If the president taps EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to be attorney general, he’d be elevating an aggressive communicator who has spearheaded the deconstruction of safeguards against climate change — fulfilling a top goal of President Donald Trump.
But Zeldin’s pugnacious messaging style may be a liability as the administration’s policies are challenged in court. There’s already some evidence that his hyper-partisan assertions threaten to undermine EPA’s justifications for rolling back clean energy programs.
The administration is currently defending Zeldin’s decision to cancel billions of dollars in climate and environmental justice grants that were under contract when Trump returned to the White House last year. In court, judges in those cases have cited Zeldin’s statements from social media posts and interviews for being at odds with the arguments of government lawyers.
Some legal experts say Zeldin’s tendency to tailor public messaging to the MAGA base may be a double-edged sword that complicates the legal defense of his policies as EPA administrator — and could have an even greater impact if he continues to speak out of school as attorney general.
It comes as the administration faces accusations of politicizing the Justice Department after former Attorney General Pam Bondi oversaw a string of failed prosecutions targeting Trump’s perceived political enemies, before being fired earlier this month.
“I think that what Zeldin has done on a slightly smaller scale at EPA, and what Bondi has done on a larger scale at Justice are very, very similar,” said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, suggesting that Zeldin’s track record shows he might not be the right choice to restore credibility at the Justice Department.
“We should expect that Zeldin does more of the same at Justice,” he added.
EPA spokesperson Carolyn Holran disputed critics’ assertions that Zeldin’s comments conflict with the administration’s official stance on the grant terminations. She noted that the recipients of the money were told last year by EPA that there were “substantial concerns regarding program integrity” and the potential for “waste, fraud and abuse,” which she said echo Zeldin’s remarks.
The Department of Justice, which is defending the terminations in court, declined to comment.
It’s not clear whether Trump intends to pick a successor to Bondi immediately. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers suggested that might not be the case, pointing to Trump’s comment this week that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is “doing a fantastic job.”
She also defended Zeldin’s record, calling it “historic work to restore commonsense at the EPA by unleashing American energy dominance, reforming costly permitting processes, protecting American auto jobs, and ensuring every American has access to clean air and water.”
Zeldin, for his part, deflected when asked Thursday whether he and White House officials had discussed the possibility of his nomination. Almost as soon as Bondi was fired, news reports indicated Zeldin was being considered for the job.
“I absolutely love the honor of serving here as EPA administrator. It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” Zeldin said last week, adding that EPA is “where my focus is at.”
Some political analysts said Zeldin would likely have little difficulty winning Senate confirmation if he is nominated. Jimmy Gurulé, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who served as assistant attorney general under former President George H.W. Bush, said Zeldin’s red-meat messaging wouldn’t hurt his standing among Republican senators, who control the chamber.
“There’s been a consistent pattern that we’ve seen with respect to Cabinet nominations by the Trump administration; many of them are just simply not qualified,” he said. “They don’t have the requisite qualifications for the position. But yet, you know, they get 100 percent support — or near 100 percent support — from the Republican members of the Senate. And I just don’t see that there’s going to be any deviation from that pattern here.”
Zeldin’s unflinching rhetoric has made him a favorite of conservatives. Prominent climate contrarians attending a conference last week hosted by the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that rejects climate science, called him an indispensable player in ending regulations for greenhouse gases. They lamented his possible departure from EPA, where they said he’s needed to finish what he started.
Zeldin has made hundreds of appearances over the past year on conservative outlets, of which Trump is an avid consumer. Unlike Bondi, Zeldin can point to a long list of accomplishments during Trump’s second term, including canceling Biden initiatives the president has branded “the Green New Scam” and repealing the legal foundation of climate rules.
But if he is nominated and confirmed, those comments could haunt him as he oversees the legal defense of the rollbacks that he launched as EPA administrator, some legal experts say.
Zeldin’s comments have already been cited by skeptical judges. The former Republican congressman and failed New York gubernatorial candidate frequently offers reasons for policy decisions — like canceling grants en mass or revoking regulations — that are designed to please the president and his supporters, even as his assertions conflict with what government lawyers have argued in court, according to analysts and his critics.
That has appeared to erode EPA’s credibility with some judges, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
“It’s perilous to use different explanations for the same thing,” he said. “Zeldin can be very helpful to his opponents in giving them grist for the mill.”
‘Very effective communicator’
Zeldin has been a transformational leader at EPA. In just 15 months, he overhauled the agency’s structure and mission —– including by taking it out of the business of regulating climate pollution.
“It’s clearly the most aggressive deregulatory agenda that we’ve ever seen out of EPA,” said Matt Leopold, who served as the agency’s general counsel in the first Trump administration.
