The Environmental Protection Agency has one job: to protect public health and the environment. A sweeping new investigation by Elizabeth Kolbert, published in The New Yorker and discussed at length on NPR’s Fresh Air, documents how EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is not just failing to do that job. He is actively remaking the agency to serve the interests of polluters.
The investigation should alarm anyone in the Southeast who breathes the air, drinks the water, cares for our precious places in the natural world, or has watched insurance premiums climb as climate-fueled disasters grow more frequent and destructive. What’s happening at the EPA right now will shape our region’s health, economy, and environment for decades to come.
Retaliation Against the Agency’s Own Staff
Last summer, more than 150 EPA employees sent a letter to Zeldin raising concerns about partisanship, the gutting of the agency’s scientific capacity, and his pattern of siding with industry over public health. The agency’s own lawyers concluded the letter was protected speech, with employees simply exercising their First Amendment rights.
Zeldin’s response was to put 144 of the signatories on administrative leave. Many were later suspended without pay. Several were fired. His public justification was chilling: he declared that the agency has a “zero tolerance policy” for employees who undercut the administration’s agenda. As Kolbert notes, the EPA’s stated mission is not to carry out a president’s agenda. It is to protect public health and the environment. That mission still appears on the agency’s website, even as the agency’s leadership works against it.
Gutting Science, With North Carolina at Ground Zero
One of Zeldin’s most consequential and damaging actions has been eliminating the Office of Research and Development (ORD), the EPA’s independent scientific research arm. The ORD employed roughly 1,500 people in labs deliberately distributed across the country, located away from Washington to insulate scientific work from political pressure. These researchers assessed the dangers of chemicals, set cleanup targets for Superfund sites, helped states and tribes that lack their own scientific resources, and scanned the horizon for emerging environmental threats.
For the Southeast, this is deeply personal. The EPA’s Research Triangle Park campus in North Carolina was the agency’s largest research facility, employing more than 2,000 federal workers. It housed labs focused on air pollution, PFAS contamination (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) a large class of synthetic chemicals also known as “forever chemicals”, and industrial emissions, all issues directly affecting North Carolinians, including the more than 3.5 million residents whose drinking water has been impacted by PFAS. When word leaked that the ORD would be dissolved, workers at the RTP campus described feeling “panicked, disappointed, frustrated, and scared,” according to WUNC. Chris Frey, who led the ORD from 2022 to 2024, warned that eliminating the office would “cut off the supply of scientific information needed to inform decisions at the agency.”
As Kolbert explained on Fresh Air, the ORD’s analyses often revealed that chemicals were dangerous at very low levels, findings with major implications for industry. The office maintained the Integrated Risk Information System, a database that was, in Kolbert’s words, particularly despised by industry. All of that is now gone. What replaced the ORD is a much smaller office housed within EPA headquarters, raising serious questions about whether science produced there can be independent of political direction.
The broader staffing damage is staggering. Since Zeldin took over, the EPA’s overall workforce has been cut by 25 percent. Seven hundred employees with doctoral degrees are gone. As William K. Reilly, who ran the EPA under President George H.W. Bush, told Kolbert, the strategy was to move fast and break things. By the time the courts catch up, the scientists, the lawyers, and the engineers will have moved on. They will no longer be recoverable.
It is worth noting that the most recent former EPA administrator before Zeldin, Michael Regan, is himself a North Carolinian. A Goldsboro native and NC A&T graduate, Regan served as Secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality before leading the EPA under President Biden. At NC DEQ, Regan secured the largest coal ash cleanup in U.S. history and led the fight against PFAS contamination of the Cape Fear River. On Fresh Air, Kolbert quoted Regan cautioning that many of Zeldin’s rollbacks may not survive the courts. But the institutional damage, the loss of people and expertise, is harder to reverse.
Revoking the Endangerment Finding: The Biggest Climate Rollback
Kolbert identifies the rescission of the Endangerment Finding as the most significant climate action taken by the Zeldin-led EPA, and SACE has been sounding the alarm about this for months.
The finding traces back to the 2007 Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the Court ruled that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and that the EPA has both the authority and the obligation to determine whether they endanger public health. In 2009, after an extensive scientific review, the EPA made that determination: yes, greenhouse gas emissions endanger the welfare of current and future generations. That finding became the legal foundation for every federal climate regulation that followed, including vehicle emission standards, power plant rules, and oil and gas industry regulations.
