 million homes each year.
• Provide $400 a year in electricity bill savings.
• Create tens of thousands of new, well-paying manufacturing and construction jobs annually.
• Generate an additional $21.3 billion to $23.9 billion in wages between 2025 and 2031.

Numerous court challenges have been brought to contest the legality of the EPA’s actions, but in the meantime, the halt in funding means less support for programs that help communities recover from past harm and build safer, healthier futures.

The protection of the environment and public health in this country rests on three complementary pillars: responsible safeguards; scientific, economic and legal expertise; and effective enforcement and oversight. The United States has pulled all of that together, for the betterment of the nation. 

Over the past 56 years, curbs on air and water pollution have delivered unprecedented health and economic benefits to our nation. Our rivers don’t catch on fire; our cities’ air isn’t choked in soot and smog. These improvements seem inevitable to us now, but they weren’t. 

It is the result of decades of progress made under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, as well as through bipartisan congressional consensus and compromise, with industrial polluters fighting this progress every step of the way.

Now comes Zeldin to do their bidding in-house, not on behalf of the American people but for the sake of short-term profits and ill-gotten gains for the industries that have the most to win from the loss of responsible public oversight.

Voters didn’t ask for Zeldin’s reckless attacks, but we will all be paying the price for them.