Dr. Amanda Millstein had just wrapped up a long day at her pediatric clinic when I contacted her to get her take on a controversial announcement from Lee Zeldin, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency: Zeldin plans to roll back 31 EPA clean air and clean water regulations.
I had just finished evaluating the potential impacts of these rollbacks using data from EPA’s detailed, science-based accounting of the costs and benefits of each rule. Here’s what I found:
If left in effect, the rules Zeldin has slated for the woodchipper would prevent more than 10,000 asthma attacks every day across the nation and save 200,000 lives over the next 25 years.
Zeldin called getting rid of these protections “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.”
Dr. Millstein, who visits her patients and their families in the hospital as they deal with asthma attacks and their aftermath, had a different take:
“It makes me sad and mad. It’s not fair. It’s especially not fair to children. They are going to pay the greatest price for any of this.”
Photo by cottonbro studio
Zeldin’s polluters-first agenda goes far beyond the 31 rollbacks of clean air and clean water safeguards.
He is intent on running EPA into the ground by cutting the agency by “at least 65 percent.” That’s a wrecking ball swing at an agency that accounts for only two-tenths of a penny of every dollar of federal spending and has 2,000 fewer employees than it did 20 years ago under President George W. Bush.
EPA is undergoing a dangerous takeover by polluter interests who are intent on gutting the agency and bending to its will whatever is left standing.
If left unchecked, Zeldin’s plans will imperil the air we breathe and the water we drink, putting the health of our families and communities at risk.
We Can Stop Them
Despite the administration’s plans, there are reasons to believe that the reckless plan to gut EPA is an overreach that can be contained in the short term and even reversed over time.
It won’t be easy, but we can start by taking the time to understand what is happening and why. In this edition of Symons Says, I take a deep dive into Lee Zeldin’s polluters-first agenda for EPA, exploring:
How this is different from any other time in history
Why it matters
Why this is happening
Four things we must do to reclaim our right to breathe air and drink water that won’t make us sick.
This Is Not Normal
When announcing “the greatest day of deregulation,” Zeldin did not even mention EPA’s mission of protecting human health and the environment. Rather, he flipped EPA’s mission on its head, putting the interests of corporate polluters ahead of public health. According to Zeldin, EPA’s job now is to:
“lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”
My firsthand experience informs me that what is happening today is far more dangerous than past attempts by new administrations to rebalance EPA priorities. When I was at EPA in 2001, newly elected President George W. Bush asked Vice President Dick Cheney to lead a task force that would prioritize energy development. EPA’s new leadership asked me to liaison between EPA and Cheney’s Energy Task Force.
Although the policy objectives were a stark shift from the prior administration, there were critical differences in 2001 from what we are seeing now. Where the Bush administration disagreed with the law, they took their agenda to Congress and sought changes — some were enacted, some were not. Zeldin, in contrast, is attempting to unilaterally circumvent Congress, running EPA more like his own personal kingdom than a federal branch accountable to congressional oversight and appropriations.
Bush’s EPA team, led by Christie Todd Whitman (a former Republican governor), enforced the laws that were on the books. Like administrations before and after, they levied billions of dollars in fines on corporations whenever they dumped unlawful amounts of pollution into the water or air.
Not on Zeldin’s watch. Zeldin’s has kicked EPA’s enforcement programs in the teeth, including:
Ending EPA enforcement of violations of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and any other standards that could “shut down any stage of energy production,” and
Asking polluters to send in email requests so he can grant case-by-case dispensations from compliance with environmental laws. From CBS News:
“Businesses that would like to avoid complying with certain EPA rules can email the agency with a reason justifying why it should be allowed an exemption and how it is in the best interest of the national security of the United States.”
And then there are the employees who work at EPA. Even when altering the regulations issued by their predecessors, EPA Administrators have relied on EPA’s civil service staff who are essential to get things done.
This time around, EPA scientists and other experts are being muzzled and fired.
Zeldin’s plans to eliminate EPA’s science research office include firing more than a thousand scientists and shutting down field labs from North Carolina to Oklahoma.
A Dagger in the Heart of “the Climate Change Religion”
Zeldin is especially gleeful when talking about how his actions reverse course, proclaiming:
“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
Zeldin plans to upend the scientific assessment that climate change endangers public health. This finding underpins EPA's Clean Air Act responsibilities to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, automobiles, and other major sources. By pulling the scientific rug out from under the Clean Air Act, Zeldin intends to make sure that the regulations that are phasing down climate pollution from passenger vehicles, heavy trucks, and electric power plants will also fall.
