The EPA Has Suffered Decades of Attacks — But Trump’s Are the Worst Yet

Just over two weeks into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, his intentions are clear: to weaken and destroy the federal government. He has already unconstitutionally usurped congressional power and given Elon Musk’s unelected team complete access to the Treasury’s payment system, while taking a hatchet to longstanding, life-saving federal institutions. We are witnessing a blatant attempt to burn our governmental structure to the ground, destroy any semblance of checks and balances, and allow billionaires and their corporations free rein without consequences.

What does this mean for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has protected the environment and human health for nearly 55 years, including by regulating air pollution, banning dangerous chemicals like DDT and working to reduce carbon emissions? Trump is revealing the fragility of our government: Progress often takes years of pressure, compromise and monumental amounts of work — consider the recent limits on the dumping of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) known as “forever chemicals” submitted by the Biden administration last fall, or the agonizing process of passing the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Now, Trump and his right-wing allies are attempting to destroy both with a snap of his fingers.

Speaking days into the Trump presidency — before some of the most horrifying orders came down — Matthew Tejada, senior vice president of environmental health at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told Truthout that concerns about the future of the EPA can be broken down into three buckets: The White House may seek to roll back or revoke hard-earned environmental regulations and protections, withhold funds that the EPA is charged with disbursing for energy and environmental projects, and weaken the agency by attacking federal employees and the institution itself.

We are already seeing Trump attempt all three avenues of EPA sabotage predicted by Tejada, who previously worked within the EPA’s Office for Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. Within his first weeks in office, Trump withdrew Biden’s forever chemical reform plan, sought to keep lead in Americans’ drinking water and froze already allocated Inflation Reduction Act funds. Trump has also appointed chemical and oil industry insiders to the agency, fired every scientist on two of the EPA’s most influential science advisory panels and seems poised to attempt mass firings of EPA staff.

Rollbacks to Existing Protections

Environmental organizations like NRDC have been preparing for legal fights over rollbacks of EPA rules and protections. On January 22, the Trump administration announced the EPA was withdrawing Biden’s proposed regulations on PFAS. The regulations, which set limits on the amount that chemical plants can dump into the water supply, had been heavily pushed for and celebrated by advocates.

Trace amounts of forever chemicals, which are strongly linked to cancer, can be found in virtually every human’s blood. “It is in every single one of us, across the entire planet,” Tejada told Truthout. “It is ubiquitous. It is scary. We only know the literal tip of the iceberg of how dangerous this stuff is in our bodies, and all of us have it.” PFAS were used for decades in the production of nonstick coatings, waterproof clothing and fabrics and cardboard food packaging. Although some PFAS are banned in some states, others are still in use, and chemical plants continue to dump the dangerous chemicals into the water supply.

“If they take down those regulations we have on the books now, they’re consigning another generation to be exposed to these forever chemicals, without even beginning the process of getting them out of our environment,” said Tejada.

Trump is also threatening long awaited improvements to the Lead and Copper Rule. In October 2024, after decades of pressure and lawsuits from advocates, Biden’s EPA unveiled rules that aim to replace all lead drinking water pipes within the next 10 years. Now, Trump and congressional Republicans are attempting to repeal these regulations and ban the EPA from ever mandating lead pipe replacement in the future. As an NRDC adviser told The Guardian, Trump is “saying let them drink lead.”

“Nobody in this country really wants to continue to live with lead,” said Tejada. “Stepping back from it now would consign literally tens, if not hundreds of millions of people that are alive today, and are yet to even be born, to growing up in an environment where they are exposed to lead every time they take a sip out of their faucet.”

Within his first weeks in office, Trump withdrew Biden’s forever chemical reform plan, sought to keep lead in Americans’ drinking water and froze already allocated Inflation Reduction Act funds.

Advocates also fear that Trump will seek to overturn the endangerment finding, a federal ruling that empowers the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. On his first day in office, he ordered the EPA to make a recommendation within 30 days on the “legality and continued applicability” of the finding. What’s more, Project 2025 also recommends eliminating the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, instead turning enforcement duties over to the states. “If you take away enforcement, then the rest of the system just kind of doesn’t matter,” said Tejada. “The rules you pass, the permits that polluters have to receive … that all falls apart if industry knows that nobody’s going to come knocking to make sure that they’re playing by the law.”

He also noted that traditional methods of fighting in the courts don’t always work the same way against someone like Trump, who has no regard for following the rules.

