Our new EPA: "U.S. Energy Protection Agency" (Part 1)

A series of posts on how the Trump Administration is tearing down environmental protections.

Image: Morrisonville, LA—part of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley”—was contaminated by vinyl chloride produced at the local Dow Chemical plant. The entire town was relocated.

The second Trump administration has now been installed for over three months—long enough to start seeing the Trumpification of the major federal regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is tasked with keeping the air, land, and water of the U.S. free of pollutants. By preserving the health of the environment, the EPA and its co-advocate agencies and offices preserve the health and happiness of people in the United States.

Trump and his team have been quickly dismantling federal environmental regulatory precedent, including a wholesale deconstruction of the environmental review process and a complete rejection of the concept of environmental justice. And, on March 12, the Trump-appointed and Senate-approved new administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, announced one of the most prominent deregulatory efforts in U.S. history. Many of the actions Zeldin announced are specifically designed to benefit fossil fuel industries.

Before I dig into these effort to weaken environmental statutes and regulations, let’s acknowledge up front that there are very valid arguments against overregulation. For instance, growth-oriented policy analysts on the left complain when the environmental permitting process is used perversely by not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) types to prevent much needed housing and infrastructure development.

The Trump team’s deregulatory effort, however, is sector-specific and difficult to construe as growth-oriented. Starting with the slew of executive orders he signed on Day One of his new administration, Trump has regularly signaled his interest in propping up fossil fuels regardless of environmental or even business sense. To kick of the deregulatory frenzy, Trump declared a specious “national energy emergency,” ordering all agencies to hasten the implementation of energy projects (except for wind and solar; Trump hates wind power).

In response, Zeldin at EPA and his colleagues at collaborating agencies and offices are using their power to effectively subsidize fossil fuel development to the detriment of clean energy competitors and leaving protection of the environment a distinct afterthought.

Through their actions, Trump and his environmental team have also shown that they are unwilling to recognize that environmental tragedies resulting from negligent or even malicious corporate actions have disproportionately affected certain communities—the very simple concept of “environmental justice” that Trump is attempting to wash away.

And, the Trump team is clearing out scientific expertise at EPA—a policy recommendation straight from Project 2025 (see the 2025 Mandate for Leadership, pg. 436).

Here are some of the major efforts by the Trump administration to loosen environmental regulations and strip protections against environmental harm. A second post—coming soon—will address specific regulatory and other efforts to promote the production of carbon-rich fuels.

Decentralizing Environmental Reviews

One intended advocate of the environment within the executive branch is the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which is part of the Executive Office of the President within the White House. The CEQ’s major function is to oversee the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires that environmental reviews are completed before major government programs projects are implemented.

If you’ve ever been affiliated with some sort of infrastructure development, you’re likely familiar with the required Environmental Impact Statement or Environmental Assessment that must be completed if the project is built by the federal government or using federal funding. Many states have their own versions of environmental policy acts that require environmental analysis before development, regardless of federal involvement.

An environmental review generally involves developing a set of viable project alternatives and assessing their environmental impacts in a standardized manner. This process ensures that all project stakeholders fully informed of potential ramifications and harms of the project and can choose (or attempt to influence the choice of) an alternative design. It also reveals probable environmental harms so that the employees of environmental permitting agencies can make well-informed permitting allowance decisions. NEPA is a law that mandates a process rather than specifies strict regulatory requirements.

Many federal agencies fund, permit, or outright build projects that are subject to NEPA requirements. At the federal level, the role of the CEQ has traditionally been to provide NEPA process guidance to the federal agencies to ensure that NEPA is enforced uniformly across all agencies.

Trump’s “national energy emergency” executive order kicked off a wave of deregulation, including the complete dismantling of the uniform guidance structure behind NEPA. Trump’s CEQ—supported by a conservative court ruling that the CEQ cannot issue regulations—will stop issuing rules on how to implement NEPA, instead leaving individual agencies to apply NEPA as they see fit “to expedite permitting approvals” (although agencies are instructed to follow existing practices until they develop their own procedures).

