The Head of the EPA on the Future of the Agency

0:04The Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970 by President Richard Nixon. The great question of the 70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings? Or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water? The EPA has a clear mission, to protect human health and the environment. The agency does this primarily through regulations on issues like air and water pollution. Now, under President Trump, things at the EPA are changing. Climate regulation is being rethought. Staff have been laid off. And billions of dollars in funding to green initiatives have been frozen.

1:02All of it is being directed by the man Trump appointed to lead the EPA. Lee Zeldin is calling it the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history. The EPA administrator is cutting 31 environmental rules regarding climate change, pollution, electric vehicles and power plants. Lee Zeldin, who has... Lee Zeldin, a Trump loyalist who spent eight years in Congress representing his Long Island congressional district. Last week, I got to ask him some questions. Administrator Zeldin, thanks for joining us today. Happy to. Thanks for having me. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power.

1:49I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Wednesday, April 9th.

1:57Coming up on the show, an interview with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

2:20So the administration has been making tons of changes to the government, including working to shut down government departments like the Department of Education and USAID. Has there been talk of getting rid of the EPA? No. EPA has important core functions. We have the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act. So these historic landmark laws that have been passed over the course of the last few decades with strong bipartisan support have created statutory obligations on the part of the EPA to ensure that Americans have access to clean air, land, and water. And our priority right now is to pursue our Powering, Our Great American Comeback Initiative, and we're not slowing down.

3:10Since taking over as EPA Administrator, you've announced plans to pull back a raft of climate regulations. What is your objective? I think it's very important to understand that protecting the environment is not a binary choice with growing the economy. And too often regulations have strangulated the economy and going after industries wholesale. Some people talk about moving power from some fossil fuel production of baseload power to sources like wind. And they'll talk about wind as if it's not an intermittent source of energy. They'll talk about wind as if it's a replacement for baseload power.

3:59And when you look at the current grid, the current supply, the current demand, and you kind of play it out in your own mind as to what it looks like if you shut down all these other industries wholesale, the people who will suffer the most are the Americans who can least afford it. So what happens? As you're going through 2024, there's a high-stakes election that's approaching. which came up this past November 5th. And Americans decide what they want their priorities to be. And the number one issue that Americans were talking about was a strong, intense desire for the federal government to do a better job in helping to grow the economy.

4:40What we need to do is to make sure that we are implementing the laws that are on the books, putting rules and regulations in place that are following the law. So the United States Supreme Court in a decision called Loper-Bright said that these agencies like the EPA can't just create our own laws where there is vague language in statute. And where agencies do so, the Supreme Court, as we've seen, will overturn those actions. The Loper-Bright decision. It was a watershed ruling by the Supreme Court last year. Today, the Supreme Court's conservative majority upended the way our federal government functions by overturning the 40-year-old landmark decision Chevron v.

5:27NRDC. The decision means federal judges can overrule a government agency's interpretation of the law. It's a meaningful rollback of agencies' regulatory power. So for us, it's very important for us to honor the rule of law, to advance cooperative federalism, to follow our obligations under the law, and to understand, as the Supreme Court outlined in Loperbright, that we should not be as an agency going rogue and strangulating the economy just because we all have a desire to protect the environment. What do you see as a solution for global warming? Well, listen, what our priority here is clean air, land, and water for all Americans.

6:15Cleaner, safer, healthier land, air, and water across this country. It's a priority of President Trump. It's a priority of the American public. It has very strong bipartisan support across this country. And ultimately, the EPA should not be legislating what a modification of the Clean Air Act may look like. We have laws that are on the books. our job is to implement those laws. Congress created the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions. The act empowers the EPA to set limits on air pollutants and penalize companies that violate the rules. Would you want to amend the Clean Air Act? That's a decision for Congress.

7:00The EPA is not lobbying Congress for changes to any laws right now. And when Congress changes a law, they could go in one direction or the other. It's our job to follow the law. But if the law gets changed, we stand by ready to do our job to implement it. Do you believe greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change? So this is part of a regulatory process that the agency is going to be going through. This is one of the announcements that you just referenced in looking at a 2009 decision called the endangerment finding. In 2009, the EPA released what's known as the endangerment finding.

7:49This determination came to the conclusion that six greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide or methane, endanger human health. It found that together, the emissions directly contribute to climate change. In January, President Trump called for a rethink of the legality of the endangerment finding. And the endangerment finding was defined many years later as saying carbon dioxide is a pollutant carbon dioxide endangers public health. But that's not exactly what the endangerment finding came to as a conclusion. What they said was that carbon dioxide, when mixed with these other five well-mixed gases called the greenhouse gases, that they contribute to climate change, not cause, contribute.

8:42How much? That's not defined. They just say that it's above a de minimis amount and that climate change endangers public health. So we will go through that process. And as we get further along in the process, then we start making conclusions and decisions as to how to go forward on this policy. But this finding has been held up again since 2009. So why do you think things have changed? Yet this is something that the EPA has not engaged in a reconsideration of at all since 2009. And also when they were going through the 2009 endangerment finding process, there was not a consideration of the impacts of what they were doing.

