Can the E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?
Last summer, more than a hundred and fifty staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to the agency’s head, Lee Zeldin, outlining their concerns about his leadership. Topping the list was Zeldin’s naked partisanship. The administrator often used his official communications to trash Democrats. This “politicized messaging,” the letter said, was undermining trust in the agency. So, too, were Zeldin’s gutting of the E.P.A.’s research division and his tendency to ignore the findings of its scientists. The missive noted that it reflected the staffers’ personal, rather than professional, opinions, and had been written on their own time. It ended by urging Zeldin to “correct course.”
“Should you choose to do so, we stand ready to support your efforts,” it said.
The employees who signed the letter did not expect it to have much effect. “I thought, Here’s a letter the staff is going to present to the administrator,” one told me. “He’s going to take a look at it and put it in the wastepaper basket. And we will go on with our work.”
That’s not how things played out. Zeldin, or at least his deputies, launched the electronic equivalent of a manhunt. In e-mails that were eventually obtained by E&E News, a lawyer at the E.P.A.’s Office of General Counsel told colleagues that the letter to Zeldin raised no ethical concerns, because the signatories were “simply exercising their first amendment right to express their opinions.” Another lawyer in the general counsel’s office warned against any sort of retaliatory action, because “government employee speech is protected.” The agency nonetheless kept up the pressure. It soon announced that it was placing a hundred and forty-four of the signatories on administrative leave.
“We have a ZERO tolerance policy for agency bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the agenda of this administration,” Zeldin said in a statement justifying the move. “The will of the American public will not be ignored.”
President Donald Trump has referred to Zeldin as “one of the superstars” of his second Administration and, perhaps even more glowingly, as “our secret weapon.” In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters. He has packed the E.P.A.’s upper echelons with former industry lobbyists, scrubbed entire databases of information from its website, and dissolved whole departments. Under his leadership, the agency has ditched a long list of rules that industries had objected to, including regulations aimed at cutting Americans’ exposure to arsenic, a known carcinogen; mercury, a potent neurotoxin; and PM2.5, a form of very fine soot that has been shown to cause asthma and lung disease. The E.P.A. has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action. It has come out officially, if astonishingly, as pro-coal.
In early April, when Trump fired his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, reportedly for failing to prosecute his political enemies with sufficient zeal, rumors began to circulate that the President wanted Zeldin to replace her. (Todd Blanche, who took over as acting Attorney General, can serve in that capacity for up to seven months.) Zeldin’s track record at the E.P.A. makes him, by Trumpian standards, a logical pick.
“Zeldin has displayed acrobatic flexibility in bending environmental laws to suit the desires of the White House,” Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told me. “He does not only backflips but triple loops.”
Christine Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor who ran the agency under George W. Bush, said that if Zeldin becomes Attorney General “he’ll do exactly what Trump wants him to do. That’s what he’s done at the E.P.A., irrespective of the damage it’s done.”
Zeldin, who is forty-six, is the subject of two adulatory (if slim) biographies, both published in 2024, perhaps with the aid of A.I. One states that his father was a lawyer, the other that he was a doctor. In fact, Zeldin’s father was a private investigator, and his mother taught fourth grade. Zeldin’s parents divorced when he was young, and he spent his elementary-school years shuttling between their homes in Shirley, a working-class town on eastern Long Island. In high school, he joined the Youth and Government club, mostly, he would later joke, “to pick up girls.”
Zeldin sped through college at SUNY Albany in three years and through law school, also in Albany, in two. Then he enlisted in the Army. At Fort Huachuca, in Arizona, he worked in military intelligence, and later, as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, he briefly deployed to Iraq. He remembers Army life fondly. “I was a paratrooper, jumped out of airplanes, did all that stuff,” he said on “New York NOW.” “Four years of very adventurous time.” (Reporters who have looked into the matter have concluded that Zeldin spent most of his active-duty career sitting at a desk.)
