Trump to speak with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy after Putin rebuffs 30-day ceasefire plan

(WASHINGTON) — Calling it the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history,” the Environmental Protection Agency rolled out sweeping moves Wednesday aimed at walking back environmental protections and eliminating a host of climate change regulations, some decades in the making.

Taken together, the agency’s actions indicate a wholesale reorientation of the agency away from government support of renewable energy, carbon reduction programs and air, water and soil regulations while threatening to gut the government’s past scientific findings at the core of most climate regulations.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin rolled out over two dozen policy announcements, through a series of press releases and public statements. The list of proposed changes includes rolling back emission regulations on coal, oil and gas production and a promise to work across the federal agencies to reevaluate the government finding that determined that greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide and methane, not only heat the planet but are a threat to public health.

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” Zeldin wrote in a statement on EPA’s website.

The backlash from the environmental community was swift.

“If they get their way, they will wreck our air, our water, burn down our homes, and hand future generations an unlivable climate. From moms in the 1970s who wanted their kids to be able to play outside without getting asthma to young people in the 2020s who went on hunger strike to force Congress to pass a climate bill, generations of Americans have fought and sacrificed for these regulations,” the youth-led climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement wrote in response.

“Corporate polluters are celebrating today because Trump’s EPA just handed them a free pass to spew unlimited climate pollution, consequences be damned. The Biden administration put the first-ever carbon limits on dirty coal and gas plants, cutting toxic air pollution, saving lives, and avoiding $270 billion in climate damages. Rolling back these protections is a direct attack on the communities that have been forced to breathe toxic air from polluting plants for decades,” climate advocacy organization Evergreen Action Senior Power Sector Policy Lead Charles Harper wrote in a statement.

Changes to the rules and regulations announced Wednesday will still have to go through the federal regulatory process and will likely have to stand up to numerous court challenges from environmental groups. However, today’s flurry of actions makes good on the president’s campaign promises to gut many of the long-established rules and regulations initially created to protect our water, air, soil and human health.

Endangerment finding

One of the most significant announcements was that the EPA would engage in the”formal reconsideration” of the agency’s endangerment finding.

In 2009, the EPA issued an “endangerment finding” determining that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and others, pose a danger to public health and the environment. This ruling, prompted by the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, gave the EPA the legal authority to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Act (CAA).

This finding represents the legal underpinning for many regulations concerning greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions standards for vehicles, power plants and oil and gas production — all of which Zeldin said the agency would also reevaluate as it reconsiders the finding.

If the Trump Administration decides the endangerment finding is no longer applicable and that determination survives court challenges, 16 years’ worth of emissions regulations, including those enacted under President Biden, could be jeopardized.

Vehicle emissions standards

Zeldin also took aim at Biden-era vehicle standards, saying the EPA would terminate the tailpipe emissions regulations announced by the previous administration last year.

While the Trump Administration has repeatedly referred to these standards as an EV “mandate”, there was no such mandate put in place by the Biden administration.

The Biden Environmental Protection Agency implemented tailpipe emissions standards last March that established an average of allowed emissions across a vehicle manufacturer’s entire fleet of offered vehicles. The standards would have only impacted cars from model years 2027 to 2032 and allowed for a range of usable technologies, including fully electric cars, hybrids and improved internal combustion engines. These standards applied to light and medium-duty vehicles. A separate set of standards were released for heavy-duty vehicles.

As Zeldin’s EPA announced reconsideration of these standards, it released a statement saying, the regulations imposed, “$700 billion in regulatory and compliance costs,” alleging they took away, “Americans’ ability to choose a safe and affordable car for their family and increases the cost of living on all products that trucks deliver.”

Impacts on coal

Another of the policies being reconsidered is the “Clean Power Plan 2.0,” which targets emissions from coal and natural gas power plants.

At the time, the agency claimed the new regulations would represent a massive reduction in pollution and save hundreds of billions of dollars in climate and public health costs as it would force power plants to control 90% of their carbon pollution through methods like carbon capture and tightened the emissions standards for toxic metals like mercury that are released from coal-fired plants.

In one of many press releases sent on Wednesday, the EPA called the rules “overreaching” and “an attempt to shut down affordable and reliable electricity generation in the United States, raising prices for American families, and increasing the country’s reliance on foreign forms of energy.”

Social cost of carbon

Also among the 31 actions announced by the agency is a revisiting of the “social cost of carbon,” with Zeldin saying the previous administration used the metric to “advance their climate agenda in a way that imposed major costs.”

In 2010, the EPA under then-President Barack Obama released its first estimate for what it called the “social cost of carbon,” or SC-CO2. This metric meant to capture in dollars the long-term damage created by carbon dioxide emissions each year.

It estimated, in effect, the cost of damages related to climate change, including changes in agricultural productivity, human health, property damages from added flood risk, changes in energy costs and other considerations.

The Biden Administration later updated the estimate process to include consideration of additional factors, leading to an increase in the national SC-CO2. In December 2023, the Biden EPA updated the metric at a dramatically higher rate — $190 per ton of carbon, compared to the administration’s earlier estimate of $51 per ton.

“To Power the Great American Comeback, we are fully committed to removing regulations holding back the U.S.,” Zeldin said in the announcement.

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden is making a sweeping move to ban all future offshore oil and natural gas drilling on America’s East and West coasts, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s North Bering Sea.

“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs. It is not worth the risks,” Biden said in a statement announcing the decision.

