“Naming an unqualified, anti-American worker nominee who opposes efforts to safeguard our clean air and water lays bare Donald Trump’s intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs, and our future out to corporate polluters. Our lives, our livelihoods, and our collective future cannot afford Lee Zeldin – or anyone who seeks to carry out a mission antithetical to the EPA’s mission.
“2024 will assuredly surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record. Across the country, we are experiencing record droughts, heat waves, and deadly storms, wiping out entire communities in a matter of hours. Americans need and deserve someone who will put them first, not millionaires sitting in board rooms seeking to increase the profits of multi billion dollar international corporations.
“We have made too much progress to allow Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin to take us back. We will not give up the clean energy manufacturing jobs rebuilding communities. We will not accept more dangerous air and water. And we will not allow Trump, Zeldin and corporate polluters to steal our future.”
Ken Cook, president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, also responded critically to the nomination of Zeldin, stating: “The most important thing to know about Trump’s nominee for the EPA is not his name, or his record, or his views on any particular environmental issue. The most important thing to know is that his mandate from Trump is to destroy the EPA.”
“Lee Zeldin seems perfectly fine for the job. In announcing the former congressman for the position, Trump promised ‘fair and swift deregulatory decisions’ from an agency whose central duty is to regulate in the service of environmental protection and public health,” Cook said.
“Zeldin’s lack of devotion to the Constitution and the rule of law and his servility to Trump are shown by his vote against the certification of President Joe Biden, in January 2021. His nomination is a bracing contrast with the instincts of the EPA’s first administrator, Republican William Ruckelshaus, who resigned in protest from his subsequent position at the Justice Department, alongside the attorney general, when then-President Richard Nixon sought to fire the special prosecutor investigating his Watergate crimes,” Cook said.
“When January 2025 rolls around, Zeldin will have set his sights on the undoing of as many Biden EPA rules as possible. He will likely start with the unraveling of any and all regulations designed to combat climate change, delicacies of special appeal to Trump’s deregulatory appetites,” he observed.
If Zeldin’s nomination is confirmed, he will replace Michael S. Regan as EPA Administrator. Sworn in as the 16th Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency on March 11, 2021, Regan is the first Black man and second person of color to lead the U.S. EPA.
Background: The stated mission of the EPA is to “protect human health and the environment.”
EPA works to ensure that:
- Americans have clean air, land and water;
- National efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information;
- Federal laws protecting human health and the environment are administered and enforced fairly, effectively and as Congress intended;
- Environmental stewardship is integral to U.S. policies concerning natural resources, human health, economic growth, energy, transportation, agriculture, industry, and international trade, and these factors are similarly considered in establishing environmental policy;
- All parts of society--communities, individuals, businesses, and state, local and tribal governments--have access to accurate information sufficient to effectively participate in managing human health and environmental risks;
- Contaminated lands and toxic sites are cleaned up by potentially responsible parties and revitalized; and
- Chemicals in the marketplace are reviewed for safety.
