When the Trump administration introduced it was shifting to get rid of dozens of U.S. local weather insurance policies, Environmental Safety Company Administrator Lee Zeldin mentioned he was sending “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
That drive – to each repeal environmental rules and forged doubt on science – displays the Trump administration’s strategy to surroundings coverage.
Deregulation has lengthy been a key theme in Republican environmental coverage. The battle between the duty to guard public well being and the need to spice up markets traces again to Ronald Reagan’s presidential administration. Reagan’s perspective that authorities will not be an answer to issues, however is the issue as an alternative, set the stage for Republican administrations that adopted.
President Ronald Reagan shakes Donald Trump’s hand throughout a reception that Trump, then an actual property developer, attended on the White Home in 1987.
White Home Photographic Assortment through Wikimedia Commons
Reagan argued that the expansion of presidency spending and enterprise regulation had stymied financial prosperity. Environmental rules have been a primary goal.
Forty years later, America is seeing most of the identical ideas within the Trump administration. Nevertheless, its technique may have a better impact than Reagan ever envisioned.
Slashing budgets and staffing
There are various methods to kneecap authorities businesses: Instituting huge finances cuts, slicing workers with vital capabilities and appointing management whose purpose is limiting the attain and effectiveness of the very businesses they direct are only a few.
In these efforts, Reagan and Trump had related approaches to the EPA, though with completely different ranges of depth.
Trump’s EPA finances plan for 2026 features a draconian 50% reduce from the earlier 12 months and the bottom finances proposal, when adjusted for inflation, since Reagan. Workers cuts in simply the primary six months of the second Trump administration put the company’s whole employment at 12,448, down from 16,155 in January.
Reagan dissolved the EPA Workplace of Enforcement to restrict “unnecessary regulation,” which resulted in a 80% decline in actions to implement environmental rules. Trump can also be stopping enforcement actions, dismantling the EPA’s Science and Analysis Workplace and politicizing the company’s science by placing political appointees in cost, strikes that undermine EPA’s independence and experience.
Each reduce EPA’s finances, however that alone doesn’t scale back an company’s effectiveness.
Politicizing EPA management
When the EPA was based in 1970 throughout the Nixon administration, it represented a bipartisan consensus: After a long time of auto exhaust, polluted waterways and smog-filled air, environmental safety had grow to be a nationwide coverage precedence.
However industries that EPA regulated argued that the prices of implementing the company’s mandates have been too excessive. That created pressure between economics and science and enforcement.
As a part of his “government is not the solution” strategy, Reagan issued an govt order shortly after taking workplace in 1981 requiring federal businesses to submit all proposed guidelines to the White Home Workplace of Administration and Price range earlier than making them public. In Reagan’s eyes, this strategy centralized energy within the White Home and was a method to get rid of burdensome rules earlier than the businesses introduced them to the general public.
He additionally appointed an EPA administrator who shared his anti-government perspective. Anne Gorsuch Burford was a lawyer and state legislator from Colorado, the place she routinely voted in opposition to poisonous waste cleanup and auto air pollution controls.
President Ronald Reagan meets with EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch within the Oval Workplace in Might 1982.
HUM Photographs/Common Photographs Group through Getty Photographs
As soon as in Washington, she appointed a number of folks to the EPA’s management workforce with direct ties to industries the EPA regulated. An instance was Rita Lavelle, head of the EPA’s poisonous waste applications, who was later convicted of perjury for mendacity to Congress about when she knew her former employer, a protection contractor, was disposing of poisonous waste at a now infamous dump website.
These appointments have been an instance of regulatory seize by the industries EPA was in command of overseeing. Anne Gorsuch Burford was held in contempt of Congress for not turning over data associated to the Superfund cleanup of the identical hazardous waste website, which led to her resignation. The Superfund program to scrub up poisonous waste dumps was new and certainly one of EPA’s largest applications on the time.
The scandals, damaged workers morale, stripped budgets and fights over coverage discredited the company.