“Even though we will challenge them in court, as will other folks … this administration has been so emboldened, they will go out there and make those claims, and it effectively freezes stuff in place,” Tejada explained. When Trump inevitably freezes or eliminates protective regulations, a federal judge can issue an injunction, instructing agencies to resume their work until the legality is sorted out. But the Trump administration has shown that it may ignore such orders, pressuring agencies to obey, even in the face of a conflicting judge order.

The massive mandate of protecting the environment already keeps the EPA stretched to capacity, even under the best of conditions. “We’re barely holding this thing together: Making our society work; keeping our economy going; offering a modicum of protection for people so they aren’t scared every time they take a sip of something, or a bite of something, or lay their head down on a pillow,” he said. “And we have a supreme agent of chaos now in the White House who understands that, and understands his ability to completely upset those systems to his own advantage.”

Slashing Funds

Each year, the EPA awards more than $4 billion in grants, technical assistance, and other assistance to governments, nonprofits, and other entities.

Among dozens of other executive orders, on January 20, Trump froze spending that was already authorized and approved by Congress through the Inflation Reduction Act. On January 27, his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) followed up with a wildly unconstitutional freeze on all federal financial assistance, grants and loans. The vague and poorly written memo, which asserts that federal spending should not be used to “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering,” appears to apply to scheduled payments for disaster relief, hospital funding, school lunch programs and other food assistance, cancer research, and infrastructure and transit funding. The following day, shortly before the OMB order was set to go into effect, Medicaid payment portals were already down in some states.

Minutes before the scheduled start to the freeze, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan temporarily blocked it, ordering federal payments to continue until the legality of the freeze could be worked out in the courts. Days later, in a second lawsuit, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. issued another temporary block. In a transparent attempt to dismiss the lawsuits, the administration rescinded its memo, but not necessarily the spending freeze, throwing everything into further confusion. On February 3, Judge AliKhan followed up with a restraining order, instructing OBM to order departments to release all frozen funds. Legal experts agree that the president has no power to indefinitely pause federal spending, as the “power of the purse” constitutionally belongs to Congress.

Meanwhile, Inflation Reduction Act funding remains frozen: pausing projects, creating widespread confusion, and leaving invoices for already approved and completed work unpaid.

“Right now is when the [Inflation Reduction Act] money is finally starting to hit the ground,” Tejada said. “It’s finally rolling out of the government, touching down in people’s communities — buying solar panels, putting people to work, building resilience centers. So all of that, right now, is in jeopardy, just as it was about to get started.”

He added: “Hundreds of thousands of individuals across this country, at every level of our society, have put in so much time and energy and effort to make the best use of these resources, to put them to work in the ways that Congress intended. And for all that to potentially now be snatched away, just as the … meaningful part of the work is actually getting started, would be a tragedy on top of a tragedy.”

Attacking EPA Staff

Trump is also waging attacks on employees across the federal government. On his first day in office, he effectively reinstated his own October 2020 “Schedule F” order, which had initiated the process of stripping employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants in “policy-related” positions, making it easier to fire and replace them. President Joe Biden not only rescinded Trump’s 2020 order, but also used the official rule-making process to establish safeguards making it more difficult for Trump to bring it back. But in another power grab, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management claims he does not need to follow official steps to unwind Biden’s protections, and can do so with a simple executive order.

Trump and congressional Republicans are attempting to ban the EPA from ever mandating lead pipe replacement in the future.

Trump’s new EPA head, Lee Zeldin, voted against the environment 86 percent of the time during his tenure in the House of Representatives, according to the League of Conservation Voters. A group of utilities has already written to Zeldin, asking him to roll back Biden-era regulations on coal ash and greenhouse gas emissions. Trump also appointed a host of industry insiders to the agency, including Nancy Beck, a former chemical industry lobbyist, and Lynn Dekleva, who worked for 30 years at DuPont, a long-time producer and dumper of forever chemicals.

Meanwhile, Trump also fired every scientist on two important EPA science advisory panels, demoted many other EPA experts, and in a further effort to demoralize staff and encourage resignations, ordered all federal employees to return to the office full time instead of working remotely. In late January, more than 1,100 EPA employees — most of whom had been at the agency for less than a year or who had recently moved into new positions — received emails notifying them that they are on “a probationary/trial period,” and that “the agency has the right to immediately terminate you.”

“It’s bad,” Marie Owens-Powell, president of a union that represents thousands of EPA workers, told CBS, referring to agency morale. “I’ve been with the agency for over 33 years and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

This is exactly what Trump and his allies want. Trump’s nominee to run the OMB, Russell Vought, was one of the main architects of Project 2025 and the Schedule F order, and is a major proponent of Trump’s current unconstitutional attempts to withhold funds authorized by Congress. In a 2024 speech, he outlined exactly what is happening now:

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.