At the age of twenty-eight, Zeldin made his first run for office. By this point, in 2008, he was married, with twin baby girls, and had moved back to Shirley. He challenged a Democrat named Tim Bishop, who was serving his third term in Congress. Zeldin lost to Bishop by sixteen points, but two years later, buoyed by Tea Party support, he won a seat in the New York State Senate. In 2014, he ran again against Bishop and prevailed.
As a new congressman, Zeldin voted mostly along party lines—in favor of repealing Obamacare, for example, and against limiting the sale of assault weapons. His district, which stretched from Smithtown to Montauk, was lined with beaches and wetlands, and, on a local level, he presented as green.
“We worked a lot with him on Long Island Sound issues,” Adrienne Esposito, the executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which is based in Farmingdale, recalled. “We never had any access problem.” National environmental groups, though, generally gave him lousy grades. In 2015, Zeldin received a fourteen-per-cent rating from the League of Conservation Voters, and the following year he got an eight-per-cent rating.
“On the issue of the environment, there were two completely different Lee Zeldins,” Steve Israel, a former Democratic congressman who represented a district abutting Zeldin’s, told me. “There was the Lee Zeldin who reliably voted against the environment as both a New York state senator and as a member of Congress. And there was the Lee Zeldin who’d appear at press conferences in his district touting his leadership in protecting the Long Island Sound. He literally could have debated himself.”
As is often the case with junior House members, Zeldin struggled to accomplish much. He was the primary sponsor on four bills that got enacted; two were measures to rename Suffolk County post offices. Beyond Long Island, he rarely made news, except when he screwed up. In 2018, the Times reported that he had sent out a campaign mailer with the wrong deadline for absentee ballots.
Then, in the fall of 2019, House Democrats launched what would come to be known as Trump’s first impeachment inquiry. (The inquiry was prompted by reports that Trump had tried to pressure the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, into investigating Joe Biden.) Zeldin threw himself into the fight. He spent long hours grilling witnesses at deposition hearings, plotted with Republican colleagues about how best to shield the President, and publicly denounced the proceedings as, among other things, “illegitimate,” a “charade,” a “fairy tale,” a “parody,” and an “abuse of power.”
“I’ve sat through EVERY interview so far of this so called ‘impeachment inquiry’ & the President hasn’t done anything to possibly impeach him for,” he tweeted that October. “NOTHING.” Among those who noticed was the President himself. Trump took to retweeting Zeldin’s comments—on one frenzied Saturday morning, nine times in three minutes. Zeldin’s appearances on Fox News began to tick up.
On January 6, 2021, just a few hours after the storming of the Capitol, Zeldin spoke to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, along with another congressman, Darrell Issa, of California. Issa, a fierce Trump supporter, condemned the attack. “Today was a bad day for the President,” he said. Zeldin reserved his criticism for Trump’s critics. “This isn’t just about the President of the United States,” he told Ingraham. “This is about people on the left and their double standards.” That evening, on the floor of the House, Zeldin repeated oft-disproved claims about election irregularities. He was one of a hundred and twenty-five Republicans who voted against certifying the results from both Arizona and Pennsylvania. Later in January, when the House voted to impeach Trump a second time, for inciting the violence at the Capitol, Zeldin once again took to the floor.
“Let’s be honest about the double standards that exist inside of this chamber,” he said. “And let’s also be honest that this President did a lot to make America greater than ever.”
In the spring of 2021, Zeldin announced that he was running for governor of New York. During the campaign, he disclosed that he’d been diagnosed with early-stage chronic myeloid leukemia the previous year and had achieved full remission. “My health is phenomenal, and I continue to operate at a hundred and ten per cent,” he told reporters.
After easily winning the Republican primary, Zeldin faced the incumbent, Kathy Hochul, in the general election. (She had become governor after Andrew Cuomo resigned, in the summer of 2021.) Trump was deeply unpopular in the state—in 2020, he had lost it to Biden by more than twenty points—and Hochul made much of Zeldin’s fealty to the former President. She ran an ad that opened with a clip of Trump praising Zeldin—“Lee fought for me very, very hard”—and ended with the tagline “Lee Zeldin: he’s extreme and dangerous.”
