As Donald Trump nears the end of his first two years in his second term, his administration is aggressively targeting the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back climate and environmental regulations. The EPA was established under Republican President Richard Nixon in response to widespread public outrage about the state of the environment in the 1960s and early ’70s.
Under Trump-appointed EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, his staff has been slashed, programs cut and grants already announced rescinded. Many former staffers have joined the Environmental Protection Network or EPN, which now counts 800 volunteers who are experts in their fields, along with 30 paid staff.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Marc Boom, who served as a senior advisor in the Office of Policy at the EPA and is now senior director for public affairs with the Environmental Protection Network. Here he talks about what needs to happen to restore the EPA no matter which party controls Congress after the election and the most important issues Congress needs to address in the lame duck period.
MARK BOOM: The current majority has actually helped advance the deregulatory agenda of the Trump administration. Congress overturned pollution protections, passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which took funding for pollution monitoring and enforcement technology away. It also postponed the methane pollution charge. It has kind of supported what’s been going on, although the administration has certainly gone farther than what Congress has done. And I’d say at the same time, it hasn’t really provided the sustained scrutiny that we need into what these impacts could be, especially the health impacts of these changes. If you just look at the voting record of who supported and who opposed, the Democrats have laid out that they’re not supportive of that agenda. The committee ranking members have sent a lot of oversight requests for information and have laid out some of their thoughts on getting answers to these big questions. And so far we haven’t seen EPA responding to those in the way that would actually provide the information people need to understand what’s been happening.
I think whoever controls Congress should be asking hard questions of this administration about what is the impact of their actions to understand how they got there? Who was part of the process? How did this get decided? Was it based on the science? Did you look at the health impacts? Anyone should be asking those things, but it is certainly clear right now that the Democrats are already lining up to ask those harder questions.
MELINDA TUHUS: So what do you think are some of the biggest issues that an EPA that really was about environmental protection would address if the opportunity arises?
MARK BOOM: What we’ve seen over the last nearly two years has been rolling back protections on pollution and either weakening them or delaying them or waiving them entirely. An agency that was focused on health and environmental protection would have a completely different approach and they would be looking for ways to increase the protection for communities. If you had a different approach at EPA, that’s what it would look like. I’m not expecting that any change in Congress, if it happens, would actually affect the administration’s approach, but it could certainly create more of a record of what’s happening and they could use their oversight powers to say who is doing what and how did you come to these conclusions? I think there’s been some recent articles that highlight the need for this. The New York Times just had a piece about how pollution waivers for ethylene oxide, which is a cancer-causing air pollutant, how those waivers happened, how career staff were pushed to the side, how scientific findings were ignored, and how industry had a seat at the table in deciding—I mean, one, they only had to send in an email to get the waiver, but then they also had a seat at the table for the actual rollback.
Those are questions that Congress should be understanding. There was also a story from the national desk, which is run by the Sinclair Network on PFAS protections and how EPA has been sitting on a lot of scientific studies and surveys and other things that would actually allow it to go after PFAS at the source and prevent it from getting into our waters, but they’ve been sitting on it and they haven’t been moving it forward. And the loss of science at the agency and the sidelining of science is really an undercurrent for all of these actions. The traditional scientific review process that looks at what is the risk of these chemicals, that has been completely sidelined.
MELINDA TUHUS: Like you said, the administration’s still the administration, but if they don’t have both houses of Congress in their pocket, what might happen?
MARK BOOM: One place where congressional attention is really needed is on data centers. Almost all communities are dealing with some type of data center development. While our leaders are looking at things like electricity bills, they should also be looking at the health costs. So EPN actually has a report called the Hidden Health Costs of AI Data Centers. It looks at the pollution costs to this and found that they’re quite substantial and that all of the actions that this federal government has been taking are going to make that pollution worse.
For more information, visit the Environmental Protection Network at environmentalprotectionnetwork.org.
