EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has launched a brazen assault on regulations, canceled environmental grants and eliminated the agency’s environmental justice wing — all in less than two months.
The policies are in lockstep with President Donald Trump’s plan to “power the great American comeback,” lower the cost of cars and slash federal spending, Zeldin has said.
The actions also closely mirror Project 2025, the conservative blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that Trump once claimed to know nothing about.
Zeldin announced a deregulatory blitz last week, targeting over a dozen rules on water pollution, air quality and planet-warming emissions. He also said EPA would reconsider a 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and the environment, one of many recommendations in Project 2025.
But while an EPA spokesperson said Zeldin has not read Project 2025, environmental advocates said they aren’t surprised to see the blueprint taking shape at the agency.
“During the election, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, which was very unpopular among voters for being so extreme and so focused on polluter interests,” said Matthew Davis, vice president of federal policy at the League of Conservation Voters. “We’re now seeing the Trump administration and some of the very authors of Project 2025 implementing those changes.”
Project 2025 is a 900-plus-page guide for overhauling U.S. policy, promoting conservative ideas, gutting the federal workforce and expanding presidential powers.
Over 150 people who contributed to the project worked in Trump’s first administration, on his 2016 campaign or on his transition team, according to a tally from The New York Times last year.
The blueprint’s EPA chapter was written by Mandy Gunasekara, who was chief of staff at the agency during Trump’s first term. She did not respond to a request for an interview and is not currently at EPA.
Other EPA chapter contributors have taken on key posts with the new administration.
Aaron Szabo is Trump’s nominee for assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation and has been working as a senior adviser to Zeldin since January; Scott Mason IV is regional administrator for the South Central U.S.; and Justin Schwab is general counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Project 2025 contributor Russell Vought is now leading the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The appointments are notable given Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 when it seemed like a political liability last year. Two polls from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and NBC News released in October and September, respectively, found that most people surveyed had a negative view of the blueprint.
Trump claimed in September 2024 that he had not read Project 2025 and did not know who was behind it.
Now, EPA policies mirroring Project 2025 ideas have come in response to Trump’s executive orders on fossil fuels, regulations and diversity. Other changes — such as a hiring freeze and the dismissal of probationary employees — are happening at the direction of Vought, said Barry Rabe, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Michigan.
“The EPA role is significant here, but so is that of OMB and its leader,” Rabe said. “For all the focus on Elon Musk and DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency] and individual agency actions, it also strikes me that OMB — created in the Nixon administration — is kind of reaching an unprecedented level of authority over other agencies and is in a central position.”
Within weeks of landing at EPA, Zeldin placed 171 staff working on “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility and environmental justice” on administrative leave.
Last week, EPA went a step further, eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. Project 2025 explicitly called for getting rid of that office, which was set up to help reduce environmental hazards in low-income communities and enforce civil rights laws.
Zeldin has said the office was contrary to EPA’s “core mission” of protecting human health and the environment.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers dismissed the similarities between EPA’s actions and Project 2025.
“No one cared about Project 2025 when they elected President Trump in November 2024, and they don’t care now,” Rogers said in an email. “President Trump is implementing the America First agenda he campaigned on to free up wasteful DEI spending for cutting-edge scientific research, roll back radical climate regulations, and restore America’s energy dominance.”
Regulatory rollbacks and grant holds
EPA’s plans to weaken greenhouse gas reporting requirements, roll back California’s car emissions standards and change the chemical review process all echo Project 2025 ideas.
On Feb. 14, Zeldin announced that EPA would allow Congress to review and potentially end a group of California’s regulations, including one that would phase out the sale of most new internal-combustion cars by 2035. Project 2025 suggests revoking California’s ability to write its own car-pollution rules, even though that authority is in the text of the Clean Air Act.
A separate proposal announced by Zeldin to roll back federal regulations on car and truck emissions also tracks with Project 2025 goals.
“The American auto industry has been hamstrung by the crushing regulatory regime of the last administration,” Zeldin said in announcing that change.
Overhauling how EPA reviews new chemicals is also on the Project 2025 wish list. The blueprint called for redoing the Biden administration’s landmark ban on asbestos and other widespread carcinogens.
Zeldin said last week that the agency would reconsider the chemical risk framework, signaling a shift back toward the first Trump term’s strategy to assess chemicals based on uses instead of determining when a chemical poses unreasonable risks.
In an extraordinary action that could open the door for EPA to take down other regulations, Zeldin also announced that the agency would revisit the endangerment finding.