Zeldin, for his part, campaigned on crime, which had spiked during the pandemic. He crisscrossed the state, holding press conferences at the sites of break-ins and assaults. In Rochester, he pitched up at a gas station that had recently been robbed, and in the Bronx he spoke at a subway station where someone had been pushed onto the tracks. He pledged that, if elected, he would declare a “crime emergency,” which he said would allow him to suspend several state laws, including one that limits the use of solitary confinement in New York prisons. (“Someone get this man a copy of the state’s constitution please,” Zellnor Myrie, a Democratic state senator from Brooklyn, tweeted.) To the extent that Zeldin campaigned on the environment, he was against it. In 2014, New York had banned fracking for natural gas, out of concern over the impacts on the state’s air and water. Zeldin vowed to lift the ban. In an irony that was hard to miss, his campaign got caught up in a ballot-fraud scandal. Zeldin had sought to run on the Independence Party line in addition to the G.O.P. line, but the state’s Board of Elections found that his petitions to secure the Independence listing included more than ten thousand invalid signatures.
Democrats had anticipated an easy victory; in the campaign’s final weeks, though, the polls tightened. Apparently, Zeldin’s tough-on-crime message was resonating. “He knows how to stick to an issue,” one Democratic strategist told me recently. “And, quite frankly, the Governor struggled to answer him.”
“Lee is a very skilled politician,” the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said. “When you think about how tough New York is for Republicans, to come as close as he did tells you a lot.” Hochul’s margin of victory—six points—ended up being the narrowest of any New York gubernatorial candidate in the past thirty years.
Out of office, Zeldin, in time-honored Washington fashion, founded a consulting firm. (Among its clients was the America First Policy Institute, which employed so many officials from the first Trump Administration that it was sometimes referred to as the “White House in waiting.”) He also took to writing opinion pieces. In an op-ed for Newsday, Zeldin blasted investment policies that took environmental considerations into account. “It wasn’t long ago that Wall Street and special interests thought they could force environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, policies into our workplace, retirements, and lives,” he wrote. Fortunately, “conservatives and other everyday people have fought back.” In another op-ed, which appeared on the website RealClearPolicy, Zeldin compared E.S.G. investing to the shady maneuvers used by the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried. Eventually, Zeldin revealed in a financial-disclosure form that he’d been paid by P.R. firms for both of the opinion pieces—in the case of the RealClearPolicy op-ed, he received twenty-five thousand dollars—though which of the firms’ clients had commissioned them he never divulged.
When Trump appointed Zeldin to run the E.P.A., some at the agency hoped—or, perhaps, hoped against hope—that he would prove a moderating influence on the President. “We felt like, He’s from New York, this is probably not his last gig, maybe he doesn’t want to set himself up to be scorched earth,” one scientist who was working at the agency at the time told me. It didn’t take long for Zeldin to disabuse them of this notion.
Within a week of his confirmation, Zeldin announced that the agency would be guided by a new set of priorities—five in all—which he labelled “pillars.” Pillar No. 2 was restoring “American energy dominance.” No. 4 was making the United States “the artificial intelligence capital of the world.” No. 5 was “protecting and bringing back American auto jobs.” Zeldin termed the initiative Powering the Great American Comeback. The E.P.A. began publishing “Call It a Comeback,” a newsletter featuring shots of Zeldin paying friendly calls on big emitters—a coal-fired power plant in West Virginia, a plastics-recycling facility in Texas—and clips of interviews with him on Fox News. When the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was killed, on September 10, 2025, that week’s newsletter was entirely given over to mourning his death. “In Loving Memory,” it said, over a photo of Kirk raising his fist.