Why It Matters
Dr. Millstein’s patients in Richmond, California live, play and work in a port city that is plagued by air pollution from diesel emissions and surrounding refineries. When she first started working in the area, parents of newborns would often ask her:
“Does my baby have asthma?”
This surprised Dr. Millstein. “Asthma is not something you are born with,” she explains. But for communities like Richmond with especially unhealthy air, asthma is an intergenerational reality that is top-of-mind for parents.
“To not feel like you can breathe is very very scary. It’s also scary to see your child suffer,” says Dr. Millstein.
Particle pollution “can get deep into your lungs, and some may even get into your bloodstream. Exposure to such particles can affect both your lungs and your heart,” which in turn can lead to aggravated asthma, decreased lung function, and heart attacks.
Zeldin’s plan is to replace EPA action with deception. One of the 31 rollbacks he proposes would erase the science-based air quality standards for soot that determines the maximum level of pollution that can be in the air before it is considered unhealthy. This scientific finding drives the federal and state action plans to clean the air.
By reverting to obsolete standards, Zeldin plans to relabel unhealthy air as clean.
As a result, 72 million people in more than one hundred counties across America will be deceived into thinking they are breathing clean air despite clear scientific evidence to the contrary.
Zeldin says that this approach will create “opportunities for American manufacturing.”
For 50 years, America has made steady environmental progress reducing pollution under the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act as our economy has grown.
Now, Zeldin has set his sights on making pollution great again.
These actions could not come at a worse time.
In the past two years, EPA has put in place updated Clean Air Act regulations for smokestacks and tailpipes as well as plans to tackle toxic forever chemicals (PFAS) and lead in our drinking water.
Zeldin is taking a chainsaw to these actions just as they are on the verge of making a lasting impact through cleaner technology that protects public health and gives American industry a competitive advantage in a world that is shifting to clean technologies.
Making matters worse, air pollution levels are rising and new threats, such as toxic forever chemicals and microplastics, are polluting our drinking water.
The United States is experiencing “the highest ever number of days designated as either purple or maroon (135 and 79 days, respectively). These are the levels on the Air Quality Index that carry the strongest health warnings.”
The American Lung Association attributes some of this increase to wildfires in the western United States and Canada that have grown worse due to climate change. This NASA video shows how air pollution from wildfires impacted air quality throughout the United States in 2023.
Why This is Happening
At his Senate confirmation hearing, Zeldin said all the right things.
“I want my daughters, your loved ones, and every child across our country to thrive in a world with clean air, clean water, and boundless opportunity. If confirmed, I pledge to enthusiastically uphold the EPA’s mission.”
Two months in, we now know beyond doubt that Zeldin’s performance was a scripted bait and switch deception. His talking points hit the trash can as soon as the Senate confirmed him.
Instead, Zeldin turned his attention to his own ambitions. He never wanted to be head of EPA but took the job to make a national name for himself as an anti-government crusader.
Job one for Zeldin: becoming a top minion for Elon Musk, whose bankroll can make or break his future political ambitions. Zeldin regularly panders to Musk with obsequious tweets on “X.” Elon in turn boosts the tweets to millions of “X” users.
Former EPA administrator Whitman aptly calls Zeldin a “water boy” for Musk.
Job two for Zeldin was to solidify his alliance with the nation’s biggest polluters. One of EPA’s first acts under Zeldin was to publish a list of praise for the new administrator. It was a “who’s who” collection of America’s biggest polluter lobby groups, including the American Petroleum Institute (the oil and gas industry lobby) and the American Chemistry Council (the chemical industry lobby).
Aaron Szabo, a lobbyist paid by these same trade associations (see lobby disclosures here and here), got a “special note of thanks” in Project 2025 for helping draft the EPA chapter that Zeldin is faithfully implementing today.
Szabo is currently awaiting Senate confirmation to — wait for it — lead EPA’s air pollution office.
Polluters already have another key ally — Russel Vought — in place as head of the White House office that oversees the federal budget. Here’s what Vought says about getting EPA out of the way of the energy industry:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
Why It Matters: 10,000 Asthma Attacks Every Day
EPA’s work is easily taken for granted, but Americans across the country count on EPA to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink.
EPA’s workforce includes thousands of scientists and engineers who work in every region of the country, responding to disasters, testing toxic chemicals, monitoring pollution, setting public health standards, and building drinking water infrastructure.
Without EPA staff on the job, the air we breathe and the water we drink will be at greater risk from toxic pollution that causes cancer, asthma attacks, lung disease, and other life-threatening ailments.
Cause more than 10,000 asthma attacks every day throughout the United States, leading to missed school days, missed workdays, and trips to the school nurse or the emergency room.
