Lee Zeldin introduced himself to EPA staff last year as someone who had experienced first-hand the risks some U.S. communities face from climate change.
In his first speech to agency staff in February 2025, the newly confirmed administrator said his home town on Long Island “got crushed” during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
“Rising sea levels, it hits my street,” he told staff gathered in a room named for conservationist Rachel Carson at EPA headquarters in Washington. Firefighters had to evacuate his young daughters through the rear window of the family car after his wife “totaled” it because of the flooding, he said.
Benjamin DeAngelo, then the career director of EPA’s Office of Climate Adaptation and Sustainability, said he found those comments encouraging, even though Zeldin didn’t firmly connect the dots from sea-level rise to warming temperatures.
“At the time, I took it as a positive sign that, yeah, indeed, adaptation work might be supported,” he said in an interview with POLITICO’s E&E News.
It didn’t turn out that way. In the first 15 months of President Donald Trump’s second term, EPA staff dedicated to climate adaptation and resilience have mostly either left the agency or been reassigned. That includes the dozen staff who worked in the office DeAngelo led — a subsidiary of EPA’s Office of Policy that was created in 2024 to play a coordinating role and was formally dissolved last fall.
But DeAngelo said the agency has also bled expertise on adaptation and resilience from its now-defunct Office of Research and Development and the program offices, including air and water.
“I’m not aware of any significant climate adaptation work happening at EPA now,” he said.
Asked about EPA’s retreat from adaptation under Zeldin, spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said the agency was “committed to policies grounded in gold standard science, sound economics, and genuine environmental progress, not in the fear-mongering and speculative modeling peddled by those invested in costly, unreliable ‘green’ scams.”
EPA in recent months has also removed countless mapping tools and databases from its website that were used by states and cities, philanthropies and businesses to assess and prepare for climate risks. Some, like the EJScreen environmental justice mapping tool — which reflects exposure to climate risk and other environmental burdens across the country — are now being hosted on nongovernmental servers.
A group of independent researchers called Climate Literacy has collected many of those deleted federal tools on its website.
EPA under Zeldin also canceled hundreds of finalized grant awards under programs authorized by former President Joe Biden’s 2022 climate law, which aimed to help communities shore up their defenses against climate risks or remediate other pollution.
DeAngelo’s office helped communities with fewer resources compete for those, among many other things.
Adriana Hochberg, a former Biden political appointee who worked with DeAngelo to set up the adaptation office, said she thought it might have staying power.
EPA’s sustainability work had survived the first Trump term, she noted. “They focused on engaging with industrial partners on sustainability issues,” she said. “So, maybe naively, folks thought, ‘Well, you know, we will probably be OK, given that we were OK before.’”
Advocates for climate-vulnerable communities said they were surprised that EPA under Zeldin moved so quickly to take EPA out of the climate adaptation business. Zeldin had, after all, represented one of the nation’s most climate-exposed congressional districts for eight years through 2023.
New York’s 1st District sits on a barrier-island coastline that is already experiencing erosion and sea-level rise that is projected to get worse. The New York State Climate Impact Assessment estimates that Long Island will see between 2 and 3 feet of sea-level rise by the close of the century, and might see more. Already it is exposed to storm surge and tidal flooding.
The federal government is spending heavily to help Zeldin’s former district prepare for that future. The Army Corps of Engineers picked up the full $2.4 billion tab to raise the elevation of thousands of homes and fortify sand barriers that are being washed away.
As a congressman, Zeldin advocated for federal dollars to make Long Island more climate resilient. In the same introductory speech at EPA, he referenced the $44 million in post-Sandy resilience funding he helped secure to shore up a historic lighthouse.
“Because of coastal erosion, Montauk Lighthouse would have been collapsing into the ocean,” he noted.
He also introduced legislation to require federally funded projects to use science-based projections to account for future flood risks to infrastructure. To be sure, Zeldin described the bill as a responsible budget initiative, not a climate adaptation measure. Before becoming EPA chief he rarely spoke about climate change, beyond stating that it was “real.” Since his confirmation, by contrast, he has described mainstream climate science as flawed.
Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which is based on Long Island, said Zeldin’s policy reversals took her by surprise.
“When he was a congressman, we worked with him on a wide variety of environmental issues — Long Island Sound protection, opposing drilling for oil on the East Coast, all of which he supported,” she said. “Not only did he support it, but he championed these positions.”
“People ask me all the time, ‘Why did you think he’d be OK as EPA director?’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Because I worked with him for almost 10 years on environmental issues.’”
DeAngelo said he had expected Zeldin would support — or at least tolerate — adaptation planning and analysis at EPA.
“Early on under this administration I thought we were going to be OK,” he said.
That work — which started in the Obama administration, continued under the first Trump administration and expanded greatly under Biden — wasn’t incompatible with Trump’s deregulatory ambitions, he said.
“There was nothing in the adaptation portfolio that was regulatory in nature,” DeAngelo noted. “It was more about providing information, providing tools. And there was also a connection to grant programs and the [2022 climate law] funding.”
The office DeAngelo headed was designed to coordinate adaptation planning that was already underway across EPA offices. In the Biden administration, program offices developed specialized plans to keep climate risks from interfering with the work they did and the programs they ran.
“There were plans within plans,” said Vicki Arroyo, the Biden EPA’s former policy chief who added it to the Office of Policy. “The idea is that you can’t really fulfill your mission to protect human health and the environment if you’re not really factoring in the changes that are already underway.”
EPA also made “accelerate resilience and adaptation” to climate change a central objective of its five-year strategic plan unveiled in March 2022.
The next strategic plan hasn’t been released yet. But DeAngelo, who now works in consulting, said he was told early on that climate adaptation wouldn’t be in it.
“That was a big blow to our office, because that was something our office always pointed to as essentially a lever to help coordinate activities across EPA,” he said.
Trump political appointees also declined to meet with office staff during the transition and early months of the administration, he said.
Hochberg, who now serves in a senior administrative role for Montgomery County, Maryland, said that in deprioritizing resilience, Zeldin’s EPA is “putting people’s lives at risk” by making it harder for communities to prepare for climate change.
“To me, it is just the evidence of the Trump administration’s what I would call willful ignorance and hubris that are in negligence,” she said.