Though it may be difficult these days to imagine such a moment, the E.P.A. was established at a time when protecting the environment enjoyed broad, bipartisan support. On April 22, 1970, after a string of high-profile ecological disasters, including an oil spill off Santa Barbara that fouled Southern California beaches and a fire on Ohio’s highly polluted Cuyahoga River, some twenty million Americans—almost ten per cent of the country’s population—turned out to participate in what organizers had dubbed Earth Day. A few months later, President Richard Nixon proposed creating a new federal department devoted to the environment. Senator Ed Muskie, a Maine Democrat who was preparing to run against Nixon, enthusiastically supported the idea, and the E.P.A. was born. On the very last day of 1970, Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, which had been approved unanimously in the U.S. Senate and by a vote of 374–1 in the House.
To run the infant E.P.A., Nixon chose an Assistant Attorney General named William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus—Ruck to his friends—was the sort of moderate Republican once common in Washington. He rushed to come up with an organizational plan for the agency and, at the same time, to establish its authority—a task he compared to “trying to run a hundred-yard dash while undergoing an appendectomy.” Just a few weeks after Ruckelshaus became its leader, the E.P.A. initiated a string of headline-grabbing enforcement actions, including one against a steel company that was spewing cyanide into the Houston Ship Channel and several against major cities—Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit—that were dumping raw sewage into their own waterways.
“It will be our job in the Environmental Protection Agency to be an advocate for the environment wherever decisions about our common future are made, whether it be in the councils of government, in the boardrooms of industry, or the living rooms of our citizens,” Ruckelshaus said.
In the decades that followed, even as control of the White House flipped between parties, most E.P.A. administrators continued to see their role as advocating for the environment. An exception was Anne Gorsuch, the mother of the Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Gorsuch cut the agency’s budget, reduced the number of enforcement actions, and inspired loathing at E.P.A. headquarters, where she was called the Ice Queen. In her second year on the job, allegations surfaced that, in an attempt to influence a California gubernatorial election, she had withheld funds from a toxic-waste cleanup near Los Angeles. Gorsuch refused a House committee’s requests to hand over documents related to the claims, thereby becoming the first Cabinet-level official in U.S. history to be charged with contempt of Congress. When she resigned, in 1983, Reagan was so concerned about the damage she had done to the E.P.A.’s reputation—and, by extension, his own—that he brought Ruckelshaus back to rebuild the agency. (After his first stint at the E.P.A., Ruckelshaus had become known as Mr. Clean, for refusing to do Nixon’s bidding during Watergate.) At Ruckelshaus’s swearing-in ceremony, Reagan praised the once and future administrator for his integrity and said, “You have my total support in your difficult job of enforcing and administering our nation’s environmental-protection laws.”
In Trump’s first term, the E.P.A. took another hit, in the form of Scott Pruitt. Pruitt had served as Oklahoma’s attorney general and, in that capacity, had sued the agency many times, in one instance for ordering Oklahoma utilities to cut their sulfur-dioxide emissions. Nominating him to run the E.P.A. was, the Sierra Club complained, like “putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.” During his tenure as administrator, Pruitt tried to rescind a host of Obama-era regulations, including a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to neurological problems in children. But his effectiveness was limited, in part by the courts and in part by his own behavior. By the time he was forced to resign, in 2018, Pruitt was being investigated for, among many other things, using taxpayer money to fly first class to Morocco, living in the home of lobbyists whose clients had business before his agency, and spending more than forty thousand dollars on a soundproof phone booth for his office.
Trump tapped Zeldin to run the E.P.A. on November 11, 2024, less than a week after his reëlection. At Zeldin’s confirmation hearing, two months later, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, pressed him to clarify his views on climate change.
“As a matter of law, is carbon dioxide a pollutant?” Whitehouse asked.
“As far as carbon dioxide emitted from you during that question, I would say no,” Zeldin responded, smirking slightly.
Whitehouse tried again: “Briefly and in layman’s terms—I know you’re not a scientific expert—what effects are carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion having in the atmosphere?”