Every EPA administrator since 2009, including Scott Pruitt in Trump’s first term, has accepted the Endangerment Finding as settled. Zeldin chose to tear it up.
On February 12, 2026, the EPA finalized the rescission, eliminating the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Zeldin himself called it the largest deregulatory action in American history. On a conservative podcast called Ruthless, he described it as driving a dagger through the heart of what he called “the climate change religion.” This is a remarkable statement from someone who, as a congressman, once joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and acknowledged that rising sea levels were threatening his own Long Island district.
As SACE noted in our formal comments opposing the rescission, the science has only gotten stronger since 2009. Atmospheric CO₂ has surged from 387 parts per million when the finding was issued to over 430 ppm today, the highest concentration in over two million years according to NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Met Office forecasts the May 2026 seasonal peak will reach approximately 432 ppm. Every one of the last 13 years has been hotter than when the finding was issued. The nonpartisan National Academies of Sciences affirmed the original finding was accurate and is now supported by even more compelling evidence “beyond scientific dispute.” The EPA’s own final rule avoids challenging the science directly because it can’t. Instead, it relies on a strained legal argument that the Clean Air Act never authorized the EPA to address climate change, despite the Supreme Court explicitly ruling otherwise.
The stakes go far beyond today’s regulations. If this case reaches the Supreme Court, which most legal observers expect, and the Court reverses its 2007 ruling, no future administration will be able to use the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions without an act of Congress. As Kolbert put it on Fresh Air, they are really trying to handicap the agency going into the future.
The Math Doesn’t Add Up, Especially for the Southeast
Zeldin claims revoking the Endangerment Finding will save Americans $1.3 trillion, mainly through lower car prices, as the rule revocation slows down the widespread deployment of electric vehicles. But as Kolbert pointed out, the EPA’s own analysis tells a very different story when you look at the full ledger. To generate that headline savings number, the EPA used a “low oil price” assumption of $47 per barrel, justified by the claim that Trump’s “energy dominance” policies would keep gasoline cheap. The NRDC found in February of this year that this scenario artificially dropped gasoline prices by up to 73 cents a gallon, artificially puffing up the supposed financial savings to Americans by eliminating climate regulations on vehicles. Even under the more realistic baseline scenario using EIA reference oil prices of roughly $75 per barrel, the EPA’s own numbers showed a $180 billion net loss to society from the rescission, driven by higher fuel, repair, and maintenance costs.
The Iran conflict has now blown past even the more realistic scenario contemplated just a few months ago. Before the U.S.-Israel military operations began on February 28, the national average gas price was under $3.00 per gallon. As of May 2, AAA reports the national average has hit $4.43, a 50% increase in barely two months, driven by the disruption of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. To put the per-barrel numbers in stark comparison: the EPA used a $47/barrel assumption to claim savings, and its more realistic scenario assumed $75/barrel. This week, Brent crude is trading around $108 per barrel, having spiked to a wartime high of $126, with oil prices up roughly 60% since the conflict began and analysts warning of $140 or higher if the Strait remains closed. The $47-per-barrel fantasy the EPA used to justify its cost savings has been obliterated by reality. As Kolbert said on Fresh Air, as gas prices go up, the scenario in which the rescission costs consumers more becomes increasingly plausible. We are living in that scenario right now, and it is getting worse. Our dependence on fossil fuels is not just an environmental liability. It is an economic and national security vulnerability, one that clean energy produced here at home, powering our electric vehicles, would help solve.
And the EPA’s cooked books go further. The administration calculates costs to industry while refusing to calculate the benefits of lives saved and climate damages avoided. In some cases, they have literally eliminated the monetary value of lives saved from the equation, arguing it is “too uncertain.” The Regulatory Review found that the EPA simply deleted an estimated $87 billion per year in avoided climate damages, over $2 trillion cumulatively by 2055, from its analysis. Once you strip out the benefits, the numbers will always look skewed in favor of deregulation.
Here in the Southeast, the real costs of inaction are painfully visible. The number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters has skyrocketed, with the last decade accounting for nearly half of all such costs over the entire 44-year period that records have been kept. Homeowners from Florida to the Carolinas are watching insurance costs consume an ever-larger share of household budgets. Florida homeowners now pay two to three times the national average for property insurance, with premiums ranging from $3,800 to over $8,000 per year. Coastal properties in South Florida face premiums of $5,800 to $7,300 or more. Realtors in southwest Florida warn that a wave of foreclosures could be coming as people simply cannot afford to insure their homes. As one researcher put it, insurance has become the place where many Americans are feeling the economic impacts of climate change first.
