Shifts in EPA Strategy and Environmental Policy Leadership

Lee Zeldin does not speak like any other Environmental Protection Agency administrator in recent history.

The job of the E.P.A. chief is to protect human health by safeguarding “the air we breathe, the water we drink and land that grows our food,” as the agency’s founding charter puts it, and most administrators have talked about their work in those terms.

Mr. Zeldin, though, speaks more about supporting industry and exporting fossil fuels than about protecting the environment.

A New York Times analysis of thousands of public communications by E.P.A. administrators, including news releases, social media posts, television appearances and podcast interviews dating back three decades, shows that Mr. Zeldin has fundamentally shifted both the agency’s mission and the words he uses to describe it to reflect President Trump’s desire to maximize economic development and industrial activity while downplaying environmental consequences.

If language is a window into policy priorities, Mr. Zeldin’s words speak loudly.

Mr. Zeldin is a champion of deregulation, and the agency now repeatedly mentions the need to cut red tape. He regularly notes the E.P.A.’s core responsibility to ensure clean air and clean water, but he talks about safeguarding the environment less frequently than his predecessors.

Mr. Zeldin is the first agency head to talk about the economy more than pollution and American energy more than public health. He rarely mentions protecting children from environmental harms but talks frequently about protecting businesses and consumers from regulations.

More than any administrator since 1994, Mr. Zelin talks about fossil fuels in a positive light, routinely expounding upon “clean, beautiful coal,” a phrase that Mr. Trump has ordered officials to use.

Mr. Zeldin is under consideration as the next U.S. attorney general, and the president has called Mr. Zeldin “our secret weapon,” whom he counts on to get permits approved speedily.

Carolyn Holran, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Zeldin talks frequently about the environmental actions he has undertaken and that the E.P.A. recently released a list of 500 of them.

“We are delivering results, ensuring America has the cleanest air, land, and water in the world while simultaneously helping to grow the economy,” Ms. Holran said.

“The core mission of the EPA is protecting human health and the environment, and we are doing exactly that, without burdening American families and businesses with unnecessary regulatory costs that harm affordability,” she added.

But critics, including former Republican E.P.A. administrators, said Mr. Zeldin is turning the agency into one they no longer recognize, prioritizing industry at the expense of public health and community safety.

“It would be nice to hear him talk about health and the environment,” said William K. Reilly, who served as administrator of the E.P.A. under the first President George Bush.

“I think the language is a giveaway,” Mr. Reilly said. “The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are his charters, and they should provide the vocabulary that animates him. But they don’t.”

‘Throttling the oil and gas industry’

Within hours of his Senate confirmation last year, Mr. Zeldin wrote on social media that he aimed to help “Make America Prosperous Again.” He laid out an agenda to “unleash energy dominance, bring back American auto jobs, pursue permitting reform and make America the AI capital of the world.”

He soon announced the “greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” a plan to repeal or weaken some two dozen environmental protections, most implemented under the Biden administration. The policies, he said, were “throttling the oil and gas industry” or had “shut down opportunities for American manufacturing.”

Mr. Zeldin’s actions have matched his rhetoric: Over the past 14 months, Mr. Zeldin has overseen a systematic unraveling of climate change protections. He has enabled coal plants, steel mills, chemical facilities and mines to bypass environmental rules by sending an email requesting an exemption. And he blocked the agency from calculating the value of saving lives when calculating the costs of setting new pollution limits.

The overwhelmingly economic terms he has used to discuss the agency’s mission are not how the Republican officials who created the E.P.A. envisioned its work.

President Richard M. Nixon established the E.P.A. in 1970 in response to public outrage over catastrophic oil spills, deadly air pollution and industrial waste setting rivers aflame. Its first administrator said that the agency would have “no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.”

Mr. Zeldin’s E.P.A. has mentioned cutting “red tape” 199 times more often than that of his Democratic predecessor, Michael S. Regan, and 38 times more often than Mr. Trump’s first E.P.A. chief, Scott Pruitt. E.P.A. news releases invoked the phrase when Mr. Zeldin vowed to make it easier to build data centers; proposed to stop requiring major industrial sites to report greenhouse gas emissions; and eliminated permitting requirements for incineration of woody debris, which he said could help prevent wildfires.

The E.P.A. under Mr. Zeldin also mentions the automobile industry more frequently than any of its predecessors since the 1990s. Mr. Zeldin has argued that deregulation will create auto jobs, and the agency has eliminated greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles. That repeal is projected to save automakers $54 billion, but the industry has lost jobs since Mr. Trump took office.

Ms. Holran, the E.P.A. spokeswoman, said Mr. Zeldin discusses the industry frequently because “it is one of the most consequential sectors for both the American economy and the environment.”

