President-elect Donald Trump has big plans for the EPA, including a radical reordering of the agency’s workforce and “swift deregulatory decisions.”
But his efforts to disrupt the 50-year-old institution could hamper his vision of slashing environmental rules — or at least make his moves harder to defend in court, according to some experts.
To lead the agency, Trump has tapped former New York congressman and gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, a Republican who has little regulatory experience. He has also given two businessmen — Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — a wide-ranging mandate to slash the number of federal employees and jettison regulations. But neither has worked in government.
“There’s a reason that most administrators have a substantial background in high executive branch or state-level executive branch positions, or both,” said Jason Schwartz, a former senior adviser in the White House regulatory office under President Joe Biden. “It’s because EPA is a complex agency to run.”
EPA has a staff of more than 17,000 people — including scientists, lawyers, economists and grant managers — who craft nuanced environmental rules that must stand up to a barrage of legal challenges.
The “deregulatory decisions” that Trump has tasked Zeldin to do likely include scrapping climate standards for power plants, the oil industry and for cars. The process is governed by the strictures of the Administrative Procedures Act and, in the case of EPA’s climate rules, the Clean Air Act.
“If you’re rolling back a regulation, you need to explain why,” said Schwartz, who now serves as legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. “You need to explain why you’re changing position from what the agency just said on its review of all the scientific and economic evidence a couple years before.”
Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate and pharmaceuticals entrepreneur who was named by Trump to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency with Musk, argued that the federal government is awash with rules that the executive branch never had the authority to write. They were made invalid, he asserted, by the Supreme Court’s June ruling that upended the decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, a legal principle that gave federal agencies deference on issues in their areas of expertise, such as environmental regulation.
But the same decision may lead to the courts being less patient with administrations that take shortcuts or ignore statutory requirements in order to achieve a politically desired result when drafting rules.
“If you rush it, if you skip steps, the courts call you out on it,” said Schwartz.
The Trump administration’s first-term track record of defending its regulatory actions in court was not strong. An analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University shows that courts sided with the Trump administration in 31.2 percent of challenges to major rules, down from 55.9 percent in former President Barack Obama’s second term.
The EPA under Trump was led by Scott Pruitt, a former state attorney general whose only regulatory experience came from fighting federal rules in court, followed by Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the energy industry.
Michael Gerrard, faculty director at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said Trump may assume that judges he appointed would be more willing to uphold his administration’s rulemakings. But that might not pan out, he said.
“Not all of his appointees are like Aileen Cannon,” said Gerrard, referring to the federal judge and Trump appointee who threw out a criminal case in July that was brought against the former president over his possession of classified documents.
Energy industry advocates said the role of the EPA administrator is to provide leadership, not to be subject matter experts. That usually falls to officials lower on the org chart.
“Most of the hard work that needs to happen in any administration happens kind of at the program level,” said Michael Nasi, a utilities lawyer with Jackson Walker LLP.
Still, Zeldin’s dearth of environmental policy experience is unusual for an EPA leader, though not unprecedented. All five EPA administrators who served under recent Democratic presidents — Douglas Costle, Carol Browner, Lisa Jackson, Gina McCarthy and Michael Regan — led state environmental agencies first. Many also staffed relevant congressional committees or held other state government positions.
EPA was established under Republican President Richard Nixon, and many of its GOP administrators were pioneers of environmental regulation.
Bill Ruckelshaus — the agency’s first administrator under Nixon who returned under President Ronald Reagan — helped write Indiana’s first air pollution law.
Nixon’s second administrator, Russell Train, founded an international wildlife conservation charity, served as secretary of the Interior and led the newly formed White House Council on Environmental Quality before landing at EPA.
Bill Reilly, the agency’s chief under President George H.W. Bush, was an urban planner who served under Train at CEQ and then as president of the World Wildlife Fund, which Train founded after leaving EPA.
Christine Todd Whitman — who served under President George W. Bush — was president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and a former governor. Stephen Johnson, Bush’s last administrator, spent decades at EPA as a career scientist.
Other Republican administrators had less environmental experience when they joined the agency, including state lawmaker Anne Gorsuch, businessman Lee Thomas and Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt.
Alumni of the first Trump administration praised the former president’s choice of Zeldin, a personal ally.
“The selections for the Cabinet, including at EPA, demonstrate that loyalty to the president is a top priority,” said Matt Leopold, an assistant EPA administrator in the first term. “And I believe that Zeldin will carry out the president’s agenda and will surround himself with great, capable people to accomplish those tasks.”
Shrinking the bureaucracy is a primary goal of Trump’s second term — and EPA career officials are a particular target. The Trump transition team is reportedly considering moving the agency’s headquarters out of Washington, a move that many see as a gambit to force career officials out of the agency.
Gerrard of Columbia University said some people might quit, as many did when the Trump administration relocated the Bureau of Land Management away from Washington in the first term.
But that might not help the Trump administration achieve its policy objectives, he said.
“You need competent people,” Gerrard said. “Musk went around Twitter with a meat cleaver. He just fired lots of people. But meat cleavers take away a lot of bone as well as fat.”
Doing the same to the federal workforce, Gerrard said, could invite litigation.
