Trump chooses Lee Zeldin to run EPA as he plans to gut climate rules

President-elect Donald Trump announced Monday that he will nominate former Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a position that is expected to be central to Trump’s plans to dismantle landmark climate regulations.

Trump campaigned on pledges to “kill” and “cancel” EPA rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.

In particular, Trump wants to erase the Biden administration’s most significant climate rule, which is designed to speed a transition away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric vehicles.

A former member of Congress from Long Island who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022, Zeldin, 44, is an avid Trump supporter who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election.

“It is an honor to join President Trump’s Cabinet as EPA Administrator,” Zeldin wrote on the social platform X. “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”

In a statement, Trump said Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”

Trump added that Zeldin would “set new standards on environmental review and maintenance that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”

Perhaps more than many other federal agencies, the EPA has been a particular target for Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Joe Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.

Some people on Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the EPA headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C., according to multiple people involved in the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the transition.

Michael McKenna, who worked in the first Trump administration on energy issues, said that as two New Yorkers, Trump and Zeldin “speak the same language.” He also said Zeldin’s experience as an Army reservist would make him adept at navigating bureaucracies.

“Lee Zeldin is a great pick,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the EPA under the first Trump administration. She wrote a section on the EPA for Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for reengineering the federal government. In it, she recommends slashing the EPA’s budget, ousting career staff, eliminating scientific advisers that review the agency’s work and closing programs that focus on minority communities with heavily polluted air and water.

Others, including some close to the Trump transition team, were baffled by the choice. Zeldin has not been known for showing a particular interest in the EPA. And Trump has tended to select agency heads from regulated industries; he put Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist, in charge of the EPA during his first term.

Zeldin’s record on climate policy appears to be mixed, especially during his years representing a swath of the east end of Long Island that includes hundreds of miles of coastline and a bipartisan tradition of environmental conservation.

He was a member of the House’s Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and earned a 14% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group. It is a low mark from the environmental advocacy group, but it was nevertheless higher than nearly any other Republican.

Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters, wrote in an email that Zeldin’s score “is obviously not what you would hope to see from the person who could be in charge of protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink and combating the climate crisis.”

Although he boasted about securing federal funds for the EPA’s Long Island Sound program, Zeldin voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 climate law that has pumped at least $370 billion into clean energy and electric vehicles.

During Zeldin’s tenure in the House, he voted against clean water legislation at least a dozen times, and clean air legislation at least half a dozen times, according to the League of Conservation Voters scorecard.

His record includes a vote against an amendment to a defense bill that would have created a climate resilience office inside the White House; for legislation that would have withdrawn the United States from the treaty enabling global climate negotiations; and for an amendment that would have blocked the federal government from considering the economic damage of climate change when it makes policies.

Zeldin has also taken some votes that the group supported, including prohibiting oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He also voted in favor of a landmark conservation bill that passed with bipartisan support and was signed by Trump. It guarantees maximum annual funding for a federal program to acquire and preserve land for public use.

He voted for a bill that would require the EPA to set limits on PFAS, which are a family of man-made chemicals that are persistent in the environment and the human body. The EPA under the Biden administration has set strict limits on the chemicals in drinking water. In 2020, he voted against legislation that would have slashed the EPA’s budget.

During his run for governor, Zeldin pledged to reverse New York’s 2015 ban on hydraulic fracturing, a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock that environmental advocates say can contaminate groundwater. He also called for construction of more gas pipelines and a suspension of the state gas tax.

He has not spoken at length about whether he accepts the established science of climate change. But in a 2014 interview with the Newsday editorial board he expressed doubts about the severity of the problem.

“It would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real,” he said. “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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