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(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) — Joe Murphy, whose position as a management and data analyst was eliminated when the Department of Education laid off nearly 50% of its workforce Tuesday evening, said on Wednesday that he and his colleagues are filled with a sense of “sadness” and “disbelief.”

“We got the sense that we were disposable in a certain sense, especially those of us in the data space,” he told ABC News.

According to Murphy, everyone he worked with directly had their positions terminated.

The 56-year-old from Dumfries, Virginia, said he has spent almost 20 years in education data, previously working for the National Center for Education Statistics, in addition to serving as a contractor for a formula grant data collection space in the Education Department.

In the Department of Government Efficiency’s latest efforts to cut federal costs, some 1,315 Education Department employees were affected by the “reduction in force” notices, leaving 2,183, according to senior officials at the agency.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the job cuts on Wednesday, referring to them as “a promise made and a promise kept.”

“There is no reason that we should be spending more than most developed countries in the world. And our education system is failing,” she added. “The president wants to return education back to the states, empower those closest to the people to make these very important decisions for our children’s lives. And this is a first step in that process.”

Though Murphy said the terminations were expected, he said the experience has still been disconcerting.

“Nothing surprises me anymore, but it’s still kind of shocking and impactful,” he said.

“I do not know where I go forward from here … I am suddenly belched out into a job market that has been at the very same time, severely constricted and also completely flooded with people who have a similar skill set to mine. I’m 56 years old,” Murphy continued, adding that he has spend “more than a third of [his] entire life” in this line of work.

“Felt really weird to wake up this morning and be like, wow, what am I gonna do?” he said.

Murphy emphasized how the most important and rewarding aspect of his job, which falls under the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, was serving the nation’s children.

“It’s really for the kids, and what we do is for the kids. And so many of us feel that way,” he said, adding that he “wish[es] things went differently.”

“That’s the thing I have the greatest sense of pride in. I would think, you know, doing a good job and getting the data to the programs in the right timely fashion — good, accurate data, so that they can make decisions on behalf of, you know, 100,000 schools in this country and 18,000 districts and 50-something state education agencies,” he explained.

When asked if he believes children will continue to receive needed educational benefits and services, Murphy projected a bleak outlook and expressed his belief that “we’re politicizing the department of education and the education of our students.”

He also expressed concern over whether his work will even be able to continue.

“So, all that work that we did for the programs, I don’t know who’s going to do it now or be able to do it. The folks in the programs were already overwhelmed. They were so grateful to us for the work that we did for them in distilling down this massive amount of data to a few answers with groundwork that they laid together with us,” he said. “So, I don’t know where that’s going to get done.”

Murphy is a member of the American Federation of Government Employees union, which he says he joined only recently due to the change in administrations from Biden to Trump.

“When it seemed to be going south and everybody was taking over after the inauguration, I said, okay, well, I’m gonna go ahead and sign up,” he said, explaining how he was affected by the “last two months of being led by threats and intimidation.”

“I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea that the federal government needed some improvements and some restructuring to some degree,” Murphy acknowledged. “But how you do it really matters, and you can’t just … the federal government is not a private business, and you can’t run it that way.”

 

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