‘Most Momentous Day’ in EPA History? Spare Me.

One of the signature moments in contemporary American environmentalism occurred on October 6, 1967, in Suffolk County, New York, when nine scientists and a lawyer formally launched the Environmental Defense Fund. Now a $314-million-a-year global organization with 750 employees, EDF went on to influence pivotal environmental achievements, among them the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and then helping the agency ban DDT and close the ozone hole.

In January, Suffolk County bobbed to the surface of environmentalism again, and not because of the county’s state-of-the-art nutrient discharge program that protects Long Island Sound and its booming regional economy from toxic algae blooms. Instead, it was President Trump’s nomination of Lee Zeldin, a lifelong Suffolk County resident and former four-term Republican congressman, to be the EPA administrator. Apparently Zeldin takes no pride in his home county’s role in making America cleaner, greener, and safer. This month, in a series of despicable announcements, the EPA’s newest senior leader set out to end the federal government’s essential role in conserving natural resources and scrubbing poisons from air and water.

On March 12, Zeldin appeared on YouTube to describe a plan to trim, curtail, or eliminate 31 regulations that previous administrations had deemed essential to ecological safety and human health. They included measures that have kept mercury out of rivers and lakes, prevented smog, and blocked drilling fluids from oil and gas wells from leaking into groundwater.

In the disorienting, vainglorious, pathetic comedy theater that has overtaken Washington, the agency’s communications staff defined Zeldin’s deregulatory actions as “the most momentous day in the history of the EPA.” Zeldin himself explained that his actions would “fulfil” President Trump’s economic agenda. Days later Zeldin announced the administration’s intent to slash EPA’s budget by 65 percent and eliminate the agency’s peerless scientific research office.

Make no mistake. The administration’s work to strip the EPA of its expertise and authority is dangerous in almost every conceivable way. It will allow more toxins in air and water, more damage to land from industrial operations, and more hazards for people, plants, and animals.

Nor will all the changes planned by Zeldin and his bosses in the White House lead to the economic gains the administration promises. Just the opposite. Dirtier communities, degraded air and water, more exposures to hazardous compounds will grievously injure the economic advantage America has gained from its cleaner environment.

Here’s why. Though it’s rarely recognized, the legal and regulatory environmental protection infrastructure constructed by presidents and Congress since 1970, and administered by the EPA, is not just meant to safeguard lives and resources. It also serves as a powerful economic development strategy promoting industry, as well as tourism, recreation, and quality of life attractions.  

The statutes that form the foundation of the program, like the 1972 Clean Water Act, don’t seek to close polluting plants. Instead they set limits on discharges to rivers that have encouraged plant operators to modernize and become more efficient. The 1970 Clean Air Act led to restrictions on lead, particulates, and nitrogen from tailpipes that cleared the air of smog and led to much better vehicles. Laws to protect wetlands and endangered species forced better mining and drilling practices while conserving forests and wild landscapes, ponds and lakeshores. Laws to prevent toxic chemical pollution led to safe disposal of millions of leaking barrels of waste.

In the last half-century, arguably no other government-led initiative has been as measurably effective in improving the lives of Americans, restoring the condition of the country, and simultaneously growing the economy as the laws and regulations administered by the EPA. The agency supervised a profound era of land and water conservation and pollution prevention that made the country more beautiful, safer, and economically wealthier.

The greenest regions of every state are typically among the most prosperous. In 1970, at the start of the EPA, America’s gross domestic product was $1.1 trillion, or $9 trillion in current dollars. Today the GDP is $30.3 trillion, more than three times larger.

There is no basis in fact to argue that environmental regulation is a drag on economic well-being. On that point (and so many others), the president and his aides are just flat-out wrong. What’s more, powerful models operating around the world — especially in China and India — vividly portray what happens to modern economies that don’t fully embrace the responsibility of caring for their ecological assets.

I know. I’ve spent months reporting from both. These two countries, both seeking to emulate the industrial development strategy of the United States without the regulatory safeguards, are an ecological mess. You can see the air and smell the rancid water in the big cities. The countrysides of both nations are scarred by mammoth and unregulated mines, contaminated fields, and wetlands buried in sediment. It looks and smells a lot like the dirty air and polluted water filled with floating dead fish, the toxic chemical dumps, and the sediment-clogged streams that existed when I was growing up in New York before the EPA was formed.

Legal authorities at EDF and other important national environmental groups assert that a portion of Zeldin’s program to dismantle the EPA will be difficult to achieve. It takes years to propose, write, and put a regulation into effect. There are many levels of public scrutiny, and negotiations between industry and government. Often regulations come under judicial review.

The same process occurs in reverse for changing or eliminating a regulation. So dismantling or adjusting 31 regulations is a tall order.

That said, the direct message from Zeldin is that the EPA is less inclined to enforce the law, and he is far less interested than his predecessors in protecting the environment and public health. Even during the years when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were doing what they could to weaken the EPA, no administration until now has expressed such disdain for environmental values and national responsibilities for keeping our country clean and effectively managing our natural domain.

I share equal measures of amazement and disgust. I had just turned 14 on April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day. It was such a big deal that the schools closed in my home town of White Plains, New York. I organized a group of friends to join me in dragging tires and appliances out of the dismally polluted Bronx River.

Since that day, I’ve put environmentalism as one of the guiding principles of my life as a journalist, as an advocate, and as an American. I’ve seen how acid mine drainage from Appalachian coal strip mines was substantially reduced by the 1977 Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act. I’ve reported on how environmental law and EPA expertise drove the Energy Department to spend tens of billions of dollars cleaning up radioactive and chemical contamination at its nuclear weapons sites. I reported in 1990 on the modernization of the Clean Air Act, which controlled sulfur emissions from coal-fired plants that ended acid rain. The same law strictly regulated emissions of mercury that made freshwater fish in the Great Lakes region safe to eat again.

I’ve also seen how environmental regulations missed the mark and needed adjustment. The 1980 Superfund Law initially required toxic chemical sites to be cleaned up to “pristine” levels. The rules required cleanup companies to excavate, transport, and detoxify thousands of tons of soil. Cities couldn’t redevelop their old industrial sites because cleanups could cost $20 million an acre. Pushed by Cincinnati and other urban areas, the EPA revised the cleanup standards, reduced the cost of developing old industrial sites, and provided a new path for American cities to rebuild in this century.

There’s a regulatory elegance to adjusting environmental statutes to meet new conditions. Lee Zeldin’s approach is inelegant and dangerous in every way. It’s a dismemberment of an agency that has improved the well-being of every American for 55 years. The sad and perilous fact in 2025 is that the EPA now needs protection from its own administrator, one who is hellbent on its demise and prepared to wreck the environment and economy, even of his own home county.

— Keith Schneider