Aaron Szabo, the head of EPA’s air office who has overseen a dramatic scaling back of climate regulations, is leaving the agency.
Szabo will exit EPA, the agency’s press office confirmed on Tuesday. Just shy of a year ago, he was confirmed by the Senate to the powerful post leading the Office of Air and Radiation.
“We are grateful for Aaron Szabo’s tireless work to Power the Great American Comeback,” EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch said in a statement. She noted under Szabo’s leadership, the air office rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, calling it “the largest deregulatory action in American history.”
“His team has been responsible for saving Americans trillions of dollars by cutting unnecessary red tape, showing it is possible to protect clean air while growing the economy,” Hirsch said. “We wish him all the best in his future endeavors.”
EPA’s statement didn’t address questions regarding when Szabo’s last day will be at the agency, nor who will serve as the air office’s acting assistant administrator after his departure. Szabo did not respond to questions about his departure.
During Szabo’s tenure atop the air office, EPA has moved to end much of its climate regulation, going further than during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Instead of rewriting less stringent versions of greenhouse gas rules for power plants and vehicles, the nation’s leading sources of climate pollution, Szabo helped draft rules that stripped EPA of much of its authority to combat climate change, including repealing the endangerment finding.
Still to come is a final rule repealing greenhouse gas limits for coal- and natural-gas-fired power plants, a rule ending longtime federal greenhouse gas emissions reporting requirements and a rewrite of methane rules for the oil and gas sector, in addition to a number of other deregulatory actions for rules on conventional air pollutants.
“Our predecessors believed they could force their climate agenda upon Americans and remove consumer choice,” Szabo wrote in a December op-ed. “Implementing Trump’s agenda, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking a different approach.”
Szabo, who was thanked in the EPA chapter of the conservative Project 2025 plan, kept a relatively low profile while at the agency. He discussed being diagnosed with the lung disease cystic fibrosis during his confirmation hearing, saying, “I have always been acutely aware of air quality.”
Nevertheless, he was a critical Trump appointee in the pushback against stricter air pollution controls, including soot exposure limits set by the Biden administration.
Much of that agenda must still be finished or defended in court. But if his deregulatory actions survive judicial scrutiny, Szabo will have played a key role in reshaping — and in many ways, especially when it comes to climate change, restricting — EPA’s regulatory power.
Before joining EPA as a senior adviser to Administrator Lee Zeldin at the beginning of this Trump administration, Szabo was an attorney at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, where he reported lobbying for the Advanced Medical Technology Association.
Prior to that, he spent four years as a partner at the CGCN Group, where his lobbying clients included the American Petroleum Institute, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, the American Chemistry Council, Exelon, Duke Energy and TransCanada among others.
He had been a career civil servant for 10 years, which included a stint at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Szabo also served as a policy analyst in the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and as senior counsel to the White House Council on Environmental Quality during Trump’s first term.
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