A Trump ally with a limited environmental record will have the task of undoing President Joe Biden’s climate legacy.
Former President Donald Trump announced Monday that he had chosen former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) to head EPA in his second term. In doing so, Trump opted for a personal ally, fierce defender and frequent visitor to Mar-a-Lago over a policy wonk with deep knowledge of regulatory policy.
Industry advocates and conservatives applauded the choice, arguing that Zeldin — who ran a competitive race two years ago against New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul — is a seasoned political operator capable both of leading Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda and of selling it to the American public.
“I think he has all the ability and political savvy to be a great deregulator,” said Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s EPA transition team eight years ago. “I think he’s capable of mastering the technical side of it, but he also will be a great advocate in public for what they’re trying to do.”
Ebell praised Zeldin for running a “straight MAGA” race for governor in deep blue New York, where he targeted the state’s ambitious climate laws as bad for Empire State manufacturing interests. Hochul defeated him by five points.
Frank Maisano, a senior principal at lobbying firm Bracewell, also spoke approvingly of Zeldin as a fixture in “Trump World” who is “totally with the president’s agenda.”
“The EPA Administrator last time … you had somebody who wasn’t politically savvy and was an attorney general who just ramrodded his policy through and didn’t have any real political acumen in the space,” said Maisano, referring to Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt.
“The agenda, I believe, needs to be radical, and there will be a lot of opposition from the mainstream media, environmental groups, the Democrats in Congress,” said Maisano. “The job of deregulation is going to need someone who can also be a good defender and explainer of what they’re trying to do and what it will accomplish, and why it’s important and why it’s not wrecking the environment.”
The Trump EPA is expected to roll back a host of Biden-era climate regulations for power plants, oil and gas, vehicles and refrigerants. Most of those will have to be replaced with laxer standards. It’s a work plan that takes time and requires the agency to build a regulatory record that will stand up in court.
During the first Trump administration, Pruitt, then the EPA administrator, tried to undo the Obama administration’s climate and air quality rules. Many of those early rollbacks were overturned in court.
Trump’s second EPA administrator, veteran environmental lawyer Andrew Wheeler, was seen as a steadier hand and architect of more durable policies. Wheeler made it known earlier this year that he’d be open to returning to EPA if Trump won reelection.
But in choosing Zeldin, the former and future president has chosen a representative who defended him during his first impeachment trial over someone with deep experience in conservative environmental policy.
On Monday, Zeldin made it clear that his primary mission will be deregulation. In a Fox News interview shortly after he was announced as Trump’s EPA pick, Zeldin said he would side with industry over public health protections.
“There are regulations that the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that ends up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction,” he said in the Fox News interview Monday. “And President Trump, when he called me up — gosh, he was rattling off 15, 20 different priorities, clear focus. He wasn’t reading off of some sheet. It’s the top of his head.”
Zeldin started his political career in 2010, when he was first elected to the New York state senate. In Albany, he made veterans affairs a top priority as well as cutting business taxes. He was elected to a conservative House district in Long Island in 2014.
Zeldin has little background in energy or environmental regulations but has long been critical of Democrats’ climate policy.
When Zeldin served in Congress from 2015 to 2023, he served on the House Foreign Affairs and Financial Service committees. Zeldin was part of the Climate Solutions Caucus and Conservative Climate Caucus but put forth no policy that would have meaningfully cut carbon emissions. Zeldin did work with environmental groups on conservation efforts to preserve Plum Island, a 800-acre island off the coast of Long Island.
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who co-chaired the Climate Solutions Caucus, said Zeldin showed interest in environmental issues and a willingness to “work across the aisle.”
Curbelo, who was one of his party’s stronger proponents of climate action, said the former New York representative would balance the competing interests of “strong domestic energy production and a reduction of pollution.”
But environmental groups quickly attacked Zeldin’s surprise nomination.
“Naming an unqualified, anti-American worker who opposes efforts to safeguard our clean air and water lays bare Donald Trump’s intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs, and our future out to corporate polluters,” Sierra Club President Ben Jealous said in a statement. “Our lives, our livelihoods, and our collective future cannot afford Lee Zeldin — or anyone who seeks to carry out a mission antithetical to the EPA’s mission.”
In Congress, Zeldin pushed for shellfish protections in the Long Island sound and opposed Trump’s offshore drilling plan while running for his second term. He also voted against a Republican effort to prevent the Department of Defense from considering climate change in its planning.
Zeldin was little known to the public before Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, when he raised his public profile significantly by aggressively attacking Democrats as one of Trump’s top defenders in Congress. A fellow member of the New York congressional delegation, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, had a similar breakout moment during those proceedings. On Monday, Trump named Stefanik as his pick for ambassador to the United Nations.
During his unsuccessful run for New York governor in 2022, Zeldin got a larger vote share than any Republican candidate in recent years. He ran on a plan to expand fossil fuel energy, proposing to overturn the state’s ban on fracking. Zeldin said that the ban, which former Gov. Andrew Cuomo put into place in 2014 and state lawmakers made permanent in 2020, was harming rural parts of the state.
“When I talk about reversing the state’s ban on the safe extraction of natural gas and approving new pipelines, that’s a lot of jobs, that’s a lot of revenue,” Zeldin told POLITICO in 2022.
After he lost that race, Zeldin became chair of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute, an influential think tank of Trump administration veterans created after his 2020 loss. Linda McMahon, the group’s board chair, is now the co-chair of Trump’s transition team and has outsize power picking key personnel to staff the administration. AFPI has prepared dozens of executive orders for Trump’s first day in office.
AFPI officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Reporters Robin Bravender and Kevin Bogardus contributed.