According to the White House fact sheet, this move blocks drilling in more than 625 million acres of U.S. oceans.

The fact sheet adds that Biden took those actions under “Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act” and adds that his actions “have no expiration date, and prohibit all future oil and natural gas leasing” in the designated areas.

“We do not need to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy, or between keeping our ocean healthy, our coastlines resilient, and the food they produce secure and keeping energy prices low. Those are false choices,” Biden added.

The fact sheet says that after this sweeping move, “Biden will have conserved more lands and waters than any other U.S. president in history.”

The action comes as President-elect Donald Trump continually made his “drill, baby, drill” promise on the campaign trail, vowing to unlock America’s drilling capabilities in an effort to lower energy costs for Americans.

But the law Biden used, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, was written so a presidential action under its authority is permanent, differing from other executive actions. If the Trump administration were to attempt to reverse Biden’s actions, Congress would likely have to change the law.

ABC News’ MaryAlice Parks contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — For many, a federal government job was a marker of stability or a way to serve the country, in some cases a “dream” job.

But a week after the Trump administration started to hack away at government agencies, many employees who were cut are left fearing for their future and in the dark about their next steps.

Days after they’d been let go, employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s hadn’t received the paperwork they needed to file for unemployment, said Elizabeth Aniskevich, who was a litigation counsel for the agency before she was told her job was eliminated.

“It’s really been a total roller coaster of emotions,” she said. “I will say the solidarity among those of us who have been terminated has been amazing, but we can barely get information.”

Aniskevich was fired with 70 other employees who were still in their probationary period. Many of them are keeping in touch through a group chat.

“We have not received forms that are requested to file for unemployment,” she said. “We have no real understanding of when our health insurance terminates,” she said. “We just have no information. We were just basically tossed out on the streets, and so that has been angering and heartbreaking, and our pay stopped the day we got the termination letter, so we’re all without a paycheck as of Tuesday.”

“I think the main question is, ‘What are we going to do?’” she said.

“I’m a single person in my house. I’m responsible for my insurance and for my mortgage, and I worked really hard to buy this house on my own after putting myself through law school, and I don’t know how I’m going to continue to make mortgage payments very far into the future,” she said.

Aniskevich said she chose to work for the CFPB because she was raised in a military family that believed in service.

“My dad was in the military for 27 years, and he really instilled in me a commitment to this country and to public service,” she said.

Katie Butler, a Department of Education lawyer, knew her days with the agency were numbered.

“Ever since the start of the Trump administration, we knew there would be a cut in federal employees,” she said.

She and her colleagues also knew that the first people to go would be probationary employees with less protection.

And while she expected to be terminated, certainty came with the “Fork in the Road” notice, an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that introduced a new program called “deferred resignation, that allowed them to continue to work until Sept. 30. Around 75,000 federal employees took the buyout, according to the White House.

Butler is also an adjunct professor at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, where she earned her law degree.

She says she was teaching a class when she got the Fork in the Road notice and didn’t see it immediately. The next day, she got a termination letter.

Her supervisors asked, “Did you get a termination notice, because we don’t know who got one.”

Butler doesn’t hold her abrupt termination against them.

“I don’t think this is coming from them, they are doing their best, but this is not the way you run the federal government system.”

Butler and her colleagues were told they could appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board but she says she knows the decision would be hard to appeal.

The loss of her job has also hit her financially — she had just bought a house in June that she’s been remodeling and also has student debt of around $140,000.

Butler began working for the federal government “right out of college.”

She worked for the National Park Service and at the Bureau of Labor Statistics before getting into law school. In September 2024, she joined the Department of Education, where she had to complete a new probationary period despite having previously established career status.

She says the job she lost was “one of the exact jobs I went to law school for.”

“Career-wise, this is a big detour from what I expected,” she said. “I went to law school because I planned to work long-term as a public servant.”

Given what she calls “the somewhat disrespectful and unthoughtful way this is being handled,” Butler says she will take a detour away from the federal government.

“It’s honestly just really disappointing, from like a personal standpoint.”

Her plan is to go into general litigation at a mid-size to large law firm or a solicitor’s office. She has also considered local government work, given her experience.

She may go to work for a city. Even now, she is “still dedicated to doing good as a civil servant but not under the present circumstances.”

Victoria DeLano, who was an equal opportunity specialist in the education department’s Office for Civil Rights based in Birmingham, Alabama, said she was outraged when she received notice that she had lost her job last week.

“I think that the work that the Office for Civil Rights does is absolutely instrumental to children in my state,” she said.

“When you take out of the equation a fully staffed Office for Civil Rights, you’re taking away an avenue to resolution and an avenue to law enforcement, a really important avenue to law enforcement.”

“These students have no one else,” she said. They can still file complaints with OCR. Please understand OCR is understaffed at best, and OCR right now does not have external communication with you all. So I don’t know where they turn,” she added.

DeLano also called her position a “dream job.”

“It’s something that I’m extraordinarily passionate about because I believe with my history working with students with disabilities,” she said. “So I jumped at the chance to take this job, and absolutely loved it.”

She is concerned that the Trump administration has no clear plan to shrink the federal government, nor is it considering students with disabilities.

“This dismantling of our government right now is just being done with a sledgehammer without thought of what are the implications be to the individuals who are serviced by these agencies,” she said.

That sentiment is echoed by Butler.

“It takes a while to build a government system, but when [you] tear it down this quickly, it can cause a lot of damage,” she said. “The progress feels slow. This could take 100 years for us to rebuild.”

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