“I am someone who believes strongly that we should work with the scientists, leaving the science to the scientists, the policy to the policymakers,” Zeldin said.
Whitehouse put the question to him yet again: “Just generally and in layman’s terms, what effects do these carbon-dioxide emissions have when they enter the atmosphere?”
“Trapping heat, Senator,” Zeldin finally acknowledged.
Unlike Trump, who has referred to global warming as a “hoax” and a “con job,” Zeldin is not a climate-change denier. In his first term in Congress, he signed up for the Climate Solutions Caucus—a group that, at the time, consisted of ten Democratic and ten Republican lawmakers. (“I am proud to join,” Zeldin said when he became a member.) In his third term, he voted against a Republican-led effort to block the E.P.A. from curbing carbon emissions. And at his confirmation hearing, after Whitehouse held up a map illustrating the effects of warming-induced sea-level rise on the Rhode Island coast, Zeldin said that he could commiserate.
“I represented the district on the East End of Long Island, and rising sea levels are concerns where I’m from as well,” he noted. He offered the example of the Montauk Lighthouse: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently spent thirty million dollars to prevent it from “collapsing into the ocean.”
But whatever concerns about climate change Zeldin might have once harbored, he has, post-confirmation, set them aside. As E.P.A. administrator, he has called worries about global warming a “religion” and efforts to combat it a “scam.”
“When he was in Congress, Zeldin knew he had hundreds of thousands of constituents who cared about the environment,” Steve Israel, the former congressman, observed. “But now he has only one constituent, and his name is Donald Trump.”
During the Biden Administration, the E.P.A. took a number of important steps to rein in carbon emissions. It imposed new regulations on power plants, set tailpipe standards aimed at accelerating the shift to electric cars, and attempted to cut methane releases from oil and gas operations. Zeldin has cancelled, or has announced plans to cancel, all of these.
Most significantly, Zeldin has rejected the very premise of the E.P.A.’s efforts to limit global warming—the so-called endangerment finding. In 2007, a Supreme Court case compelled the agency to determine whether climate change represented a danger to the public, and, if so, to take action to reduce that danger. In 2009, under President Barack Obama, the E.P.A. administrator Lisa Jackson signed the finding, which said that greenhouse gases threatened the “welfare of current and future generations.” All her successors, including Pruitt, accepted the matter as settled. Until Zeldin.
“There are people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country,” Zeldin said on “Ruthless,” a bro-y conservative podcast, on the day the E.P.A. released a draft version of a plan to revoke the endangerment finding. Initially, the agency tried to justify its position on scientific grounds: climate change wasn’t really all that dangerous. Later, when this counterfactual position proved untenable, it fell back on a hermeneutical argument: the endangerment finding was based on a misinterpretation of the Clean Air Act.
“Today, we dismantle the tactics and legal gymnastics used by the Obama and Biden Administrations,” Zeldin declared in February, when the final version of the repeal was released. At a press conference with Trump at the White House, he said that revoking the finding would save Americans $1.3 trillion, mostly in the form of lower car prices. He neglected to mention the costs of the move, which, by the E.P.A.’s own estimates, could top $1.4 trillion, and this is not even counting the expenses associated with greater warming. Twenty-four states, along with a broad coalition of environmental and public-health organizations, quickly sued to block the repeal, and this case, too, appears bound for the Supreme Court. Zeldin’s bet, it seems, is that the composition of the Court has changed enough that a majority of the Justices—three of whom are Trump appointees—will be willing to overturn the 2007 decision. If the Court reverses the ruling, no future E.P.A. will be able to regulate CO2 emissions without an act of Congress.
“This is one of those things where you shake your head and say, ‘How low can you go?’ ” Christine Todd Whitman told me. “I mean, how much damage do you really want to do?”
“On the endangerment finding, you can see that their legal rationale is absolutely ludicrous,” Gina McCarthy, who led the E.P.A. during Obama’s second term, said. “But that doesn’t mean that it won’t go all the way to the Supreme Court, and it doesn’t mean that this Supreme Court might not uphold it.”