Going after authorities scientists
Anne Gorsuch Burford’s deregulation efforts weren’t totally profitable, partially as a result of EPA workers specialists rallied to protect science and regulatory capabilities. They leaked supplies about delays within the Superfund website cleanup to sympathetic congressional workers, who in flip discovered assist from Republican and Democratic senators.
That historical past might have influenced the Trump administration’s technique towards the federal forms’s workers specialists, who Trump calls “the Deep State.”
The Division of Authorities Effectivity, an unofficial group Trump arrange in early 2025 headed by Elon Musk, directed the firing of tens of 1000’s of presidency scientists and different workers with experience that authorities businesses depend on. Hundreds extra have resigned amid intimidation ways comparable to surveillance.
EPA staff and supporters held a rally in Philadelphia on March 25, 2025, to name consideration to the impression of the Trump administration’s job cuts.
AP Photograph/Matt Rourke
Trump’s head of the Workplace of Administration and Price range, Russell Vought, has been clear about concentrating on bureaucrats. He mentioned in 2023: “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.”
There’s a clear focus immediately on EPA applications that don’t align with the administration’s views. Applications associated to environmental justice for low-income communities are within the line of fireside. The appointment of individuals from the chemical, fossil gasoline and company industries to high-level regulatory and authorized positions raises questions on regulatory seize – whether or not their focus will probably be extra on the well being of the industries they oversee than on the well being of the general public.
An instance is decision-making associated to who bears the prices of cleansing up air pollution from PFAS “forever chemicals” − persistent, dangerous chemical substances that are actually present in consuming water and in folks’s bloodstreams. Steven Cook dinner, a Trump appointee, as soon as represented chemical firms which can be preventing a rule that might require them to scrub up PFAS air pollution. He has now proposed scrapping the rule, The New York Instances experiences. That transfer may shift what are anticipated to be billions of {dollars} in cleanup prices to taxpayers as an alternative. It might be a major shift away from the 45-year Superfund mantra that “the polluter pays.” Such actions blur the strains between ethics, policymaking and client and firm pursuits.
The primary Trump administration had a concentrate on reforming allowing and forms. Whereas showing radical on the time, the revamping of scientific boards to incorporate extra business representatives, the undoing of energy plant guidelines and the lessening of enforcement hobbled however didn’t fully undo the company.
The second Trump administration, in actively supporting fossil gasoline “energy dominance,” is taking steps to not simply get rid of rules however to make sure future administrations can’t carry the rules again, by utilizing a fancy set of authorized arguments associated to the regulation of greenhouse gases.
On the identical time, the administration is making an attempt to discredit scientific analysis to downplay the dangers of a warming planet.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin broadcasts plans in March 2025 to rethink dozens of rules that have an effect on the fossil gasoline business and human well being.
The Reagan administration, whereas it additionally pushed for deregulation and expanded allowing of oil, gasoline and coal leases, embraced some parts of environmental safety. Reagan designated greater than 10 million acres as protected wilderness and signed the Coastal Boundaries Assets Act, which helped defend 3.5 million acres of shoreline from improvement. When Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol in 1988 to assist defend the ozone layer, he cited scientific information displaying the rising dangers of ozone-depleting substances.
When Congress doesn’t push again
There may be one other vital distinction between the primary and second Trump administrations: The present Republican-controlled Congress is consenting to nearly each request the president makes.
Congress has a constitutional accountability to be a examine on the chief department, and a bipartisan Congress has lengthy taken an energetic function in oversight and investigation involving environmental points.
In 2025, nevertheless, Congress has authorised most of Trump’s calls for, together with voting to repeal a lot of the Inflation Discount Act, a package deal of pro-environment spending it had simply handed two years earlier and that included many tasks in Republican districts.
The administration’s effort to get rid of U.S. local weather insurance policies will take time and face lawsuits.
In an irony of historical past, Anne Gorsuch Burford’s son Neil Gorsuch now sits on the Supreme Courtroom. His vote when these circumstances come earlier than the courtroom would be the final Reagan legacy on the Trump EPA.
This text, initially revealed Aug. 26, 2025, has been up to date with a advice inside EPA to shift PFAS cleanup prices from firms to taxpayers.
