How Trump's EPA head has transformed the agency — and sided with polluters
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
And thanks.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency are being chased out and departments drastically reduced or eliminated. Efforts at the EPA to slow climate change and reduce pollution are constantly being decreased. The head of the EPA who is behind this change of direction is Lee Zeldin.
What changes has Lee Zeldin implemented at the EPA?
President Trump has described him as our secret weapon. Zeldin isn't known for the kind of personal drama and big personality that some other members of the Trump administration are, but he's been very successful in carrying out the dramatic changes in Trump's agenda to undo restrictions on companies that are polluters and on the chemicals in the air and water that harm our health and the environment. My guest, Elizabeth Colbert, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her article in The Current Issue is titled, Can the EPA Survive Lee Zeldin? She's also the author of the bestseller, The Sixth Extinction. Our interview was recorded yesterday. Elizabeth Colbert, welcome back to Fresh Air.
You start your piece in The New Yorker about Zeldin by saying that last summer, more than 150 staff members of the EPA sent a letter to Zeldin about their concerns about his leadership. What were their concerns?
Well, they listed five areas of concerns. And the first one was that he was terribly partisan, that he would use his public appearances and public communications effectively. to attack the other party, sometimes by name. He kept referring to these funds that had been appropriated really under the previous administration as a scam. So they were very disturbed by that level of partisanship, the notion that the EPA is supposed to be basically calling the shots objectively and that this seemed to be undermining that. It was clear that they were going to dismantle what was called the Office of Research and Development, which was the EPA scientific arm, which is 1,500 people who spent their lives trying to figure out what environmental threats we are facing and also sort of scanning the horizon.
What environmental threats are we going to face? They were dismayed about his tendency to side with industry on a lot of key issues. They were very upset about his treatment of the workforce. I mean, if you go back to Russ Vogt and Project 2025 and these tapes that came out of Russ Vogt saying we're going to put... employees of the federal government in trauma. We want to put them in trauma. He explicitly mentions the EPA. And I think many employees felt that they had successfully been put in trauma, that that was not an appropriate way to run an agency.
So the response that they got to that letter was most of them were terminated or put on leave.
Yeah, they were put on administrative leave, which is, you know, sort of pending this investigation. And at the end of the day, so months later, many of them were suspended without pay for a few weeks. So they lost a few weeks pay and several of them were fired.
Wow.
Zeldin's response to this letter was to say, we have a zero tolerance policy for agency bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the agenda of this administration. The will of the American public will not be ignored. Is it the job of the EPA to carry out the Trump administration's agenda?
Well, quite simply, the job of the EPA, and this is their stated mission and remains their stated mission even now, is to protect public health and the environment. The EPA is really a public health organization. Certainly many of the actions that they take have the effect of protecting our waterways, protecting our air, and have implications for all species that share those waterways and share the air. But really, regulations are designed to be protective of human health. And that is its job. And that has meant there's always a tug of war between what industry wants, what public health and environmental groups want, and you could argue what the public wants. And the EPA has had to balance that.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:47
2
What changes has Lee Zeldin implemented at the EPA?
0:47–9:17
3
What concerns did EPA scientists express about Zeldin's leadership?
9:17–13:46
4
How has Zeldin's partisanship affected the EPA's mission?
13:46–31:00
5
What is the significance of the Office of Research and Development at the EPA?
31:00–45:05
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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