‘Shameful’: Trump’s EPA accused of prioritizing big business over public health

A year into Trump’s second term, critics say the EPA is rolling back dozens of protections and giving a leg up to polluters

After a tumultuous year under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has adopted a new, almost unrecognizable guise – one that tears up environmental rules and cheerleads for coal, gas-guzzling cars and artificial intelligence.

When Donald Trump took power, it was widely anticipated the EPA would loosen pollution rules from sources such as cars, trucks and power plants, as part of a longstanding back and forth between administrations over how strict such standards should be.

But in recent weeks, critics say the EPA has gone far further by in effect seeking to jettison its raison d’etre, forged since its foundation in 1970, as an environmental regulator. The EPA is poised to remove its own ability to act on the climate crisis and has, separately, unveiled a new monetary worth assigned to human lives when setting air pollution regulations. The current new value? Zero.

“The EPA was designed to protect public health and the environment and did a remarkably effective job of that,” said William Reilly, who was EPA administrator under a previous Republican president, George HW Bush.

“That record is now at risk and we will see the degradation of air quality in major cities. The administration seems to conceive the purpose of the agency as solely promoting business, which has never been the agency’s mission. That’s revolutionary – it’s not been seen before.”

A vivid illustration of this, Reilly said, was when the EPA asked businesses last year to simply email a request to be exempt from air pollution rules. “The notion you could be excused from a black letter law just by asking for it was startling to me,” he said. “I thought it was a spoof. But it did happen.”

After returning to the White House, Trump vowed to “unleash” oil and gas drilling and the burgeoning AI industry by sweeping away environmental regulations that the president says only serve a “globalist climate agenda” and a “scam” clean energy sector.

The EPA under its current administrator, Lee Zeldin, has zealously followed this lead – initiating 66 environmental rollbacks in the first year, according to a tally compiled by green group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

This list includes paring back limits on pollutants such as mercury and soot coming from cars and power plants, cancelling grants for renewables and aid for communities blighted by toxins, squashing clean water protections and deleting mentions of the climate crisis from the EPA website.

Two particular reversals have shocked former EPA staff and could fundamentally transform the agency. Last year, the agency announced it would rescind the so-called “endangerment finding”, a landmark 2009 determination affirmed by the supreme court and outside experts that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide harm human health.

Removing the finding would essentially demolish all climate-related regulations issued by the federal government, a move cheered by pro-fossil fuel companies and Republican-led states that have urged Trump to take drastic action to remove any restraints on global heating.

Then, this month, the EPA said that it would no longer consider the cost to human health from two common air pollutants – but still weigh the cost paid by industry for regulatory compliance.

This will hide the outsized economic as well as health benefits of reducing pollution – the EPA had previously calculated that reducing emissions of tiny soot particles, harmful to lung, heart, and brain functions when inhaled, would deliver $77 in benefits for every $1 spent by businesses to comply.

“This move ignores the incredible success we’ve had in reducing air pollution while growing our economy,” said Jenni Shearston, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It appears the EPA is putting more importance upon the cost to industry than the cost to the public. I’m worried this will mean more air pollution will be emitted as a result.”

An EPA spokesperson said the agency was “taking steps to update” the consideration of human health in regulatory decision making, adding that “legal decisions about standards are guided first by scientific evidence of health risk, not by whether benefits can be assigned a precise dollar value.” They did not clarify how EPA will model these impacts in the future.

The spokesperson also defended the decision to roll back the endangerment finding, a decision they said “is the legal prerequisite used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations”.

Reilly’s criticism was an example of the “out-of-touch, elitist thinking that failed American taxpayers and held back real environmental progress” and it was a “propagandist narrative by outlets parroting far-left talking points” to suggest the agency will no longer assess the public health costs of pollution, the spokesperson added.

Zeldin, a Republican who was previously a New York congressman, has been an enthusiastic public champion for the Trump administration, appearing dozens of times on Fox News. However, unusually for an EPA administrator, Zeldin appears to be spending less time than predecessors telling Americans about efforts to cut their exposure to toxic air and water.

Instead, the EPA chief has said he wants to thrust “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion”, called for a revival of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, and demanded drivers opt for gasoline, rather than cleaner electric, cars.

In a novel move for an environmental regulator, Zeldin has even taken it upon himself to ensure that “making the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world” is a core priority for his agency. When asked on Fox in September whether he agreed with Trump’s attempt to shut down clean energy projects, Zeldin replied: “I am for whatever President Trump is advocating for.”

The EPA’s 16,000-strong workforce, meanwhile, has been shrunk through firings and early retirements by a quarter, with entire divisions of the agency – such as the EPA’s scientific arm, called the office of research and development – slated for closure. Enforcement actions against rule-breaking polluters have plummeted.

The changes amount to “a war on all fronts that this administration has launched against our health and the safety of our communities and the quality of our environment”, said Matthew Tejada, the former director of the EPA’s environmental justice program.

“It is an attempt to completely eliminate EPA and just leave a symbolic husk,” said Tejada, who is now senior vice-president of environmental health at NRDC.

Hundreds of EPA staff have revolted at this agenda, signing an open letter last summer accusing the administration of “recklessly undermining” the agency’s mission and promoting a “culture of fear” – a protest that led to 140 staffers being suspended from work.

“He answers to capital and nothing else,” Justin Chen, president of AFGE Council 238, which represents EPA employees, said of Zeldin. “The EPA isn’t fulfilling it’s mission and won’t be able to again until the boot is taken off the neck of dedicated civil servants to do their job.”

Anonymous testimonials taken from EPA staff by the union suggests a widespread sense of despair has taken hold. “To say that this year has been hard, insulting, demeaning, horrific, stressful … all would be a gross understatement,” said one.

Another said Zeldin’s tenure had been “Orwellian”. A third staffer, who works on Great Lakes water quality, added: “We no longer use EPA’s authorities to safeguard our water resources – we use them to protect the interests of industry.”

The EPA’s transformation will not immediately plunge the US back into the era that predated the agency’s foundation under Richard Nixon 55 years ago, a time when US cities were routinely shrouded in thick, choking pollution, lead was found in paint and gasoline, and rivers were so riddled with chemicals that they caught fire.

But the next three years of the Trump administration threaten to erode much of the progress made since this time, warned Jeremy Symons, a former EPA policy adviser.

Cover photo:  Critics say under Donald Trump, the EPA has effectively abandoned its mission to protect public health as an environmental regulator. Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images