Trump's environmental rule-shredding will put lives at risk, ex-EPA heads say [View all]

Source: AP via The Guardian

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Zeldin said on Wednesday he planned to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change. The former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy called Zeldin’s announcement “the most disastrous day in EPA history”.

The warning by McCarthy, who served under two Democratic administrations, was echoed by two former EPA heads who served under Republican presidents.

Zeldin’s comprehensive plan to undo decades-old regulations was nothing short of a “catastrophe” and “represents the abandonment of a long history” of EPA actions to protect the environment, said William K Reilly, who led the agency under President George HW Bush and played a key role in amending the Clean Air Act in 1990.

“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives – ours, our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under President George W Bush. “We all deserve to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. If there’s an endangerment finding to be found anywhere, it should be found on this administration because what they’re doing is so contrary to what the Environmental Protection Agency is about.”

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/epa-lee-zeldin-trump-environment