Whitehouse told me, “Zeldin has been the most ardent stooge of the fossil-fuel industry that there is. The E.P.A. can now say, ‘We took down the endangerment finding.’ And their willingness to do this, despite so much evidence to the contrary, despite all of the difficulties they are going to face defending this—it’s almost like an act of tribute.”
Environmental regulations are full of technical terms that get compressed into acronyms. “Maximum achievable control technology,” for instance, becomes MACT; “mercury and air toxics standards” goes by MATS. A hazardous air pollutant is a HAP and, as such, is regulated by “national emissions standards,” which are called, for short, NESHAPs (pronounced nee-shaps).
Ethylene oxide is a HAP that is widely used to sterilize medical equipment. The compound is extremely reactive, which makes it useful for killing microbes and also makes it dangerous to humans. A decade ago, the E.P.A. discovered that the hazards posed by ethylene oxide were at least thirty times greater than it had previously estimated. People who regularly breathed in even tiny amounts had an elevated risk of, among other diseases, breast cancer, lymphoma, and leukemia. In 2024, the agency published a new, more restrictive NESHAP for commercial sterilization plants that use the gas. This spring, just before the new standard was scheduled to take effect, Zeldin pulled the plug.
Many sterilization plants are situated near schools and day-care centers. One such plant, on the outskirts of Richmond, is run by a company called Sterilization Services of Virginia. Not long ago, a pair of attorneys from the Southern Environmental Law Center travelled to Richmond to meet with people who live close to the plant, and I decided to join them.
The meeting took place at a community center with a rich history. In 1777, a Quaker family freed its slaves and granted land for some of them to settle on, including the spot where the center now stands. A part of the building serves as a miniature museum, tracing the history of the area, which became known as Gravel Hill. The main room holds chairs for fifty people; by the time the session started, they were full.
One of the attorneys, Irena Como, began by presenting a slide of the nearby plant, in the district of Varina. It showed a long, low-slung brick building fronted by truck bays. “A lot of these commercial sterilizers are sited in residential areas,” Como said. “They look like warehouses. They’re very nondescript. And a lot of them are in predominantly Black and brown communities.” It’s estimated that, of the roughly hundred thousand people who live within five miles of the Sterilization Services of Virginia facility, only about a quarter are white.
The E.P.A., Como went on, had been moving to reduce the risks for communities like Varina. But then it changed course. Last spring, Trump invited companies that couldn’t—or didn’t care to—meet the latest NESHAP to apply for exemptions. All they had to do was send an e-mail to the agency. (The Administration described the waivers as necessary for “national security interests.”) Some forty commercial sterilizers received exemptions, including the Sterilization Services plant. Next, the E.P.A. replaced the 2024 regulations with a less stringent set. It justified this action by saying that it had been wrong to reëvaluate the risks of ethylene oxide in the first place, because it lacked the authority to do so. Coincidentally or not, the sterilizer industry’s trade group had made this same argument in a 2024 legal filing.
When it came time for questions, a woman in the audience asked why the E.P.A. would want to reduce protections for a neighborhood like hers. “What is the real reason?” she pressed.
“That is a great question,” Como said.
The fact that polluting facilities are disproportionately located in communities of color is an inequity that the E.P.A. has recognized for decades. In 1990, under President George H. W. Bush, Administrator William K. Reilly created an environmental-justice working group, which led to the formation of a new division at the agency. In 2010, the E.P.A. developed a mapping tool, called EJScreen, that combined information on demographics and pollution levels on a census-tract level. In 2022, the agency expanded its environmental-justice division and granted it the same status as larger offices, like the divisions of air and water. Just days after Zeldin was confirmed, the agency removed the EJScreen from its website and placed more than a hundred and fifty staff members from the environmental-justice office on administrative leave. A few weeks later, Zeldin did away with the office entirely. He also cancelled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from an environmental-justice fund which had already been awarded to community groups and local governments. Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works accused him of violating federal appropriations law by terminating the grants.