That agenda culminated in February with the repeal of a key climate science finding that in 2009 authorized EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.
Zeldin has made deft use of social media and frequent appearances on outlets like Fox Business and in the pages of the New York Post and The Daily Caller to galvanize Trump’s political base behind EPA policies.
“Zeldin has been a very effective communicator for the administration,” said Leopold, who is now a partner at the law firm Holland & Knight. “I think that he’s very comfortable in the public eye.”
His most consequential action to date — repealing the endangerment finding — has yet to begin judicial review.
But several cases involving EPA’s cancellation of climate law grants are already underway. And Zeldin’s rhetoric on X, the social media platform, and elsewhere has already been featured in some of them.
Within weeks of being confirmed, Zeldin froze about 400 climate and environmental justice awards that the Biden administration had signed contracts for. Then he terminated them.
Zeldin justified the sudden cancellations by asserting that the grant programs were the result of a “rush job” by the Biden administration, and amounted to a “slush fund” for politically connected nonprofits.
He worked with the Treasury Department in February 2025 to pressure Citibank to freeze the accounts of EPA’s largest Inflation Reduction Act program, a $20 billion climate finance initiative known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), a green energy and electrification effort aimed mostly at poor neighborhoods.
Internal documents showed that career attorneys warned that retaking the funds was legally risky. A career prosecutor resigned after she said U.S. Attorney Ed Martin pressured her to launch a criminal investigation and freeze the accounts at Citibank, which was acting as an intermediary for the program.
DOJ began the probe anyway. As it unfolded, Zeldin continued to claim that the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was plagued with “programmatic fraud, waste and abuse.”
When the program’s grantees took EPA to court in an attempt to regain access to their award funds, EPA chief of staff Eric Amidon stated in a March filing in district court that the recipients were selected because of their cozy relationships with Democratic administrations.
But neither DOJ nor EPA ever disclosed any irregularities associated with the program or its recipients, and DOJ lawyers argued that the cancellations were justified for other reasons, such as shifting policy priorities, not because of fraud. The DOJ declined to say whether the investigation was ongoing, citing long-standing policy.
Zeldin, meanwhile, continued to use media appearances to allege abuse linked to the program — including “kickbacks, theft and graft” by Biden officials. He sometimes lambasted reporters for requesting evidence.
EPA’s Holran told POLITICO’s E&E News in response to queries for this story that the GGRF — was marked by “documented instances of self-dealing and conflicts of interest.”
She pointed to an EPA website that highlights a surreptitiously recorded video of a Biden EPA official who described the grant making process as throwing “gold bars off the Titanic.” But the official’s attorney told The New York Times that he was discussing a different program.
‘Mr. Zeldin doesn’t like it’
Zeldin’s statements have already come up as DOJ tries to defend the cancellations in court.
Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who granted the GGRF awardees an injunction last April, challenged DOJ attorney Marc Sacks at a hearing last year to produce evidence of wrongdoing associated with the program “other than the fact that Mr. Zeldin doesn’t like it.”
Appellate judges at oral arguments last month in the same case said Zeldin’s “pungent” public statements undermined DOJ’s case.
States and environmental groups are already lining up to challenge EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding. That litigation could consume much of Trump’s term, and is key to EPA’s hopes of ending greenhouse gas regulation for good.
EPA finalized the repeal in February after it decided against challenging mainstream climate science as the basis for revoking the finding.
But despite skirting climate science as much as possible in the final repeal, Zeldin has continued to imply that the rollback was warranted because the science underpinning the 2009 finding was faulty and exaggerated.
At the Heartland Institute event in Washington last week, Zeldin inaccurately compared decades-long climate modeling to short-term weather forecasting when faulting the Obama EPA for relying on what he called pessimistic projections about the dangers facing people. He commended the audience for challenging climate science “knowing that predictions that you pushed back on won’t be proven true until 2050, or 2100.”
“You will be vindicated,” he told the gathering of climate science skeptics.
He promised that EPA would rely on “accurate, present day facts” instead of “bad, flawed assumptions.”
Holran of EPA said that despite the decision to leave climate science out of the final endangerment finding repeal, “the Administrator repeatedly stated that he lacks confidence in the scientific analysis underlying the 2009 Endangerment Finding.”
“The final rule explained that because EPA lacks authority to regulate in response to global climate change concerns under Clean Air Act section 202, it would not be appropriate to resolve these scientific questions in a rulemaking,” she said, referring to the section of the law that covers motor vehicles.
But Georgetown’s Super said Zeldin’s public comments could endanger EPA’s regulatory actions in court.
“If there continues to be a divergence between what he’s saying … and what his lawyers are telling the courts he’s doing, the courts are free to disbelieve both of them and reject the action,” he said.
Miranda Willson contributed to this report.
