Climate Action
From Politics to Pollution: Administrator Lee Zeldin’s Path to Leading the Environmental Protection Agency
August 8, 2025
On July 29th, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s 17th administrator Lee Zeldin proposed removing the agency’s power to regulate fossil fuels.
Zeldin proposes rescinding the Endangerment Finding – the E.P.A’s 2009 scientific determination that greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, pose a threat to public health. It gives the E.P.A legal authority (under the Clean Air Act) to regulate emissions from vehicles, power plants, and other sources contributing to climate change. Repealing it would remove the foundation for most federal climate regulations, allowing increased greenhouse gas pollution with severe consequences for public health. Administrator Zeldin seems delighted by this reckless move and appears motivated by his politics not about his duty to protect the public.
We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate‑change religion.
Administrator LEe Zeldin, Newsweek
Administrator Zeldin’s actions would remove dozens of protections against air and water pollution – including losing limits on soot from smokestacks and pushing restrictions on emissions of mercury back to levels allowed over ten years ago. Mercury is ranked as one of the most hazardous substances on the planet and has no beneficial function in the human body.
Lee Zeldin is effectively the one leading the charge to undermine ‘his’ own Agency making him the perfect person to lead what should be called the Environmental Pollution Agency.
Qualified or Not?
Lee Zeldin holds a bachelor’s degree in political science as well as a juris doctorate. Neither of these degrees are scientific or environmental in their scope. While holding science degrees is not universal or a prerequisite for the role in recent years it has become more customary. Of the six most recent administrators, five of them — Michael Regan, Andrew Wheeler, Gina McCarthy, Lisa P. Jackson, and Stephen L. Johnson, dating back to the Bush era — all had some scientific qualifications. Only Scott Pruitt, a 2017 President Trump pick, had no science background.
So, how did Zeldin end up at the E.P.A? Here’s his trajectory: he served in the U.S military for over two decades, which we honor. He was elected to the New York State Senate in 2010, serving in the 3rd Senate District, before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014, where he served till 2023.
While the EPA’s website emphasizes his ‘contributions’ to environmental legislation, made as a Congressman, a closer look at his policies reveals a worrying trend: As a Long Island congressman, Lee Zeldin voted repeatedly to weaken the Clean Air Act, and he has supported fracking,
Thanks to the rising sea levels, brought on by climate change, areas of the Long Island South Shore flood at least monthly with the tides. This issue prompted the creation of the Fire Island Inlet to Montauk Point Project, federally funded by U.S taxpayers to the tune of 2.4 billion dollars. Which Zeldin supported. Perhaps that is because in this specific case the consequences of climate change were literally impossible to ignore?
In fact of the 94 pieces of legislation he sponsored throughout his time in office, only 7 were under the category of “public lands and natural resources.” It seems that his work to dismantle and establish clean air and clean water protections is just more of the same – his March 12th, announcement of the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history” is not surprising. Nor is it triggering, it’s just what he does.
Zeldin’s Not Alone In Undermining the Work of the EPA
We know Administrator Zeldin has ardent supporters across industry for his actions, he also has an army of non-industry supporters too.
For example, Mandy Gunasekara, a former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A), in the first Trump Administration. Gunasekara is not a climate change scientist but she helped to write the environmental section of the conservative policy agenda known as Project 2025. Her chapter appears to be the unofficial playbook outlining how the E.P.A should roll back the ‘Endangerment Finding’.
Which seems very much at odds with this sentiment from her from 2019.
American citizens are breathing the cleanest air on record and enjoy access to the cleanest drinking water in the world. Under President Trump’s direction, the Environmental Protection Agency has been busy strengthening the clean air and clean water programs behind our nation’s proven, environmental success.
Mandy Gunasekara, December 4th, 2019, from her Opinion article in the The Daily Caller
Ms Gunasekara is acknowledging how the E.P.A has kept our air and water clean. But how can our water and air stay clean if the Endangerment Finding is rescinded?
Her thinking, and Zeldin’s, is very much at odds with US voters: 76% of Trump voters and 86% of all voters oppose weakening the E.P.A, 72% of Trump voters and 80% of all voters support increasing federal funding to communities harmed by air and water pollution. Over 90% of Americans across party lines support strong clean water protection.
Another potential Zeldin ally is John Christy. He is a Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. He was awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991, after his team developed a global temperature data set. Yet, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus, 99% of actively published climate scientists agree that human activities are causing climate change, Professor Christy claims fossil fuels are more helpful than harmful.
In 2019, he was appointed to key EPA science advisory boards under the first Trump administration, and in 2025 the U.S. The Department of Energy funded and released a 150-page report co-authored by Professor.Christy, called “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” It claims human-caused climate change “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and states that mitigating against climate change might be more harmful than beneficial.
Internationally recognized climate scientists have described this report as “deceptive,” “cherry-picked,” and “antiscientific.”
What motivates Prof Christy to be a contrarian? While not funded by the fossil fuel industry, his stance aligns with libertarian, and anti-regulatory values, and he frames his motivation as a desire for scientific independence and skepticism of consensus. It is as if he is invoking historical analogies like Galileo versus the establishment.
We fully anticipate that Prof. Christy’s deceptive/cherry-picked/antiscientific report will be presented as credible evidence by Lee Zeldin, to the Supreme Court, when the battle to protect the Endangerment Finding reaches it.
We The People – Demand Clean Air and Clean Water
In 1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets on the very first Earth Day. They demanded these three things: clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and a healthy future for their families. Out of that movement Republican President Richard Nixon was inspired to create the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A) to deliver on the public’s vision – clean air and clean water for us all.
The Clean Air Act is the most powerful public health law enacted in the twentieth century in the United States.
Paul Billings, a SVP at the American Lung Association, told National Geographic, 2020
Now, over 50 years later, the E.P.A is under attack. But we are not helpless. At EARTHDAY.ORG we don’t believe that ‘belief’ systems should determine the quality of the air we breathe or the water we drink. Only strong government regulation can. Your family’s health is on the line and we urge you to join the thousands of other citizens who have made their feelings known by speaking up.
If you are in the U.S., use your voice; add your name to our public comments on the EPA’s intentions to gut the agency’s ability to regulate pollution due to climate change.
The time to act is now. Do it for your children’s health. For all of our children’s health. Nobody, no matter how rich or how powerful lives in a bubble. We all breathe the same air- in the end. Even if Lee Zeldin seems to have forgotten.
