On January 29, the Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee for Environmental Protection Agency head, Lee Zeldin—a noted Trump loyalist. Trump also appointed David Foutouhi (another Trump EPA veteran, who recently as a litigator challenged the EPA’s asbestos ban) as second in command, tapped chemical industry insiders Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva to lead the EPA’s chemical regulation, and named two former oil lobbyists—Alex Dominguez and Aaron Szabo—to manage auto emissions and air pollution for the agency. Meanwhile, newly confirmed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy instructed the Department of Transportation to preferentially fund projects serving areas with higher marriage and birth rates, and began the process of reversing Biden policies on fuel efficiency standards.
This week opened with the administration reminding all recently hired EPA workers via email that "as a probationary/trial period employee," they could be fired immediately—an EPA-specific escalation from the prior week’s general threats and buyouts offered to all federal workers via the extrajudicial powers of Elon Musk. The White House also announced the nomination of Neil Jacobs, known for altering a map of the projected path of Hurricane Dorian with a Sharpie during Trump’s first administration, in an attempt to corroborate the president’s misleading tweet, to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee, the fracking executive Chris Wright, to lead the Department of Energy. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the EPA would also be "demoting career employees who oversee scientific research, the enforcement of pollution laws, hazardous waste cleanup and the agency’s human resources department and will replace them with political appointees."
So what does this add up to? And how does it fit into the much larger flurry of executive actions on foreign aid, immigration, public health, LGBTQ rights, and more in the past two weeks?
First, while some aspects of Trump’s first two weeks (such as the speed and scale of some of the assaults on the federal workforce, the attacks on USAID in particular, handing over the federal payment system to Elon Musk and his teenage staff) have surprised even watchful experts, you really can’t say that most of these environmental moves come as a shock. They’re fully in line with what informed observers expected from a reelected Trump administration; the president has been telegraphing these decisions for months, and they’re also found in the pages of the GOP’s Project 2025 policy manifesto.
The second theme here is that—as with many of Trump’s other moves, and as this newsletter predicted two weeks ago, noting the oligarchic aesthetics of the inauguration festivities—you really can follow the money. All of these actions benefit specific industries and people. Gutting the environmental review and permitting process and greenlighting LNG terminals will please the oil and gas industry that Trump explicitly courted for donations during his campaign. Killing the electric vehicle subsidy will please Elon Musk—who has openly said this would benefit Tesla (currently struggling) by hurting the company’s competitors. In general, putting corporate lobbyists in charge of regulating the industries they come from is a good way to please corporate interests, and revoking any policy that restricts "consumer choice" in household appliances tends to benefit companies manufacturing appliances that are dangerous.
The third point is one that pertains to many of Trump’s moves in other areas, as well. Right now there seems to be a stark divide in the commentariat: an open argument over whether the administration’s actions over the past two weeks are a catastrophic attack on literally lifesaving programs and American political norms, or merely a predictable show of bluster from team Trump that will inevitably be slowed or halted by legal challenges and lack of congressional support.
But both these things can be true at once. It’s possible—likely, even—that many of Trump’s initial actions will fizzle for legal or organizational reasons. It’s also possible for these actions to do a lot of damage, even if the specific orders are eventually countermanded. "On Friday morning," Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester recently reported for ProPublica, "the staffers at a half dozen U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan who care for severely malnourished children had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die."
The effects of halting funds for environmental programs won’t be as gut-wrenchingly immediate as the halt on foreign aid. But the same principle applies across multiple fields: Programs and projects operating on tight margins and relying on predicted federal funds to show up can’t necessarily wait for this all to be cleared up.
"We have one woman in her 80s who lives alone, and if she does not get her roof fixed, well, we’re going to have a senior in her late 80s who is homeless," Warren Tidwell, leading efforts to repair storm damage in Alabama using IRA funds, recently told The New York Times. The same article pointed to farmers and small-business owners waiting for reimbursement who went into debt to fund improvements that the Rural Energy for America Program was supposed to reimburse, or clean energy projects whose status is suddenly up in the air. The uncertainty alone will probably shutter some projects.
The overarching analysis is fairly grim. Trump was hardly an unknown quantity. The chaos he has unleashed was predictable, as was his capture by a slew of cronies benefiting from a rollback of sensible energy and environmental policy. If anything’s getting lost in all the sturm und drang, it’s that ordinary people will wind up impoverished or harmed as a select few profit, regardless of how things ultimately play out in the courts. That alone ought to be generating more opposition, and more pointed media coverage, than we’re currently seeing.
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