The announcement was an about-face for EPA. During the first Trump administration, the agency rejected a petition to overturn the finding, which was based on decades of scientific research on climate change.
The shift under Zeldin’s watch earned a statement of praise from the Heritage Foundation.
“In 2025, more is known about the science behind climate change, and it’s high time to take another look at the data,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the think tank, said in a news release.
An EPA spokesperson said the agency’s deregulatory efforts would protect human health and the environment and strengthen the nation’s economy.
“Every action this agency took on the most consequential day of deregulation in American history were geared toward making it more affordable for Americans to heat their homes, put gas in their cars, and lower cost of living,” the spokesperson said.
Aside from regulatory changes, Zeldin has also tried to cancel federally contracted grants to environmental nonprofits that were awarded by the Biden administration.
He has claimed that the money — tied to the Inflation Reduction Act — was given out without guardrails to protect taxpayers and accused grant recipients of having ties to Democrats. A judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked EPA from terminating the grants.
“It’s a green slush fund,” Zeldin said on Fox News this month, referring to the climate-focused Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. “It’s going to people that were in the Obama and Biden administration, it’s going to donors, and it’s not going directly to remediate that environmental issue to deliver clean air, land and water.”
The focus on grants is another idea discussed in Project 2025. The guidebook suggests that EPA stop distributing grants to nonprofits, pause grants “over a certain threshold” and ensure money goes to organizations “focused on tangible environmental improvements free from political affiliation.”
“This is probably an example of the spirit of Project 2025,” said James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s like every few days, we get this new [EPA] press release, ‘We’ve canceled 400 grants.’”
The parallels between EPA actions and Project 2025 have caught the attention of some House Democrats. Last month, two Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee accused EPA of carrying out the “radical agenda laid out in Project 2025” and demanded answers on the agency’s firing of career staff and enforcement of environmental laws.
Workforce cuts
At the direction of Vought and the Office of Management and Budget, agencies have been instructed to submit plans to cut back on staffing levels.
EPA’s plan, according to a copy leaked by House Democrats this week, proposed eliminating the Office of Research and Development and firing up to 1,155 scientists and researchers who work there.
Agency research and science was heavily discussed in Project 2025. The plan described the research office as “precautionary, bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.”
It also proposed cutting programs within the office and giving political appointees more oversight of EPA science and research.
Eliminating ORD would be “probably beyond what Project 2025 hoped for or called for,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, the former acting assistant administrator of the office who retired in 2021.
“If they move forward, and it’s not coordinated or given approval by Congress, it’s violating a lot of our regular norms about how government operates,” Orme-Zavaleta said.
EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou told POLITICO’s E&E News that no final decisions had been made about the office and that the agency was “actively listening to employees at all levels” about potential staff cuts.
Gutting the office would undermine EPA’s mission of protecting health and the environment, Orme-Zavaleta said. ORD conducts research on climate change, chemical hazards, toxic algal blooms and many other topics of importance to both states and federal agencies.
Myron Ebell, chair of the American Lands Council and a member of Trump’s transition team in 2016, said EPA will need to quickly get its political nominees confirmed in order to carry out its agenda.
The agency will face resistance on its agenda from career staffers, who are “not happy with these efforts,” he said.
“I really liked how Zeldin rolled out and made a big splash with these regulatory efforts, but the problem is they don’t have the manpower at EPA to figure out how to do these things,” Ebell said.
Project 2025 discussed federal workforce issues at length, calling on the next president to take steps to fire career civil servants across government. That process is already underway, with Trump having signed an executive order in January that gives agencies 90 days to submit recommendations on career positions that could potentially be reassigned or removed.
“You can draw a straight line from Project 2025 to a lot of things,” said Ryan Hathaway, director of the environment and climate justice program at Lawyers for Good Government. “They want to hamstring the federal government’s ability to provide civil servants a chance to do their job.”
Ebell said EPA’s actions so far are more about undoing Biden administration policies than following Project 2025. Much of what’s in the blueprint has been supported by Republican lawmakers and industry groups for years, he noted.
“There’s just an awful lot of overlap between what’s in Project 2025’s recommendations and what are generally the recommendations in the larger conservative world,” Ebell said.
A notable exception, he added, is the endangerment finding, which Project 2025 explicitly proposed updating.
“That’s big, and it was not on the table in Trump 1,” Ebell said.
Contact the reporter at mirandawillson.99.
Reporters Mike Lee and Ellie Borst contributed.