“President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people,” Zeldin said in a statement. “Part of this mandate includes the elimination of forced discrimination programs.”
Zeldin followed up the environmental-justice purge with an even more breathtaking assault, this one on the Office of Research and Development, the division that had flagged the risks posed by ethylene oxide. The O.R.D., often referred to as the E.P.A.’s scientific arm, employed more than fifteen hundred people. It was responsible for providing the analyses that guided a wide range of E.P.A. actions, from setting air-quality standards to establishing targets for cleaning up Superfund sites. It also assisted state and tribal governments, which often lack the resources to conduct their own research and risk assessments. When, in the spring of 2025, word began to leak out that Zeldin was planning to eliminate the O.R.D., Democratic lawmakers accused him of handing environmental regulation over to the regulated industries. “Stripping EPA of its independent research capacity would transform the agency into a rubber stamp for corporate interests,” Chellie Pingree, a Democratic congresswoman from Maine, and Jeff Merkley, a Democratic senator from Oregon, wrote in a joint letter.
That summer, in an official announcement of the closing, Zeldin said that he was replacing the O.R.D. with a new science department that would insure “the agency is better equipped than ever before.” Apparently unconvinced by this claim, the Senate subcommittee that oversees E.P.A appropriations, which is headed by Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, said in a report that it was “appalled” by the plan to shutter the O.R.D. The move, the group warned, could result in “immeasurable risk to our health and environment.” Zeldin went ahead and eliminated the office anyway.
Zeldin rarely engages with his critics, be they lawmakers, E.P.A. employees, or his predecessors at the agency. There is, however, one exception: the so-called MAHA moms, a subset of the Make America Healthy Again movement. The group is made up of women who, in the last Presidential race, backed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., before switching their allegiance to Trump. Some are fervent anti-vaxxers; others are more worried about their kids’ exposure to harmful chemicals. Many are independents, and they could play a critical role in the midterm elections.
Last year, Zeldin got on the wrong side of the MAHA moms by hiring several former lobbyists to oversee the E.P.A.’s division of chemical safety. (Two used to work for the American Chemistry Council, a chemical-industry trade group.) “President Trump and Bobby Kennedy said we were going to make America healthy again, and we are going to be ending the revolving door of special interests,” Alex Clark, a wellness podcaster associated with Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Charlie Kirk, told me. “In the E.P.A., you see this massive gap where the revolving door seems to still be shuffling people in.”
The moms were also ticked off by Zeldin’s approach to PFAS compounds, or, as they’re more commonly known, “forever chemicals.” Last fall, after the E.P.A. approved the use of several pesticides containing PFAS-adjacent compounds, a prominent MAHA mom named Kelly Ryerson drafted a petition calling for Zeldin’s ouster.
“Administrator Zeldin has prioritized the interests of chemical corporations over the well-being of American families and children,” it said. The petition urged Trump to replace Zeldin with “a leader who will genuinely defend public health and truly put America First.” Posted online, it soon garnered thousands of signatures.
Zeldin responded with a charm offensive. Shortly before Christmas, he invited several MAHA moms to meet with him at the E.P.A.’s headquarters. Ryerson, who blogs about glyphosate, a widely used and potentially carcinogenic herbicide, was among the attendees. “Zeldin brought most of the senior members of the E.P.A. to this meeting, so it was eight to ten of them, all sitting there, just wanting to listen,” she told me. “And that has never happened in all the years that I’ve been doing this. So I was, like, This is really something.” (In an e-mail, Mike Bastasch, an agency spokesman, said, “Any claim that EPA’s relationship with the MAHA grassroots is ‘damaged’ is flatly false.”)