Tejada warned that Project 2025 proposals like reinstating Schedule F and moving whole agency campuses across the country “will effectively shut down huge parts of our government, not just for days or weeks, but for years. And we’ve seen over and over again from past government shutdowns how unpopular that is with the American public. People are failing to connect the dots that what this administration is threatening to do is not a shutdown of our government for a few days, but literally for years.”

The EPA’s History as a “Punching Bag”

The EPA has been under assault before. But in many ways, the threats it faces today are unprecedented.

“EPA has been a punching bag since it was first created,” Tejada told Truthout. The agency was established in 1970 under President Richard Nixon, at a moment when the dangers of pollution were becoming impossible to ignore, from oil spills, to lifeless lakes, to deadly smog and chemical odors permeating cities, to the Cuyahoga River literally catching fire. In 1969, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which required federal agencies to assess the environmental impact before beginning major projects, and directed the president to assemble the Council on Environmental Quality. The following year, sensing a growing environmental consciousness, Nixon created the EPA.

The EPA faced its first major challenge from Nixon himself. After Congress overrode his presidential veto on the Clean Water Act of 1972, he refused to release half of the funding mandated by Congress in the legislation. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled he had no power to withhold the funds. Congress further limited the president’s power to withhold spending in the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — the very law that Trump and his allies are now trying to steamroll with his federal spending freeze.

A decade later, in 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned on deregulation, arguing that the health effects of pollution were overblown. Although environmental deregulation was unpopular with the public, Reagan rejected a moderate policy plan created by Republican environmentalists, instead adopting recommendations from the relatively new right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation.

Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch — Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mother — to head the agency. According to a 2018 paper in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH): “Gorsuch demoralized, marginalized, and reorganized EPA staff. In her inaugural speech … Gorsuch told employees, ‘We’re going to do more with less and we’re going to do it with fewer of you.’” Higher-ups developed hit lists of career staff they wanted gone, and EPA staffing levels dropped 21 percent over two years. Gorsuch also disbanded the EPA’s Office of Enforcement, causing civil enforcement cases to plummet.

Career staff at the EPA fought back. Hundreds of former employees calling themselves “Save EPA” leaked documents to Congress, prompting an investigation into Gorsuch’s handing of the Superfund program, which is dedicated to cleaning up highly contaminated sites. When Gorsuch refused to turn over subpoenaed documents, 55 House Republicans joined with Democrats to hold her in contempt of Congress. Amid the growing controversy, the White House forced Gorsuch to resign, reinstating Nixon’s original EPA head, William D. Ruckelshaus, for the remaining two years of the term.

In the following years, the EPA was generally supported by presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, although Republicans gained control of Congress under Clinton in 1994 and managed to shrink its budget. According to the AJPH article, as fossil fuel-funded conservative think tanks and media outlets grew in influence, “Many EPA employees remember 1994 as a watershed after which environmental policy and science became more politicized.”

This politicized atmosphere continued under George W. Bush, whose administration prohibited EPA employees from mentioning climate change. The AJPH article outlines how Bush’s attacks on the EPA were less confrontational than Nixon’s, “relying on delaying decisions and undermining science rather than on cutting budgets.”

Writing in 2018, one year into Trump’s first term, the paper’s authors analyzed the ways in which Trump’s assault on the EPA differed from Reagan’s and Bush’s. Their analysis holds truer than ever in 2025: “The Republican Party has shifted to the right and now controls the executive branch and both chambers of Congress (unlike in the early Reagan administration). Wealthy donors, think tanks, and fossil fuel and chemical industries have become more influential in fighting regulation. In the broader public, political polarization has increased, the environment has become a partisan issue, and science and the mainstream media are distrusted.”

Over the years, Tejada said the EPA has come to hold a key role in everyday life. “Not that everything has been perfect.… But if you look at the environment that we lived in in 1970, versus today, EPA has been wildly successful at cleaning up the environment in our country.”

“I think a lot of people don’t understand that its ability to have been as successful as it has been, has largely been due to the steady leadership and commitment of the institution and the people who inhabit it,” he continued. “And those people are now under threat in a way that they have never been. If they actually make moves to really gut the staff, to eliminate institutional memory and knowledge? A next president can’t just fix that. You’re talking about generations of value that can pretty quickly be extinguished, and that will take generations to rebuild.”