Lead to nearly 200,000 premature deaths through 2050. That’s the equivalent of 20 sports arenas filled with children, grandparents, moms, and dads who will live shorter, less healthy lives.
Create six dollars in costs to the public for every dollar in cost relief to corporate polluters. The EPA rules that Zeldin seeks to erase create $254 billion in annual benefits for public health and the economy, compared to $39 billion in costs to regulated industry. These benefits come from avoided hospital and health care bills and the opportunity to live longer, healthier lives.
You can see The Guardian’s take on the analysis here.
It’s Not Too Late to Save EPA
Zeldin is not the first EPA administrator who came in with the intent of turning the agency over to polluters. Scott Pruitt attempted a similar playbook in Trump’s first term before Congress, on a bipartisan basis, blocked his efforts to cut EPA’s budget by 30 percent (Trump’s EPA cuts were voted down in the Republican-controlled House, 260-151).
Pruitt, plagued by ethics scandals, eventually resigned in disgrace. Trump and Congress ended up settling at a cut to EPA’s budget that was 5 percent below Obama funding levels — a step in the wrong direction, but within the range of pendulum swings of past presidential transitions.
While Zeldin has bolder plans and fewer guardrails, it’s not too late to contain the worst of these assaults on EPA and people’s health.
To prevail, we will need to mobilize simultaneously on four fronts:
Contain Zeldin in the Courts
Speak Up and Mobilize
Hold Congress Accountable
Find the High Ground and Make a Stand
(1) Contain Zeldin in the Courts
The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and other environmental laws have been enacted by Congress and cannot be lawfully undone by Zeldin without congressional approval.
During his first term, Trump’s EPA lost more than 80 percent of their cases in court when their deregulatory efforts were challenged.
Zeldin seems to be following the same playbook, replacing the standards spelled out by Congress with a notion of executive exceptionalism that would make Zeldin alone the sole judge and jury in interpreting the law. Jillian Blanchard of Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG), a leading challenger of Zeldin’s early actions, provides this perspective:
“Everything this executive is doing, whether it's executive orders that expand far beyond their executive authority, or whether it's attempts to freeze federal funding that's in legally obligated funds that have been approved by Congress, is this executive's effort to push past their legally authorized executive authority under the Constitution, and that should concern us all.”
In early tests, the courts seem to see it similarly. Zeldin’s EPA has already suffered a number of setbacks in court that have forced them to backtrack on staff firings and shutting down grants.
Ironically, taxpayers will end up footing wasteful legal bills for Zeldin’s antics. In EPA’s latest court filings, the agency argues that it can’t be stopped from breaching contracts with grantees because it can simply pay out damages, writing:
[Grantees] are entitled to claim damages for this asserted breach of contract in the Court of Federal Claims. After all, EPA has the same rights as every other party when it enters contracts. That includes the right to breach and face remedies.
Think about that. Taxpayers will be paying grantees billions of dollars to not do the work that they desperately want to do, protecting public health. This is the opposite of efficiency. It is the very definition of wasteful spending that Musk and Zeldin pretend to be trying to target.
To succeed in court, we will need to support the relentless work of state attorneys general and NGOs like L4GG and Earthjustice, whose president, Abbie Dillen, vows:
“What Trump wants to do to our climate, to our health, and to our air and water is against the law. We will see him in court.”
(2) Speak Up and Mobilize
EPA wasn’t on the mind of most voters in 2024. Partly, this is because Trump himself reassured voters during the widely watched debates they had nothing to worry about:
“I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. … during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever. And my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually.”
Trump claims an electoral mandate for many things, but his promise to voters during the campaign was a promise of clean air and clean water.
Why? Because that is what voters want.
A nationwide 2024 election poll found that 86 percent of voters, including 76 percent of Trump voters, opposed efforts to weaken EPA:
Trump has the opposite of a mandate when it comes to his EPA agenda. Instead, Zeldin is on a course to unequivocally break Trump’s promise to the American public to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink.
That makes our job clear. We have to make sure the public know what’s going on.
As former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy recently told a crowd at Wake Forest University:
“Don’t give up. Buckle up.”
Spreading the word and speaking out are essential elements of a public backlash.
Too many people think we are powerless when it comes to educating others. Which is ironic, because the most important sources of news and information for most people are the people we know through our families, our work, our neighborhoods, and social media.
So spread the word to your family and friends! You can steer people to get the facts about EPA at EPAFacts.org, which is hosted by the Environmental Protection Network. And, by the way, if you have the means in interest in supporting this fight, organizations like the Environmental Protection Network and Lawyers for Good Government need your financial support now more than ever.
