Trump, Lee Zeldin, and the anti-EPA zealots of Project 2025 just don't care if more of this is the consequence of their regulatory retreat.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland: “If Vladimir Putin had a plan to foul our air and water, wreck public health and drive America over the cliff of irreversible lethal climate change, it would look exactly like [EPA chief] Lee Zeldin’s plan. This is a plan for self-inflicted environmental disaster.”
Amid the wreckage our Outlaw Prez and his gang are inflicting on the nation, it’s tempting to wonder what measures are the most terrible when we’ve got an internal kind of extraordinary rendition going on, the cozying up to Vladimir Putin, the upending of post-World War II alliances, the corrupting and weaponizing of the Department of Justice, the attacks against universities, the threats against the media, the promise of devastation to Medicaid, the crippling of the Veterans Administration, and the flipping-off of judges. Not to mention the daily tyrannizing by the unfettered DOGE, which apparently has been given the keys and passwords of every federal agency, bureau, department, and other workplace coast to coast, with the mission being to do-your-worst.
There was a time when the Environmental Protection Agency wasn’t a target of Republican ire. For instance, President Ronald Reagan had a mixed yet okay environmental record as governor of California. But he did a turnaround when he arrived in the White House. Two of his hires — Interior Secretary James Watt and EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch — were practically anti-environment caricatures. Scandals soon forced them out of office.
The bad optics associated with those two spurred Reagan — with an early eye on reelection — to try and restore public trust in the agency by bringing the highly respected William Ruckelshaus back to the EPA in 1983. He had been the agency’s first administrator after it was established in 1970. As Seema Kakade and Robert Percival wrote in 2018, Ruckelshaus “accomplished Reagan’s goal of restoring trust in the agency because he cared about being faithful to the environmental protection mission Congress had entrusted to it.” In the four decades since then, a new generation of elected Republicans has become rabidly anti-environment and, especially, anti-EPA. (Needless to say, but I will anyway: #notallRepublicans.)
Rep. Zoe Lofgren
Just how intensely this sentiment has become was exemplified when Project 2025 was made public by the Heritage Foundation two years ago next month. The organization’s 900-page blueprint-cum-manifesto for dystopia makes an incredible 1,908 mentions of the EPA. Until just weeks before the 2024 election, most media and all too many progressives had downplayed the whole document as boilerplate rightwing fantasy. And it would have been had Trump not been elected. As soon as he was, he froze federally funded environmental projects, moves that are in various stages of judiciary review. And though Trump has often invoked the idea that the EPA should focus exclusively on clean air and water, included in his funding freeze are 132 air monitoring projects in 37 states.
This month, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin got rolling making clear that the intent — unlike with the planned extinction of the Department of Education — is to hollow out the EPA by cutting 65% of its budget and sabotaging its mission with a regulatory retreat and fossil-fuel-friendly enforcement regime. Last week, in announcing an end to 31 regulations, Zeldin said in a hyperbolic press release: “Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.”
It’s quite the hoot when devoted worshipers at the altar of fossil fuels dare call climate science a religion.
Cross-posted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places
You can also catch me @meteorblades.bsky.social
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