Mr. Zeldin’s supporters said the economy should be a top priority for every cabinet secretary.

“There’s almost this insinuation that if he’s not talking about regulating the environment that he must hate the environment, but those are not binary,” said Drew Bond, the co-founder of C3 Solutions, a conservative-leaning clean energy think tank.

“I know the environmental left doesn’t like him, but I just keep coming back to the fact that we can’t build stuff in the United States, so the more we can get red tape and regulations out of the way, we can build faster and we’re going to build cleaner,” Mr. Bond said.

‘Unleashing American energy’

Previous E.P.A. administrators have championed energy efficiency as a way to reduce pollution while saving money. Mr. Zeldin is more likely to skip calls for efficiency and promote fossil fuels, encapsulated in Mr. Trump’s favorite phrase: “energy dominance.”

Mr. Zeldin casts many of E.P.A.’s policies in terms of furthering that goal.

The E.P.A. has delayed standards that aimed to limit leaching of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury into water supplies from coal-ash dump sites; proposed ending greenhouse gas limits on coal and gas-fired power plants; and loosened Biden-era methane standards that he claimed were designed “to regulate the oil and gas industry out of existence.”

Mr. Zeldin described those actions as an effort to “unleash American energy” and maintained they didn’t clash with the E.P.A.’s mission of protecting the environment.

“The war on beautiful clean coal is OVER!,” Mr. Zeldin wrote on X last year. “No longer will the U.S. be trying to regulate coal out of existence. This moment calls for more U.S. energy more jobs and less cost and we are so ready to meet this moment!”

He has criticized renewable energy as insufficient to meet the intense appetite of artificial intelligence data centers.

“Natural gas nuclear coal etc. can’t be held back shouldn’t be held back and at the Trump EPA WON’T BE HELD BACK!,” Mr. Zeldin wrote.

Visiting Japan last month, Mr. Zeldin declared the United States was eager to ink natural gas export deals with Indo-Pacific nations. A few weeks later at an energy conference in Houston, he noted that Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz would likely increase the desire in Asia for U.S. gas.

“I don’t know what the secretary of Energy is doing, but most of these things are just way outside the E.P.A. administrator’s job description,” said Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey who led the E.P.A. under President George W. Bush. She has since left the Republican Party.

“It’s just staggering how far outside the parameters of what the agency is about he has taken it,” Ms. Whitman said. “He is completely undoing the mission of the E.P.A.”

Local Pollution over Climate

Republicans and Democrats have always spoken differently about the job of environmental protection.

While the E.P.A. enjoyed bipartisan support after its creation, that began to fracture under President Ronald Regan, who campaigned against government overreach. His first administrator, Anne B. Gorsuch, rolled back several clean air and water protections. Deregulatory sentiment among Republicans was even higher in Mr. Trump’s first term, when he put Scott Pruitt, a fierce critic of the E.P.A.’s work, in charge of it.

Democrats later came to view the E.P.A. as the primary agency for fighting the growing threat of climate change. With no specific laws from Congress to curb greenhouse gases, both the Obama and Biden administrations interpreted the Clean Air Act of 1970 in ways that allowed the E.P.A. to regulate, with increasing aggressiveness, planet-warming pollution from automobile tailpipes and power plant smokestacks.

Emissions from burning fossil fuels are the leading driver of climate change, which scientists say is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme heatwaves and heavy precipitation, melting the world’s glaciers and ice sheets, and heightening the risk of severe wildfires. Republicans and industry leaders, however, have claimed that climate rules stifle the economy. Mr. Trump, who calls climate change a “hoax,” campaigned on ending them.

Mr. Zeldin rarely mentions climate change, other than to criticize climate “zealots” and to boast of repealing greenhouse gas regulations, as well as E.P.A.’s authority to fight global warming.

Mr. Zeldin has taken specific steps to safeguard air and water. This month he announced that the agency would curb microplastics and pharmaceuticals in drinking water for millions of Americans. He signed an agreement with Mexico to address a sewage crisis in the Tijuana River and led a 28-day cleanup of hazardous material last year after wildfires tore through Los Angeles. His list of 500 “environmental wins” includes removing contamination at industrial sites in Maine, Boston and Florida.

In interviews, Mr. Zeldin tends to focus on local environmental remediation. Speaking in March with John Solomon, a conservative podcaster who called the Trump administration’s climate repeals “legendary,” Mr. Zeldin described the E.P.A.’s efforts to help repair a sewage line that collapsed, sending raw waste flowing into the Potomac River in Maryland.

He said the Trump administration just wants to get back to basics. And, he said, that includes easing commerce.

“For us here at E.P.A., it’s protecting human health and the environment, which we know we could do while also growing the economy,” Mr. Zeldin said.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/12/climate/lee-zeldin-epa-mission-language.html