When the EPA side-lines its scientific core to serve industry needs, public health and environmental protection are casualties.

Ever since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson’s science advisory committee warned of the dangers of unchecked global warming, the United States has taken steps to protect people from these risks.

Now, however, the Trump administration appears to be essentially abandoning this principle, claiming that the costs of addressing climate change outweigh the benefits. The effect is to shift more of the risk and responsibility onto states and, ultimately, individual Americans, even as rising temperatures fuel more extreme and costly weather disasters nationwide, experts say.

“It’s a radical transformation of government’s role, in terms of its intervention into the economy to try to promote the health and safety of citizens,” said Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, this week proposed to repeal the landmark scientific finding that enables the federal government to regulate the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. In effect, the E.P.A. will eliminate its own authority to combat climate change.

Speaking at a truck dealership in Indianapolis, Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. would reverse a 2009 scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health. He said the agency would also rescind Biden-era regulations designed to reduce planet-warming emissions from automobile tailpipes.

While few people have heard of the endangerment finding, it has had a profound effect on society. Its establishment cleared the way for the Obama administration to set the country’s first limits on greenhouse gases from cars and power plants, with the goal of putting more electric vehicles on the roads and adding more renewable energy to the electric grid.

But Mr. Zeldin’s announcement was only the latest in a rapid-fire series of actions to weaken or eliminate protections against climate change.

In April the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship analysis of how climate change is affecting the country. In May, Mr. Trump proposed to stop collecting key measurements of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as part of his 2026 budget plan. And since January he has called for eliminating or overhauling the Federal Emergency Management Agency to shift disaster response to the states.

Alongside other sweeping policy changes, like recent cuts to food stamps and the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, the rollback of federal climate efforts has also had the cumulative effect of leaving vulnerable people more exposed.

“It’s never been the role of government to completely take care of people,” said Sarah Pralle, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. “But this conservative, anti-regulatory, anti-welfare-state ideology all comes together in kind of shifting risks back to individuals.”

The government has a track record of tackling environmental problems under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The E.P.A. itself was created more than a half-century ago by a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon. Environmental action “has to be done on a bipartisan basis and it also has to be on a bigger-than-federal-government basis,” Nixon said in 1970 before signing a law that required federal agencies to study the environmental consequences of major infrastructure projects.

Mr. Zeldin has struck a different tone.

This year, he essentially reoriented the E.P.A.’s mission away from environmental stewardship, saying the mission would now be to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.” Building on that message this week, he said the endangerment finding had led to costly new regulations that burdened households and businesses. “We’re strangulating our own economy,” he said, adding that past administrations had found “new ways to put trillions of dollars of new handcuffs around the American family.”

Joe Aldy, a professor of environmental policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said that by repealing the endangerment finding, the Trump administration was relinquishing the country’s historical role as a protector of public health. “The concern here isn’t just the attack on regulation,” he said. “There is this much bigger question of what does it mean to promote the general welfare?”

In response to questions, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, Brigit Hirsch, said in an email, referring to the 2009 endangerment finding: “How does a partisan policy from the mid-2000s qualify as a ‘time-honored American tradition’? E.P.A. is bound by the laws established by Congress and Congress never explicitly gave E.P.A. authority to impose greenhouse gas regulations for cars and trucks.”

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said that the endangerment finding had been misused to justify excessive regulation and that the administration was “putting everyday Americans First by restoring consumer choice and sidestepping the left’s out-of-touch climate policies.”

Governments have taken steps to protect citizens from environmental hazards for centuries. After cholera outbreaks in the mid-1800s, England worked to improve sanitation and water quality. In the United States, research into contaminated drinking water in the early 20th century led to investments in sanitation. And the Clean Air Act, enacted in 1963 and amended in 1990, helped solve issues including smog in Los Angeles, acid rain in New England and the depletion of the ozone layer high in the atmosphere.

“This is a real retreat from the social compact that I think has been dominant in the U.S. for some time,” said Margaret Levi, a professor of political science at Stanford University. “Part of government’s responsibility is to protect the health and well-being of its citizens to the extent that it can, and that does require some regulation.”

The Trump administration’s approach has supporters. Several conservative scholars and politicians applauded the imminent end of the endangerment finding, saying it had empowered the E.P.A. to restrict Americans’ choices of how to heat their homes and what kinds of cars to drive.

“The endangerment finding became a pretext for the agency, without congressional authorization, to impose centralized economic planning on the U.S. transportation and electric power sectors,” said Marlo Lewis Jr., a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a right-wing research organization.

Suzanne Jaworowski, Indiana’s secretary of energy and natural resources, said at the event in Indianapolis that the proposal was “a reaffirmation of common-sense government and moving away from years of regulatory overreach that I think we’ve all seen and felt, whether it was at the grocery store or the gas pump.”

The endangerment finding has sparked fierce legal and political battles in Washington for nearly three decades.

In 1999, several states and environmental groups filed a petition urging the Clinton administration to limit greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide from motor vehicles. In 2003, the Bush administration denied the petition, saying the Clean Air Act did not authorize the E.P.A. to regulate greenhouse gases.

Massachusetts challenged the denial in federal court, and the case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which issued a landmark 2007 decision affirming the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases. The justices, emphasized, however, that the agency needed to demonstrate that those emissions threatened public health and welfare.

That’s what led to the E.P.A.’s 2009 endangerment finding, which concluded that, based on the scientific evidence, greenhouse gases do, in fact, endanger public health and welfare. In more than 200 pages, the agency outlined the science and detailed how increasingly severe heat waves, storms and droughts were expected to contribute to higher rates of death and disease.

“For so long at E.P.A., Republicans and Democrats have understood that they had a job to do, and that their job was dictated by the law, and they did not toss the science aside,” said Gina McCarthy, who served as Mr. Obama’s second E.P.A. administrator and helped establish the power-plant rules based on the endangerment finding.

“There may have been differences of opinion over what that science meant and how to do the regulations in accordance with what we understood the science said, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” Ms. McCarthy said. “They are basically just disowning their responsibilities entirely at E.P.A.”

Mr. Zeldin has rejected such allegations.

“Conservatives love the environment, want to be good stewards of the environment,” Mr. Zeldin said on Tuesday on a conservative podcast titled Ruthless. “There are people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country.”

After the proposal to repeal the endangerment finding is published in the Federal Register, the E.P.A. will solicit public comments for 45 days. The agency will then finalize the rule, most likely within the next year.

The debate over the proper use of the government’s regulatory hand has been going on for centuries. Adam Smith, the 18th-century philosopher and economist, argued that governments should play a limited role, emphasizing the importance of free markets and individual rights. A century later the philosopher John Stuart Mill contended that governments should promote the common good.

“What this government is doing is going outside the frame of that debate,” Ms. Levi said. “It’s not talking about what are the cost to citizens. It’s only really focusing on what are the costs to business, and denying the science that demonstrates there is a cost to the public.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/climate/trump-epa-endangerment-finding-climate-change.html