And the problem is not only the cost of disasters already happening; it’s the infrastructure being built to guarantee more of them. As Kolbert explained on Fresh Air, the administration is pursuing a strategy of fossil fuel “lock-in”: building as many pipelines, power plants, and export terminals as possible, on the theory that once built, that infrastructure will operate for 30 to 50 years. This is precisely the wrong approach for a region that should be leading the clean energy transition, and as SACE has documented, the economic justification is backwards. Globally, $2 trillion went into clean energy last year, $800 billion more than fossil fuels. Solar energy, not long ago four times the cost of fossil fuels, is now 41% cheaper than the least expensive fossil fuel alternative.
A Polluters-First Agenda Across the Board
The pattern extends well beyond climate. Under Zeldin, the EPA has rolled back or weakened protections against arsenic, mercury, fine particulate matter, and ethylene oxide, a chemical used to sterilize medical equipment that the EPA’s own scientists found to be at least 30 times more dangerous than previously estimated. Many of the affected sterilization plants are located near schools and in predominantly Black and brown communities.
The agency also eliminated its Office of Environmental Justice, removed the EJScreen mapping tool that communities relied on to understand local pollution levels, and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants already awarded to community organizations and local governments. The upper ranks of the agency have been packed with former industry lobbyists, including several from the American Chemistry Council, now overseeing the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety.
Even the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has pushed back. When the EPA approved pesticides containing PFAS-adjacent compounds, a prominent MAHA activist drafted a petition calling for Zeldin’s ouster that quickly gathered thousands of signatures. Zeldin responded with what critics call “MAHA-washing,” touting minor actions as major wins. As Kolbert reported, one supposedly MAHA-friendly phthalate regulation applied only to workers, not consumers. Another touted decision to reevaluate the pesticide paraquat had actually been made under the Biden administration.
The Courts Will Have Their Say, But Time Matters
Practically every major action the EPA has taken under Zeldin is being challenged in court. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against the Endangerment Finding rescission alone, brought by 24 states and a broad coalition of environmental and public health organizations, including Earthjustice, the Clean Air Task Force, the Sierra Club, and the American Lung Association.
There is reason for cautious hope. A Brookings Institution analysis of the EPA’s deregulatory efforts during Trump’s first term found that a third of them were blocked or partially blocked by the courts. But the courts are slower than the wrecking ball, and as Kolbert emphasized, that is a deliberate strategy. By the time judges rule, the people and the expertise that made the EPA function may be gone.
The environmental consequences are measured in more than legal outcomes. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, the EPA’s recent rollbacks, combined with the repeal of clean energy tax credits in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, will send an estimated 1.5 billion extra tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere by 2030 and 12 billion extra tons by 2040. That carbon will contribute to hotter temperatures and higher sea levels for centuries. As Kolbert wrote, it is impossible at this point to say how many premature deaths Zeldin’s deregulatory campaign will lead to, but the numbers could easily run to the tens of thousands.
What You Can Do
This is a critical moment for everyone who cares about clean air, public health, and the future of the Southeast. We encourage you to:
Get informed. Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s investigation “Can the EPA Survive Lee Zeldin?” in The New Yorker, and listen to the full Fresh Air interview on NPR. For SACE’s ongoing coverage of the EPA’s actions, read our pieces on the Endangerment Finding rescission, the economic costs of EPA sabotage, and the history and mission of the EPA.
Join the Clean Energy Generation. People across the Southeast are standing up for clean energy and climate solutions in their homes and communities. Join us to connect with others, get timely policy updates, and find ways to make your voice count.
Take action. Tell your elected officials that gutting clean air protections is unacceptable. The EPA’s mission is to protect people and the environment, not to serve as a clearinghouse for polluter-friendly deregulation. Learn how to get involved with SACE.
Support the fight. Organizations across the country are challenging these rollbacks in court, and advocacy groups like SACE are working every day to hold decision-makers accountable and advance clean energy solutions across the Southeast. Your support makes this work possible.
The damage being done to the EPA right now is, as one former official told Kolbert, “generational.” But so is the resolve of the people fighting back. The science hasn’t changed. The law is on our side. And the clean energy solutions we need are already here, more affordable and available than ever. What’s missing is leadership in Washington that puts people over polluters. Until we get it, the rest of us need to keep showing up.
