Former EPA Employees Warn of Polluted Skies Ahead Under Trump

Experts and former employees say the Trump administration’s moves to fire key scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and dismantle clean air and water protections will make the United States a “sicker and poorer” place to live while demoralizing the next generation of environmental investigators and public health researchers.

The rollbacks could lead to a significant increase in hospitalizations and premature deaths from illnesses linked to air and water pollution, public health experts warn. For example, new analysis by former agency researchers at the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network (EPN) estimates that 16 major air pollution rules updated by the Biden administration between 2021 and 2024 would save at least 200,000 lives by 2050.

Air pollution rules also reduce the pollution driving climate change, which is now widely recognized as a major public health threat.

However, last week EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the clean air rules are among 31 environmental protections that will be weakened or eliminated by the Trump administration. According to documents reviewed by House Democrats and reported on by the New York Times, Zeldin also plans to eliminate the EPA’s scientific research office, “firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists” who investigate environmental health threats at federal labs across multiple states.

“This is a disaster for everyone that relies on EPA for clean drinking water, and for everyone that breathes,” Jeremy Symons, a former EPA air office employee and coauthor of the EPN report, told Truthout. “We are all going to be left wondering what toxic chemicals are in our drinking water, and what harmful air pollution we are breathing, if these regulations are rolled back.”

Symons pointed to a nationwide poll of 1,000 voters taken by EPN shortly after the November elections that found the vast majority of voters — including 76 percent of Trump voters — want the EPA to be strengthened or remain the same. Only 14 percent of all voters agreed the EPA should be weakened. However, environmental groups say Trump’s rollback of EPA regulations alone threatens to reverse more than a decade of progress toward reducing highly toxic pollutants.

“There is no mandate for what we are seeing, so why are we seeing it?” Symons asked. “It is becoming very clear that Lee Zeldin is working with Elon Musk to follow a radical and extremist agenda put forward by Project 2025, and that puts the interests of corporate polluters above public health.”

President Donald Trump does not appear to be concerned about the consequences of unleashing toxic pollution, including political blowback — or even willing to acknowledge the reality of the environmental issues the EPA is tasked with handling.

On his Truth Social platform earlier this week, Trump claimed he is opening “hundreds” of power plants that will produce energy by burning “BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL” (emphasis is Trump’s). However, Trump does not own any power plants or have the authority to compel companies to burn coal. The term “clean coal” is an oxymoron pulled from a defunct greenwashing campaign largely abandoned by the industry years ago.

Perhaps the president was feeling nostalgic for his first term, when he declared an end to the so-called “war on coal” and rolled back the Obama administration’s signature carbon regulations for new coal-burning power plants meant to thwart the climate crisis. Patrick Drupp, the director of climate policy and advocacy at the Sierra Club, a group that has pushed for years to retire the dirtiest coal plants, said Trump’s statement is “completely delusional” in 2024.

“There is no such thing as clean coal,” Drupp said in a statement. “There is only coal that pollutes our air and water so severely that nearly half a million Americans have died prematurely from coal in the last two decades.”

Scientists know that coal pollution is linked to asthma and respiratory illnesses, heart attacks, cancer and premature death, but the Trump EPA is still poised to roll back regulations known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that require power plants to limit dangerous air pollution for burning coal.

Thanks to these rules, mercury emissions from power plants dropped by more than 81 percent from 2011 through 2017, according to analysis by the Center for American Progress. The EPA estimates the regulations prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks and 130,000 asthma attacks each year.

Technology for removing from smokestacks the mercury and particulate matter that lodges in human lungs and leads to asthma and premature death has existed for years, but some utilities complain that installing and operating these “scrubbers” is too expensive. Last year, 23 GOP-led states sued the EPA over the Biden administration’s air standards, and last week Zeldin announced the EPA would consider granting power plants a two-year exemption while the agency reconsiders the rules, which could lead to an immediate increase in toxic air pollution.

The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards are just one of several air pollution regulations Zelding is preparing to roll back, including rules meant to limit climate-warming methane and carbon pollution produced by the fossil fuel industry. The EPA is also reconsidering limits on hazardous air pollutants produced by the manufacturing sector, including synthetic chemical makers that have come under fire for polluting communities.

“EPA needs to pursue commonsense regulation to Power the Great American Comeback, not continue down the last administration’s path of destruction and destitution,” Zeldin said in a statement.

Cheap gas from the fracking boom has drastically reduced demand for coal, and renewable energy is quickly becoming more affordable and reliable, which explains why utility companies are retiring coal plants instead of building new ones. In fact, the U.S. is producing more oil and gas than any other nation in the world, a reality that undercuts Trump and Zeldin’s claims about the need for deregulation to spur cheap energy production.

Drupp said Trump’s “clean coal” comments are baseless but reveal that he does not care about the “health or economic well-being” of his constituents. While Trump and Zeldin claim onerous regulations are holding the U.S. back economically, EPN estimates that EPA’s air pollution regulations deliver over $250 billion in net benefits to the public annually, with savings on health care and climate spending exceeding regulatory costs by a six to one ratio.

“He is only concerned with helping out his billionaire buddies in the fossil fuel industry,” Drupp said. “In exchange for their loyalty and political dollars, he will lie to the American people and sacrifice their lives.”

Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta worked at the EPA for 40 years and recently retired from running the agency’s Office of Research and Development, the scientific arm that is reportedly losing 75 percent of its staff under Trump, Elon Musk and Zeldin. Orme-Zavaleta said she served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, and like all federal agency employees, EPA scientists are civil servants who expect shifts in policies when a new administration takes over.

“They say EPA is a job killer that strains the economy, but nothing could be furthest from the truth,” Orme-Zavaleta said in an interview. “If anything, EPA has brought innovations to industry and developed a lot of jobs in sectors such as air treatment and water treatment and waste management.”

Republicans have a long record of attempting to downsize the EPA and shift its priorities toward cleaning up after polluters rather than enforcing the law against them. In a recent op-ed, Zeldin wrote vaguely about “collaboration” with polluting industries rather than “regulation” for safeguarding human health and the environment.

But Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta said the second Trump administration’s gutting of the EPA is extreme, unprecedented and posed to cause long-term damage to an agency that has made the U.S. a visibly cleaner, healthier place to live since its creation in the 1970s. The difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 at the EPA is the “attacks on its people,” Orme-Zavaleta said.

“Russell Vought really called out the goal of terrorizing EPA employees in particular, and making life so miserable for them they wouldn’t like to get up and go to work in the morning, and they are really playing out that card,” Orme-Zavaleta said, referring to a now-infamous comment in which Trump’s staffing director said he wanted career workers to be “traumatized.” “It’s really hard to understand why, because these are the people who make the EPA work, any government agency work.”

Despair and dysfunction are the point, Orme-Zavaleta said, and it’s the wrong message to send to students studying to be the next generation of environmental scientists. By canceling the EPA’s ability to conduct its own science to inform regulations, Zeldin is making more room for the claims made by polluting industries during the rule-making process.

Completed in 2023, the EPA’s landmark Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases study is a prime example. Working with the National Academy of Sciences, EPA researchers produced a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of burning fossil fuels that produce climate-warming pollution. The study examines energy spending alongside the realities of a warming planet, including increased spending on health care and recovery from extreme storms and floods. The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America applauded when Zeldin announced the study was among the policies and documents to be revised or revoked.

“By limiting the science that can be considered by the agency — especially science the agency can generate to directly to inform a regulation — and focusing on that limited subset of science, there is a potential for increasing people’s risk of exposure to pollutants and rolling back the decades of worth of progress we have made in cleaning up our environment,” Orme-Zavaleta said.