Following the meeting with the moms, the E.P.A. announced that it was beefing up regulations on phthalates, chemicals that are used in countless consumer products and are suspected endocrine disrupters. Zeldin, on X, portrayed the move as a “massive MAHA win.” The next week, he said that the agency would reassess paraquat, an herbicide that’s been linked to Parkinson’s disease. “More MAHA progress!” he declared. In the case of phthalates, the E.P.A.’s move had nothing to do with children’s exposure to the chemical—the new regulations will apply only to workers—and, in the case of paraquat, it wasn’t a move at all: the decision to reassess the pesticide had, it turned out, been made fours years earlier, during the Biden Administration. Nathan Donley, the director of environmental-health science at the Center for Biological Diversity, coined a term to describe Zeldin’s tactic for dealing with the moms: MAHA-washing.
“Much like the greenwashing you see at the grocery store, with terms like ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘green’ advertising chemical-laden products on store shelves, Zeldin’s MAHA-washing paints the same rosy picture to distract from decisions that harm public health,” Donley wrote in an online post. In February, an E.P.A. spokeswoman said that the agency was “in the final stages of completing” a new MAHA-friendly agenda. But, if that agenda is indeed in its “final stages,” it has yet to be released.
Practically every action that the E.P.A. has taken since last January has been challenged in court or soon will be. In this way, Zeldin’s rule-bending style could prove self-defeating.
“To go back and unwind the scientific arguments that were made during the previous Administration, that’s tough,” Michael S. Regan, who served as the E.P.A. administrator under Biden, observed. “For many of these rollbacks, you have to have a replacement rule. And, when you put forth the replacement rule, not only is the rollback going to be litigated, the replacement will be litigated as well. So this gives me hope that a lot of these rollbacks will not stand.” A Brookings Institution analysis of the E.P.A.’s major deregulatory efforts during Trump’s first term found that a sixth of them were blocked by the courts, another sixth were blocked in part, and the remainder were still wending their way through the legal system when Regan took over the agency.
Meanwhile, a future E.P.A. administrator—one who cared more about the future—could seek to reverse many of Zeldin’s decisions. She could, for example, reimpose the standards that he scrapped for mercury, arsenic, and ethylene oxide.
But much of the damage that Zeldin has done is, as one former E.P.A. official put it to me, “generational.” Since Zeldin took over, the agency’s staff has been cut by twenty-five per cent. A disproportionate number of those who left (or were forced out) were longtime employees and team leaders. Seven hundred held doctoral degrees. The institutional knowledge that these experts took with them isn’t coming back.
“They had a very shrewd strategy,” William K. Reilly, the former E.P.A. administrator, told me. “It was a little like Zuckerberg: move fast and break things. It will take a while for the courts to catch up. And, by the time they do, the scientists, the lawyers, the engineers—they will have gone somewhere else. They will no longer be recoverable.”
And much the same goes for the additional pollutants that get spewed into the air and water. According to a report by the Environmental Defense Fund, the E.P.A.’s many recent rollbacks—in concert with the repeal of key clean-energy tax credits—will send some 1.5 billion extra tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2030 and some twelve billion extra tons by 2040. This extra CO2 will still be contributing to hotter temperatures and higher sea levels centuries from now. Forever chemicals will last, if not actually forever, certainly for the foreseeable future. It is impossible at this point to say how many premature deaths Zeldin’s deregulatory campaign will lead to, but the numbers could easily run to the tens of thousands.
Trump’s Cabinet has been described as a “telegenic clown show,” and the antics of its members, not to mention those of the President himself, have proved endlessly, if unedifyingly, absorbing. In this company, Zeldin has stood out mostly for not standing out; he doesn’t work out shirtless with Kid Rock, or send federal agents to accompany his girlfriend to the hair salon, or pass around top-secret information on Signal. He isn’t even particularly telegenic. But, as the Administration’s “secret weapon,” he has been strikingly successful in furthering Trump’s wind-is-dangerous, coal-is-beautiful world view, with effects that will linger long after a new administrator takes over and the E.P.A. returns—or doesn’t return—to its original mission. ♦