Can’t get to a rally? The Climate Action Coalition is encouraging people to protest the EPA enforcement exemptions by sending your own email to the EPA email address intended for corporate polluters. Don’t expect Zeldin to care, but it will be a nice boost for the EPA staff who have to suffer through his reign. Also, send a copy to your member of Congress, which brings us to the third part of the strategy to save EPA…
(3) Hold Congress Accountable
That’s right. Congress.
Eyerolls please.
So far, Republicans in Congress seem disinterested, at best, as Zeldin puts the health of their constituents at risk. Some are actively cheering.
It’s reasonable therefore to question whether efforts to engage Republicans in Congress is worth the time.
Yes, it is. Congress will face voters in 17 months. The president’s party usually starts to fray the closer we get to the mid-term elections. In the meantime, Republicans have the slimmest of majorities. Even a handful of Republicans can swing a vote that may be key to preserving EPA’s core capacity to bounce back after Zeldin.
Against this narrow margin, 45 House Republicans have broken party ranks in the past on EPA votes, acting on behalf of their constituents to protect EPA funding or support action to address forever chemicals (PFAS). I have posted the list of members and their votes here.
Republican Jen Kiggans, for example, won her Virginia district along the Chesapeake Bay by less than four percent. EPA provides critical resources to clean up the Chesapeake and plays a critical role in addressing flooding that is driving up local insurance rates.
It’s not just Republicans that need to hear from you. Too many Democrats seem to be missing from this fight.
Some Democrats in Congress are rousing. Senator Cory Booker (NJ) this week set a record for the longest Senate floor in history (25 hours) to draw attention to Congress’ inaction. Five Democratic Senators, led by Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), recently took to the Senate floor for over an hour to speak up against Zeldin.
But where were Senators John Fetterman (PA), Ruben Gallego (AZ), and Mark Kelly (AZ), all of whom voted to confirm Zeldin? Are they on board with Zeldin’s radical plans? Crickets.
More than 60 House Democrats sent a letter to Zeldin opposing his plans to eliminate EPA’s science office. That’s a great start, but there are 213 House Democrats. How hard is it to put up a unified front against Zeldin’s extreme effort to abolish EPA’s science office?
Let’s be honest. Waiting until next year is too passive and too late. Congress needs to feel the heat now. The next big test: federal government funding expires in September, and Congress will begin work on the next appropriations bills in the coming months.
They can’t hide from what Zeldin is doing forever.
If we can mobilize the public and ensure that members of Congress from both parties are feeling the backlash to Zeldin’s extreme agenda, enough members of Congress may revert toward the norm and reassert their constitutional responsibilities to make a difference.
One thing we can count on, however, is that Congress won’t stand up to Zeldin and Musk without encouragement from their constituents.
The only thing certain to kill EPA’s public health protections is public silence at a time of crisis.
(4) Find The High Ground and Make a Stand
The threat to EPA is one of many threats to public health and the environment across the federal government. With such a broad landscape, it may seem like a drop in the bucket to save EPA.
Trump whisperer Stephen Bannon has a name for the strategy we are witnessing: “flood the zone.” The goal is to keep opponents playing whack-a-mole, chasing the daily news rather than focusing on a winning counterstrategy.
A sampling:
Federal science grants are being weaponized to force universities to bend the knee, prompting 1,900 scientists from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to issue this stark warning.
The term “safe drinking water” has been red-flagged by USDA as it searches for grants and programs to eliminate.
The US is pulling back from global climate agreements and ending foreign aid to impoverished nations even as millions of people globally are at increasing risk of climate-driven disease, famine, drought, and conflict.
NOAA, a vital agency and world leader in weather monitoring and climate science, is under attack.
Interior Secretary Burgum has proposed using the pretense of an energy emergency to force shuttered, highly polluting coal power plants back online.
The list goes on.
To withstand any flood, we need to find high ground and make our stand. The fight to save EPA is the high ground.
The forces pushing to gut EPA are well financed but are working against the interests of voters. Pollution touches every corner of America. Whether you voted red or blue, you want to know that impartial scientists, not polluter lapdogs, are protecting the water you drink and the air you breathe.
That’s a strong place to make a stand, speak out, and hold our ground against the flood until it passes.
As Dr. Millstein puts it:
“We know these regulations save lives. We know the amazing benefits of the Clean Air Act and other environmental regulations. What we have done around lead has been wildly successful. These are commonsense protections that we can implement. At the end of the day, our kids are innocent, and they deserve better than this.”
Symons Says is a publication by Symons Public Affairs LLC, which invites you to copy and redistribute the Content, solely for noncommercial purposes, provided that you give appropriate credit and indicate if any changes were made to the Content, pursuant to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license and Substack’s terms of use.
