Trump’s Cabinet of Polluters, Frackers & Climate Deniers
In their first few weeks in office, they rushed to gut environmental safeguards
Lee Zeldin was full of pablum in his January Senate confirmation hearing to run the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A former member of Congress from Long Island, New York, with scant regulatory experience, Zeldin promised to “defer to the research of the scientists” on whether climate change made oceans more acidic. In even more laudatory language, he said he would “defer to the talented scientists,” on whether the Earth had hit a threshold for runaway climate change.
He also said he “would welcome an opportunity to read through all the science and research” on pesticides and search for “common sense, pragmatic solutions” on environmental issues. Claiming there was “no dollar large or small that can influence the decisions that I make,” Zeldin went so far as to say, “It is my job to stay up at night, to lose sleep at night, to make sure that we are making our air and our water cleaner.”
It was all a lie. Last month, President Trump said Zeldin was considering firing 65 percent of the EPA’s staff, which would amount to nearly 10,000 of the agency’s 15,000 workers. The White House later issued a clarification—as if it made any difference—that Zeldin was “committed” to slashing 65 percent of the agency’s budget. The EPA issued a statement saying President Trump and Secretary Zeldin “are in lock step.”
Also last month, the news broke that Zeldin is urging the White House to strike down the 2009 EPA finding that global warming gases endanger public health and the environment. That finding, made under the Obama administration, girded federal efforts to reduce vehicle and industrial emissions. The finding, long a legal target for climate deniers, has so far held up, even in an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, but that has not stopped the administration from attacking it. Project 2025, the blueprint organized by the Heritage Foundation to guide this White House, called for an “update” to the endangerment finding. Leading climate denier and former Trump transition adviser Steve Milloy told the Associated Press recently that without the finding, “everything EPA does on climate goes away.”
This all happened after Zeldin told senators in written answers for his confirmation that he planned to “learn from EPA career staff about the current state of the science on greenhouse gas emissions and follow all legal requirements.” Instead, Zeldin has agency scientists in a state of bewilderment. In just a few weeks, he has EPA employees looking over their shoulders, fearing the dismissal of their work or the tap of outright dismissal.
Zeldin’s latest “lock-step” actions cap an already breathtaking first month in running the EPA. He has launched an illegal effort to claw back $20 billion in EPA clean energy funding significantly targeted for disadvantaged communities. He placed nearly 170 workers in the office of Environmental Justice on administrative leave and oversaw the firing of about 400 probationary staff (although some have momentarily been brought back after public outcry). And he has begun a rollback of Biden administration energy efficiency and water conservation regulations for home appliances and fixtures.
There are surely many more attempts to come that will turn back the clock on environmental protection.
An EPA led by industry apologists
Zeldin’s EPA includes a rogue’s gallery from President Trump’s first term.
Returning to the EPA in top spots for chemical regulation are Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva. Both formerly worked for the American Chemistry Council, the top lobbying arm of chemical manufacturers, and Dekleva spent more than three decades at DuPont, one of the most notorious companies for hiding the danger of the highly toxic fluorinated chemicals called PFAS.
In the first Trump administration, Beck was at the center of suppressing science to resist the most stringent regulation or bans of such carcinogenic chemicals as trichloroethylene, PFAS, methylene chloride and asbestos. She was also reported to have helped bury the strongest possible health and safety guidelines to help communities reopen during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dekleva, meanwhile, was accused during her first stint in President Trump’s EPA of pressuring employees to approve new chemicals as well as colluding with industry to weaken the Toxic Substances Control Act.
The nominee for Zeldin’s assistant administrator, David Fotouhi, is a returnee who was at the center of the first Trump administration’s efforts to strip wetlands protections. When not working inside the EPA, Fotouhi has a long record defending industries in legal battles over standards or contamination lawsuits about toxic chemicals, such as asbestos, PFAS, PCBs and coal ash.
Holding high-level positions in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation are Abigale Tardif and Alex Dominguez. Tardif lobbied for the oil and petrochemical industry and was a policy analyst for the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. Dominguez lobbied for the American Petroleum Institute, which opposed the Biden administration’s vehicle pollution standards.
In line to join Tardif and Dominguez is Aaron Szabo, who has been nominated to be assistant secretary for Air and Radiation. Szabo was a contributing consultant to the Project 2025 chapter on the EPA that recommended sharply curtailing the agency’s monitoring of global warming gases and other pollutants and eliminating the Office for Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.
Other recent EPA appointees who also contributed to Project 2025 (which President Trump disavowed during his presidential campaign) include Scott Mason and Justin Schwab. Steven Cook, a former lobbyist for plastics, chemicals, and oil refining, and another veteran of the first Trump administration, is also returning.
Zeldin may be inexperienced at regulation, but none of the above industry lobbyists are. As Kyle Danish, a partner at Van Ness Feldman, a consulting firm for energy clients, told the New York Times, “This group is arriving with more expertise in deploying the machinery of the agency, including to unravel regulations from the prior administration. They all look like they graduated one level from what they did in the first Trump administration.”
