Excerpt:
Environmentalists vow to fight “the greatest increase in pollution in decades.”

If there can be such a thing as bureaucratic “shock and awe,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin tried to unleash it Wednesday.

He unveiled the Trump administration’s widely anticipated assault on regulation on all fronts at once, announcing 31 separate actions to roll back restrictions on air and water pollution, hand over more authority to states and relinquish EPA’s mandate to act on climate change under the Clean Air Act.

“These announcements represent the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in the history of the United States,” an EPA representative wrote in one of a slew of press releases. Zeldin said the moves would lower the cost of living, create jobs and revitalize the economy. In a video posted on the social media site X, Zeldin exulted over the plan to rescind the EPA’s 16-year-old determination that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare, known as the endangerment finding.

“I’ve been told the endangerment finding is considered the holy grail of the climate change religion,” said Zeldin, a former Congressman and Army intelligence officer. “For me, the U.S. Constitution and the laws of this nation will be strictly interpreted and followed, no exceptions. Today, the green new scam ends.” Zeldin, who acknowledged the risks of climate change and sea level rise during his confirmation hearing, borrowed terms from Trump to describe the government actions designed to address the threat. 

He said the moves would lower the cost of living, create jobs and revitalize the economy. But environmental advocates voiced determination to fight back against an onslaught they warned would harm public health and set back the nation’s standard of living. 

“EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin today announced plans for the greatest increase in pollution in decades,” said Amanda Leland, executive director of Environmental Defense Fund, in a statement. “The result will be more toxic chemicals, more cancers, more asthma attacks and more dangers for pregnant women and their children. Rather than helping our economy, it will create chaos.”

Zeldin’s announcements mark the start of a dismantling process that could take months or even years. To undo regulations that go back decades, EPA staff would have to write proposals, gather public comments and possibly hold hearings and create a scientific and legal record justifying any decision. The latter will be needed to defend against inevitable lawsuits by environmentalists and states. All of this will have to be carried out by an agency that is severely hobbled by firings and plans to slash its funding to the lowest levels in its 55-year history.

In a post on the social media site Bluesky, John Walke, clean air director and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the sheer size of Zeldin’s effort may cause it to collapse on itself.

“The same limited #s of EPA air office staff & attorneys work on many of these rules,” Walke wrote. “Some have quit, some have been fired, more will be fired. EPA won’t have adequate resources to write defensible rollbacks.”

Walke’s group, NRDC, prevailed in scores of lawsuits against the regulatory rollbacks of the first Trump administration—in some cases, because it had not followed the long-standing law for public notice and comment of both regulatory and deregulatory actions. But Zeldin showed an awareness of this potential pitfall.

“The agency cannot prejudge the outcome of this reconsideration or of any future rulemaking,” he said. “EPA will follow the Administrative Procedure Act and Clean Air Act, as applicable, in a transparent way for the betterment of the American people and the fulfillment of the rule of law.”

Zeldin also pointed to recent Supreme Court rulings limiting federal agency authority as providing backing for the plan. The Supreme Court, with a conservative majority bolstered by three Trump-appointed justices, articulated a relatively new doctrine in those cases, saying that on issues of major economic consequence, regulatory agencies cannot act without explicit instructions from Congress.

Congress has never given the EPA explicit instruction to cut greenhouse gases from power plants or motor vehicles, but the agency has relied on the power it was given in the 1970 Clean Air Act to set controls for any pollutant that it finds endangers health and welfare.

In addition to reconsidering the 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gas emissions, the EPA is preparing to rescind all regulations that flow from that decision, including those adopted under President Joe Biden to restrict greenhouse gas pollution from power plants and from cars and trucks. And Zeldin proposed ending the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, the 15-year-old effort to take stock of where greenhouse gas emissions are being produced and the nation’s progress in reducing them.

Zeldin called the reporting program “another example of a bureaucratic government program that does not improve air quality. Instead, it costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream…”