President Donald Trump loves to tap a loyal point man for a big project.
So when he wanted to escalate a fight with California Gov. Gavin Newsom over housing permits, he enlisted his EPA boss, Lee Zeldin.
The country’s top environmental regulator might seem an odd pick to lead Trump’s fight over expediting housing permits — a typically local issue — in Los Angeles. But assigning Zeldin to the job gives Trump the chance to install a trusted front man and reliable messenger in the president’s campaign to shame the blue state and his adversary Newsom over the response to the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles in early 2025.
“The president has a lot of confidence in Administrator Zeldin. I think he’s probably the right person for it,” said Tom Pyle, head of the conservative American Energy Alliance who led Trump’s energy transition team ahead of the president’s first term.
As this midterm election year kicks off — and with an eye toward a possible Newsom presidential run — political experts see some obvious upsides for Trump and Zeldin leaning into policy fights with California. Criticizing the deep-blue state’s policies can curry favor with conservatives and moderates alike. And laying groundwork for policy attacks against Newsom could pay off for Republicans in 2028 or beyond.
“I think fighting against progressive policies plays really well in swing states,” said Bryan Lanza, a Republican strategist who worked in California politics and as a Trump communications official.
“The case study of California should be the canary in a coal mine to what progressive policies can do when they’re in governance,” Lanza said. “The case to the country is that California is a failed state as a result of failed policies instituted by a failed governor.”
‘He’s done an amazing job’
Zeldin’s stock in Trump world is sky-high, as evidenced by this latest assignment.
The EPA boss last week appeared in back-to-back White House events alongside the president to tout the administration’s energy agenda and to announce the formal repeal of the “endangerment finding” — the linchpin of EPA climate rules whose execution has long been seen as the holy grail for critics of environmental regulations. Trump referred to Zeldin as his “secret weapon” at a White House event last week.
And the president sent Zeldin to the Munich Security Conference last week to represent the administration on the world stage.
Trump regularly lavishes praise on his EPA boss, which he did at a Jan. 28 event when he announced Zeldin would be in charge of a federal effort to speed up permits in California. The president also used the chance to take a swipe at Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
“Override those people. Those people are incompetent,” Trump told Zeldin. “Between the mayor and the governor, they’re incompetent.”
The president and Zeldin elaborated on the permitting plans in a White House Cabinet meeting the next day.
Trump called the New York congressman-turned-environmental regulator a “very capable man.” He’s the “most reliable, solid guy, and he’s done an amazing job,” the president said.
Zeldin embraced the task, praising the president for his effort to strip authority from state and local governments to permit the rebuilding of homes and other structures destroyed in the January 2025 fires.
Days later, the EPA boss was on the ground in Los Angeles, slamming local “permitting delays and red tape” and attacking the governor.
Newsom “goes campaigning to be president in 2028, trying to lob insults at the president all day, every day,” Zeldin said at a news conference in the fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades in early February. “Like in between insult four and five of the day, he’s like, ‘Oh by the way, where’s my tens of billions of dollars?’”
Newsom and others insist that instead of trying to muscle in on the permitting process that’s always been under the control of local governments, Trump should be assisting recovery by acting on the governor’s long-standing $33 billion request for long-term aid.
“In true Trump fashion, Lee Zeldin’s appointment to this imaginary position in LA’s recovery is more about optics than helping survivors — Zeldin has zero role in issuing rebuilding permits,” Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos said in a statement. “The fact that his only contribution has been to suggest that the Governor should stop calling out the Trump Administration for its complete failure here says everything you need to know about their commitment to this community.”
Disaster recovery experts say Trump’s bid to dramatically expand federal power over housing permits is legally dubious.
“I don’t know that it’s going to really ever fly,” said Daniel Farber, faculty director of the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at UC Berkeley Law. “It’s hard to even know if it’s supposed to or whether it’s just an effort to take a shot at a blue state.”
No love lost
Both Newsom and Zeldin have embraced the fight as they publicly blast each other on policies including housing permits and auto rules.
EPA in January dealt a blow to California on the environmental front when Zeldin’s agency said a state regulation applying inspection and maintenance requirements to out-of-state trucks was unlawful and wouldn’t count toward the state’s pollution reduction requirements.