Same playbook at other agencies
Other agencies responsible for addressing carbon pollution have also quickly deployed the machinery of environmental destruction.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a memorandum ordering a review of the Biden administration’s fuel economy standards, claiming without evidence that the standards would destroy “thousands” of jobs and “force the electrification” of the nation’s auto fleet. In fact, the agency’s own analysis found the rules would save consumers $23 billion in fuel costs and result in annual health cost benefits of $13 billion due to reduced air pollution.
Secretary Duffy also issued a memorandum canceling the Department of Transportation’s plans to address climate change, resilience policies, and environmental justice in low-income populations and communities of color. Again, he offered no facts as to why communities disproportionately beset with pollution and pollution-related diseases should be excluded from protection. Duffy was just following President Trump’s Orwellian executive order that aims to wipe out any consideration of race, gender, equity and climate, as well as any disproportionate impact from federal programs.
Over in the Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum issued a memorandum directing all of his assistant secretaries to provide action plans that “suspend, revise or rescind” more than two dozen regulations. The obvious goal is to allow the fossil fuel and mining industries to plunder more public land and water for private profit. Many of the regulations Burgum plans to weaken or outright kill involve endangered wildlife and plants, land conservation, and the Migratory Bird Treaty, failing to account for their benefits to public health, agriculture and the environment.
In a recent interview on FOX News, Secretary Burgum said he was “completely embracing” the Department of Government Efficiency’s campaign to massively shrink the federal workforce, which means he is just fine with DOGE’s 2,000 job cuts at Interior, including 1,000 in the chronically understaffed National Park Service, which has a $23.3-billion deferred maintenance backlog.
Climate mockery at the Energy Department
And then we have the reported layoff of 1,200 to 2,000 workers at the Energy Department, now run by Chris Wright, a former CEO of one of the nation’s largest fracking companies. In President Trump’s cabinet, Secretary Wright is the most blunt in dismissing the effects of the climate crisis. In 2023, he said the “the hype over wildfires is just hype to justify” climate policies. “There is no climate crisis,” he said, “and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition.”
Wright doubled down on his rhetoric during his first month in office. He told attendees at a conservative policy conference in February—without evidence—that net zero goals for carbon emissions by 2050 were “sinister” and “lunacy.” Wright also went on FOX Business in February to say that climate change is “nowhere near the world’s biggest problem today, not even close.”
Despite all the evidence already unfolding that climate change is a major factor in the growing number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States, and despite a major 2023 projecting that five million lives a year could be saved worldwide by phasing out fossil fuels, Wright insists a warmer planet with more carbon dioxide is “better for growing plants.” Never mind that communities are living in the crosshairs of contamination and climate catastrophe and that endangered species, conservationists fear, could be driven to extinction.
Wright spent his first month in office postponing Biden-era energy efficiency standards for home appliances, claiming without evidence that the standards have “diminished” appliances’ quality. His office also announced it was canceling $124 million in contracts, many of them connected to diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives. He said those contracts were “adding nothing of value to the American people.” And when asked if he wanted fossil fuels to “come back big time,” Wright responded, “Absolutely.”
NOAA Slashed
And over in the Commerce Department, the 6,700 scientists and 12,000 staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are reeling from the recent first wave of layoffs. The New York Times reported this week that the 1,300 staffers who have already resigned or have been let go, coupled with another 1,000 planned cuts, would amount to slashing about 20 percent of NOAA’s workforce. There could be even more to come. Anonymous sources on Capitol Hill have told major media outlets that the Trump administration and new Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are considering a 50-percent cut in staff and a 30-percent cut in NOAA’s budget.
It is apparently irrelevant to the Trump administration that NOAA is a bedrock agency that protects the public with its real-time tracking of dangerous storms. It is at the center of long-term federal analysis on climate, global warming’s toll on property and life, the health of our oceans, and the state of our fisheries. Instead of being placed on a pedestal for its critical role, NOAA is as much a target for polluters and plunderers as the EPA. Project 2025 called for breaking up NOAA because it “has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
Lutnick, a billionaire Wall Street financier, told senators during his January confirmation hearing that he had “no interest” in dismantling NOAA. His mass firings, however, suggest the dismantling has begun.
Repeating the same “drill, baby, drill” mantra
When Lee Zeldin promised at his confirmation hearing that he would “defer” to talented scientists on climate change data, it was a mere six days after NOAA and many other weather agencies around the world confirmed that Earth experienced its hottest year on record in 2024. That was obviously lost on him—and his fellow cabinet members. In just one month, Zeldin, Burgum, Wright, Duffy, and Lutnick have only demonstrated deference to President Trump’s mantra of “drill, baby, drill” and deregulating toxic industries. Left in their wake are demonized and demoralized federal scientists.
In his address to Congress last week, President Trump boasted about ending “environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable.” Hopefully it will not be one hurricane, one contaminated community, or one disappearing species too many to realize the country cannot afford to be without those scientists. We will be far less safe without them.
A version of this essay originally appeared on The Equation, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ blog.
Derrick Z. Jackson, a new contributor to Money Trail, is a Union of Concerned Scientists fellow, a former columnist at the Boston Globe, and author and photographer of “Project Puffin” (Yale University Press, 2015) and “The Puffin Plan” (Tumblehome Books, 2020) on the restoration of puffins in Maine.
Good summary, but, but her emails. Surely Ralph Nader and Jill Stein will save us. Oh, right they lost, and decisions are made by winners.