The effects of the NEPA teardown are already becoming apparent. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is adjusting their NEPA process to expedite natural gas permits. The Bureau of Land Management will no longer require full environmental impact statements for over 3,000 pending oil and gas leases. In an interesting but very Trump-y twist, expedited environmental reviews from the Interior Department for energy projects (to ameliorate our so-called “energy emergency”) are for all forms of energy except wind and solar.

If we were really experiencing a national energy emergency that required jettisoning environmental review, why would we leave out any form of energy production?

Redefining the Waters of the United States

One of Trump’s most eye-catching initial executive orders demanded that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America. While certainly weird and provocative, this is far from the most dangerous action by this administration with regard to the waters of and surrounding the United States.

The Clean Water Act defines an official set of “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, which are the waters within the US that the federal government is tasked with keeping free of pollution. WOTUS by statute includes navigable interior waterways and territorial seas. What is less clear is how the “WOTUS” designation should cover other bodies of water like wetlands and tributaries that connect to the major waterways. As of 2023, after a Supreme Court decision ordering the narrowing of the definition, WOTUS includes “relatively permanent” bodies of water like lakes, rivers, and streams; and wetlands so long as they have a “continuous surface connection” to other WOTUS bodies of water.

On March 12, 2025, the Trump administration moved to further constrict the definition of WOTUS by issuing guidance to field staff on how to interpret “continuous surface connection.” It encourages a stricter interpretation that would leave many wetlands unprotected. The administration opened a public comment session on the issue, the first step in formally changing regulations related to WOTUS. This is a recommendation from Project 2025 (pg. 429).

Again under the guise of declaring a “national energy emergency,” Trump has directed the Army Corps of Engineers to fast-track permits for energy infrastructure projects, specifically with regard to Clean Water Act permits. Environmentalists fear that Trump has essentially told the Army Corps to disregard Clean Water Act concerns in favor of building energy infrastructure quickly.

Denying Environmental Justice

Trump’s EPA no longer researches or considers “environmental justice” when prioritizing policy or responses. They’ve even taken away a useful public GIS tool for assessing environmental justice criteria when planning projects. This tool was an easy way to learn demographic and environmental health facts about the population within a project’s U.S. Census tract.

(Full disclosure—I used this tool frequently before it was taken down to better understand the population that might be affected by my projects, and I’m more than a little salty it was taken away. Luckily, some data scientists saved the data and rebuilt the tool.)

What is “Environmental Justice”? It’s simply the idea that certain communities—often but not always poor and otherwise disadvantaged—have tended to experience the most environmental harm from industry because they do not have the power to fight the chemical plant or smokestack in their backyard like more advantaged populations. Thus, the EPA, especially under Biden, started to prioritize ensuring that communities disproportionately victimized by environmentally risky development would have a more environmentally healthy future and, crucially, would be supported in lawsuits against negligent companies.

In their mad dash to get rid of everything “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-related, Trump and co. also threw away environmental justice. They have fired environmental justice staff at all EPA regional offices, including experts in the environmental health of children. They have canceled grants that focus on environmental justice, even those that focus on such things as improving drinking water quality in red states. And they continue to find more to cancel—just today, a court filing revealed that almost 800 grants are targeted.

Were 100% of the grants useful and prudent? Maybe not—there’s room for more efficiency in every government process. But that’s 800 communities that were expecting to have funding for some project that they thought would improve local environmental health. Trump has effectively wrested from those states and those districts the power to improve their own environmental future.

One example of a region full of communities that are victims of environmental injustice is Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” which boasts a plethora of petrochemical plants. The mostly Black residents of the region not only suffer the health consequences of these plants, they are also disproportionately excluded from their economic benefits. In this case, goals of environmental justice workers might be to ensure that no community faces health risks, that a community that does is represented in court, and that any benefits an industry receives from federal funding or permitting allowances are not spread discriminatorily among the local community.

The Trump administration, however, is outright denying environmental justice goals, even going so far as to drop a lawsuit against a chemical manufacturer in Louisiana’s cancer alley—a lawsuit that the Biden administration was supporting on behalf of the local residents who were exposed to high levels of cancer-causing chemicals. The Trump admin’s justification was that the lawsuit was just another case of DEI.