They Just Rewrote the EPA’s Mission—And It’s Completely Insane

Apparently the EPA Will No Longer Protect the Environment

It turns out the EPA was purchased in the last election

I was writing about lighthouses yesterday. It was going to be a break from the steady drumbeat of bad news and hard-hitting pieces we’ve been dealing in lately. Then the news out of the EPA dropped, and suddenly, a story about lighthouses felt like writing about deck chairs on the Titanic.

On Wednesday, Trump’s EPA chief Lee Zeldin announced the biggest environmental rollback in U.S. history—he declared that the EPA’s job is no longer to protect the environment.

Instead, Zeldin released a video saying that the agency’s mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.”

Take a second and let that sink in.

This is the Environmental Protection Agency.

It does not exist to lower business costs. It does not exist to boost profits. It does not exist to help corporations squeeze every last dime out of their operations. It exists to protect the environment and public health. That is its entire reason for existing.

Or, as the EPA’s first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, put it when the agency was created under Republican President Richard Nixon:

“The E.P.A. has no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.”

That’s it. That’s the job. That’s always been the job.

And now? They’re pretending that never happened. They’re rewriting history in real time, turning the EPA into an agency that exists to serve big business instead of protecting people and the planet.

This Isn’t Just a Pivot. It’s a Coup.

Let’s be absolutely clear: this is illegal.

The EPA’s mission is written into law. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act—every major environmental law on the books makes it crystal clear that the agency exists to regulate pollution, enforce environmental protections, and safeguard public health.

What it does not do—and what it has never done—is sit around calculating whether oil companies can save a few bucks by dumping their waste into drinking water.

The entire function of the EPA is to impose costs on businesses—to make polluters pay for the damage they do. To force them to stop poisoning our air, water, and climate whether it’s “cost-effective” or not.

For Zeldin to stand up and say, with a straight face, that the EPA’s job is now to make things cheaper for businesses is not just absurd—it’s an outright coup against the agency’s entire existence.

This is the final stage of a long-running project by folks like the Heritage Foundation, fossil fuel lobbyists, and radical libertarian billionaires who don’t believe the government should have the power to regulate silly things like pollution at all.

And they’re not just changing policies—they’re gutting the entire agency from the inside.

Hollowing Out The EPA

This isn’t just about slashing regulations. It’s about hollowing out the EPA from the inside until it’s nothing more than a name on a building (if Elon Musk doesn’t dispose of the agency headquarters).

Zeldin is firing 65% of the agency’s workforce—bringing staffing levels back to what they were in 1970, before the Clean Air Act, before the Clean Water Act, a time when skies were dark with smog and rivers caught fire.

Hundreds of EPA employees—career scientists, air quality experts, water safety regulators—have already been laid off.

To be clear, the agency is being gutted on purpose. Because if you eliminate the experts, the regulators, the enforcers—then it doesn’t matter what the law says. If there’s no one left to enforce it, the polluters win.

A War on the Environment Itself

With all the illegal actions taking place under this administration it can be easy to forget that Zeldin lied under oath during his Senate confirmation hearing. He told the Senate he would uphold the EPA’s mission, respect its career staff, and follow the science.

Of course it turns out he had no intention of doing any of that as he sat there smugly and answered questions.

Announced yesterday, Zeldin and Trump’s EPA plan to:

• Gut limits on tailpipe emissions, making sure more gas-guzzlers hit the road and setting back the transition to electric vehicles.

• Kill pollution rules for coal plants, including mercury and soot standards that protect kids from developmental damage and keep millions of Americans from choking on dirty air.

• Abolish the “good neighbor rule”, which keeps states from dumping their pollution onto their neighbors. Because who cares if someone else’s kid gets asthma as long as oil and gas CEOs can pocket a few million more?

• Stop accounting for climate disasters when making environmental policy, pretending the wildfires, hurricanes, and floods devastating communities every year have nothing to do with human-induced climate change.

But the biggest bombshell? Dismantling the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases at all.

For the last 15 years, the agency’s power to fight climate change has rested on something called the endangerment finding—the scientific determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health. This has been the legal backbone for regulating carbon pollution.

Now? Zeldin calls it “the holy grail of the climate change religion” and wants to erase it entirely.

If they succeed, the EPA will lose nearly all power to regulate emissions from power plants, cars, or oil and gas drilling. In one move, they would handcuff the federal government’s ability to fight climate change forever.

The Supreme Court Is the Final Battlefield

These changes won’t take effect immediately. There will be massive legal battles, and environmental groups, state attorneys general, and health organizations will fight this tooth and nail.

But we all know where this is going: the Supreme Court.

The conservative majority has already kneecapped the EPA (West Virginia v. EPA, 2022), ruling that the agency can’t regulate emissions in any significant way without Congress explicitly saying so.

Now, they might go even further—stripping California’s ability to set its own emissions standards and erasing the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases altogether.

If they do, the EPA’s ability to fight climate change dies on the spot. The only way to get it back? Congress would have to pass new laws—something that simply isn’t going to happen with a major party whose leadership denies climate change.

This Is a Manufactured Crisis

Let’s be clear: there is no public demand for this.

Most Americans want clean air, clean water, and action on climate change. These rollbacks aren’t about helping everyday people—they’re about oil executives, coal barons, and libertarian ideologues who see public health protections as government overreach.

They want a world where corporations are free to pollute as much as they want, workers have no protections, and billionaires don’t have to deal with pesky “regulations” that prevent them from wrecking the planet in pursuit of quick profit.

If this all feels insane, it’s because it is. Last year was the hottest in recorded history. The U.S. had 27 billion-dollar climate disasters. But instead of acting, the people in charge are dismantling every tool we have to stop it.

We’ll keep covering this fight, because there’s too much at stake to ignore it. If you want to help, support the groups suing to stop this: NRDC, Earthjustice, the Environmental Defense Fund. They’ve beaten this nonsense in court before. They’ll have to do it again.

Maybe next time, we’ll get to talk about lighthouses.

— Jim

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