Zeldin led the Trump administration’s work with the Republican-led Congress to ax Biden-era regulations that allowed California to adopt vehicle emission standards tougher than the federal requirements. The move was part of the administration’s broader assault on policies promoting electric vehicles.
“We can call it a political fight,” Lanza said. “This is a policy fight.” And there’s no better person than Zeldin “to push back against radical policies that hurt America’s national security than somebody who actually sees the ramifications of this Green New Deal agenda.”
Newsom is no Zeldin fan, either.
The California governor penned a letter to Zeldin last fall assailing EPA’s plans to repeal the endangerment finding.
EPA’s plan to reverse the finding — which has since been finalized — was “bad policy, a dereliction of duty, a moral abdication, and a betrayal of the very mission entrusted to you,” Newsom told Zeldin last fall.
After EPA formalized the repeal last week, Newsom said the move “betrays the American people and cements the Republican Party’s status as the pro-pollution party.”
Asked about his relationship with Newsom during his visit to Munich over the weekend, Zeldin sidestepped the politics, saying his focus was on helping Californians to rebuild.
A year after the fire, Zeldin said, Trump “had heard from so many people who lost everything in the fires dealing with nonfederal logjams. And the president just decided, with that frustration, that he wanted me and others to utilize our efforts to help break through these nonfederal roadblocks.”
On the ground, it’s unclear at best how the latest federal intervention will affect wildfire recovery.
So far, the Small Business Administration is allowing property owners to certify they’re facing permitting delays and begin to draw down their loans and start building. But this intervention mirrors a local process already available to residents, and it still anticipates a large role from city and county inspectors to review development plans and sign off on final construction. Trump’s executive order called for regulators to provide more details about their permitting initiative in the coming weeks.
Additionally, surveys of survivors show that financial issues have been a much more common barrier to rebuilding than permitting. Zeldin told reporters in Los Angeles during his visit that he was shocked to learn the depth of problems residents were having with receiving payouts from their insurance companies.
EPA’s primary motivation is “to help wildfire victims who have waited over 13 months to rebuild their lives,” the agency’s press office said in response to questions about the politics of sending Zeldin in to work on permits.
“Administrator Zeldin led the largest wildfire cleanup in agency history at TRUMP SPEED, and he has proven his ability to get massive projects done fast and done right,” EPA said. “Further, he has a great relationship with Mayor Karen Bass, spanning from their time in Congress, which has allowed EPA to work in close coordination with the City of Los Angeles, as well as the County.”
Although Zeldin and Bass served together in the U.S. House, Trump’s own language toward the Los Angeles mayor has been more derisive.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Trump decided to appoint Zeldin and Small Business Administration boss Kelly Loeffler to help rebuild due to “the lack of leadership and initiative exhibited by Governor Newscum and Mayor Bass,” using the derogatory version of Newsom’s last name regularly employed by the president.
Trump vs. Newsom
The long-standing Trump-versus-Newsom feud escalated over the weekend after the California governor announced that he’d signed a clean energy pact with the United Kingdom.
Trump called the deal “inappropriate” and derided Newsom as a “loser” in an interview with POLITICO. “Everything he’s touched turns to garbage. His state has gone to hell, and his environmental work is a disaster,” Trump said.
Newsom’s advisers see Trump’s public outrage against the governor as a win for the California governor. And Newsom publicly embraces the fight against the president.
“Donald Trump is temporary,” Newsom said in Munich last week. “He’ll be gone in three years.”
Newsom is aware that the wildfire recovery effort “is going to be a lasting part of his legacy and he has done everything in his power to try to expedite the process of rebuilding in a smart and efficient way,” said a California Democratic strategist who was granted anonymity to speak freely about political relationships.
“The idea of the president sending out his own guy to knock some heads together, that may just be wishful thinking, but it’s also an opportunity for Newsom to show that this is a priority for him too,” the strategist said. “This governor has shown he is always willing to be a partner in times of crisis and hopefully the administrator is a collaborative partner and not being sent out here to fan political flames.”