9:33And there has since been a reduction of emissions since 2009. There's also been advancements in American innovation since then, advancements in science. And all of these developments since 2009, obviously, were not factored in when that decision was made back then. Do you believe greenhouse gases should be regulated? This is the rulemaking process that I am not going to be able to prejudge. I do have opinions that I've shared publicly. and some I've just reiterated actually in my answer to your last question. But as far as what that decision will be of the agency and of the administrator formally, that's something that I'll have to wait until we get further along in the process before I'm allowed to reach a conclusion and have a judgment and a decision.

10:29Coming up, we'll talk about the environmental rules that Zeldin is putting in place.

10:54Getting back to what you've done at the EPA, you've been pushing through deregulatory actions, including rolling back rules on coal plant pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from cars. How do you square deregulation with the EPA's mission to protect human health and the environment? You know what's amazing about your great question is that when we made our announcement just over three weeks ago, there were people who were responding to the announcement showing pictures of water quality in 1969 and saying that if you change these rules that America's land, air, and water are going to go back a half a century, we're talking about rules that were enacted over the course of the last year or two.

11:48So what we announced just over three weeks ago, almost every single regulation that we discussed having a reconsideration of are regulations that are not from the 70s. They're not from the 80s. They're from the last 12 to 24 months. Are you planning to make any new rules? Well, I just signed off on one for the Delaware River Basin. Last week, Zeldin finalized new water quality standards to protect fish in a stretch of the Delaware River. The EPA first proposed these standards in 2023. And this was a decision for me as the administrator to make, and I could have went one in a couple of different directions.

12:38What decision did I make? It was the one to have the stricter standards put on these plants to improve water quality. So that's an example. I'm about to go to South California, where there's a big issue cross-boundary with Mexico. In Tijuana, where they are dumping raw sewage. It's a complicated issue. For decades, raw sewage has been coming across the border into Southern California. Ew. Raw sewage. Unpleasant. Yes. I mean, you have a lot of people who are living just across the border. They have to see it. They have to smell it. They live with it. They don't want to have to live with it. And they've been looking for action for a long time.

13:23And I think now is the time. What can you do about it? There's a few different things. One is there's funding from the USMCA,$300 million as part of that agreement, to build a treatment facility, which is right now going through the design phase. There is another pot of money that is doing infrastructure projects on both the U.S. side and the Mexican side. While it is on the Mexican side, this is extraordinarily important for U.S. impacts. This is something that I've heard from the president and others. There's a lot of concern for and making sure that Mexico stops participating in this activity.

14:07So and by the way, that's just starting to scratch the surface. Are you concerned that the trade relations between the U.S. and Mexico vis-a-vis the tariffs could interfere with your objectives? No. Well, this is not an issue that is tied up in a tariff negotiation. This is something that there actually are agreements right now that we just need Mexico to follow through on their commitments. And that's not something that we are expecting them to go back on. As a matter of fact, what my hope is, is that we can get Mexico to do more. We need Mexico to do more. It's important for Americans on our side.

14:52And by the way, I was talking about going to visit Southern California, which is in Region 9 of the EPA. They did a fantastic job in the wildfire response. After the January wildfires, the president signed an executive order giving EPA 30 days to complete our Phase 1 hazardous material removal of over 13 ,000 properties. And we ended up getting it done in under 30 days. You brought up the wildfires in California. I mean, I think that that was a real extreme situation that sort of captures the fears that many Americans have about climate change. And that's why people feel an urgency to try to remediate it, to reverse it, as opposed to just dealing with the consequences of it.

15:41I mean, I will tell you that there's a concern as it relates to forest management, prescribed burns, being prepared with water. I was just also in Maui where they dealt with the consequences of a wildfire that quickly went over Lahaina and some other communities. as it relates to being prepared for that, being able to mitigate for that next wildfire and the damage that it can cause. There's a lot of topics that are being discussed as far as what actually caused these particular wildfires, not just what gets lit, but how it spreads and what communities can do to be prepared. I wanted to sort of circle back to your plans for the EPA itself.

16:34Given the changes happening to the federal government, it has been reported that you plan to eliminate the EPA's scientific research arm and lay off more than 1 ,000 scientists, including toxicologists. Is that true? And how will that impact the EPA's ability to write policy? The EPA is going to continue, no matter what, in doing environmental science. We have these core statutory obligations that we must fulfill. And the environmental science work that we do here, the applied science work that we do here, are very important and one that agency employees take great pride in. Now, as I talk to individual offices, they have a desire to be able to do more science within their offices.

17:25So by having someone who is a scientist in the Office of Research and Development get moved to the Office of Chemicals or the Office of Water, now some people who might be very simple-minded or just looking for a rhetorical edge in Congress, They might want to say that we are getting rid of science by moving a scientist from one office to another, even though they're still doing an environmental science mission. And we're going to be more thoughtful. We're thinking past all of that rhetoric. We're going to make sure we're fulfilling all of our statutory obligations. And I got to tell you, quite frankly, some of our statutory obligations, we inherited some massive backlogs because we need to be doing more science faster.

18:12And we have great, talented scientists to help with that. But as far as what kind of moves might get made, we're going through the process of being very deliberate and thoughtful on it. And we have not yet reached any decisions. Administrator Zeldin, thank you so much for your time today. You got it. Happy to. Take care.

18:46That's all for today, Wednesday, April 9th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Special thanks to Eric Neeler for his help with this episode.

19:00Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.