A Democracy Drive Thread
The agency created to protect American air and water is being run by a man who calls its grant money “gold bars” to be clawed back. A 65% budget cut, 31 pollution rollbacks in a single day, the environmental-justice offices closed, and the scientific finding that gives the EPA power over greenhouse gases at all marked for repeal.
Lee Zeldin took over an agency with a statutory mission — protect human health and the environment — and set about reducing its capacity to do so. This thread tracks the EPA specifically: the budget and staff cuts, the deregulatory blitz, the grants terminated mid-stream, the offices closed, and the legal foundations pulled out from under the agency's own authority.
It sits alongside three related threads and deliberately does not repeat them. [[big-oil]] follows the money and the people — who bought this and who was installed to deliver it. [[anti-climate]] follows the climate specifically: Paris, coal, and the defunding of climate science. [[anti-environment]] follows the physical environment — public land, water, forests, and wildlife. Where a single action belongs to more than one of these, the same record appears on each.
February 26, 2025
On the ground
In late February 2025, Trump said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin would cut the agency by 65%; the White House then clarified he meant a 65% cut to EPA spending, not staff. Zeldin embraced it, telling Spectrum News he thought “the EPA can save even more than 65 percent of our budget year over year” and calling the figure “a low number.” Three former EPA administrators warned that cuts of that scale would leave the agency unable to protect Americans from threats to their air, water, and land. The administration’s budget later proposed slashing EPA funding by roughly half.
March 4, 2025
On the ground
On March 4, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in City and County of San Francisco v. EPA that the Clean Water Act does not let the EPA write “end-result” conditions into discharge permits — the broad provisions barring a polluter from causing or contributing to a violation of water-quality standards. The agency must now spell out each specific action a permit-holder must take, rather than holding it responsible for the actual cleanliness of the water it discharges into. Environmental groups warned the ruling strips regulators of a key backstop against pollution in the nation’s rivers, lakes, and bays.
March 11, 2025
On the ground
On March 11, 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin moved to terminate roughly $20 billion in grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund — the Inflation Reduction Act’s “green bank,” meant to finance clean-energy and emissions-cutting projects — sending immediate termination notices to eight nonprofit recipients and freezing funds already parked at an outside bank. Awardees sued and courts scrutinized the legality of the clawback; Congress later repealed the fund’s remaining money in the July 2025 tax law. In August 2026 the full D.C. Circuit, in a divided ruling, held the terminations unlawful and restored the injunction, reversing a September 2025 panel decision; the money was held back to give the EPA time to appeal to the Supreme Court.
March 12, 2025
On the ground
On March 12, 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled 31 simultaneous deregulatory actions targeting rules on air, water, and climate pollution from power plants, oil and gas operations, vehicles, and factories — and moved to reconsider the 2009 “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health that underpins virtually all federal climate regulation. Zeldin called it “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.” The agency also announced it was closing its environmental-justice offices.
On the ground
In early 2025 the EPA placed 171 environmental-justice and DEI staff on administrative leave, and on March 12, 2025, Administrator Lee Zeldin ordered the closure of the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights along with the environmental-justice divisions in all ten EPA regions — ending more than three decades of federal work to address pollution concentrated in low-income and minority communities. The EPA later moved to lay off nearly 280 of those employees, citing Trump’s executive order ending government DEI programs.
March 14, 2025
On the ground
On March 14, 2025, Trump signed a Congressional Review Act resolution nullifying the EPA rule that would have implemented the Inflation Reduction Act’s “Waste Emissions Charge” — the first-ever federal fee on a greenhouse gas, levied on oil and gas operators for excess methane, a pollutant far more potent than carbon dioxide. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that scrapping the fee would cost taxpayers about $7.2 billion in lost revenue over a decade.
April 11, 2025
On the ground
More than 50,000 people in Alabama’s Black Belt pipe raw sewage into open trenches and pits because the dense soil defeats conventional septic systems. A federal civil-rights investigation concluded in 2023 that Alabama had failed to address a sanitation crisis falling overwhelmingly on Black residents; the state signed an interim settlement unlocking federal money for septic tanks built for the soil. In April 2025 the Justice Department terminated that agreement, announcing it was “advancing President Trump’s mandate to end illegal DEI and environmental justice policies.” The EPA separately cancelled an $8 million grant for roughly 300 septic tanks, and a further $14 million earmarked for septic systems and workforce training across Lowndes, Hale and Wilcox counties. Rep. Terri Sewell: “This agreement had nothing to do with DEI. It was about addressing a public health crisis.”
“This agreement had nothing to do with DEI. It was about addressing a public health crisis that has forced generations of children and families to endure the health hazards of living in proximity to raw sewage.”
May 14, 2025
In May 2025, EPA Administrator Zeldin announced the agency would give water utilities two more years — until 2031 — to meet limits on the “forever chemicals” PFOA and PFOS, and would rescind entirely the 2024 drinking-water limits on four other PFAS compounds (GenX, PFHxS, PFNA, PFBS). More than 73 million Americans are served by water systems that have detected PFAS above those limits, which are linked to cancer, immune harm, and developmental problems.
June 16, 2025
On the ground
EPA official Lynn Dekleva wrote in June 2025 that the agency would weigh whether the ban “went beyond what is necessary,” in a review the EPA said could take 30 months, while the ban stayed in effect. After public backlash, the administration reversed course weeks later and said it would defend the ban in court.
July 29, 2025
On July 29, 2025, the EPA proposed to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding — the scientific determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, which is the legal foundation for every federal climate rule — along with all greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles. Officials framed the move as ending the “climate change religion.” Scientists and environmental groups sued, noting the Energy Department report used to justify it contradicted the overwhelming scientific consensus.
November 18, 2025
On the ground
On November 5, 2025 the EPA approved the PFAS pesticide cyclobutrifluram for agricultural use. Thirteen days later it approved isocycloseram for golf courses, lawns and food crops including oranges, tomatoes, almonds, peas and oats. Isocycloseram degrades into more than 40 smaller PFAS compounds, some more environmentally persistent than the original. EPA’s own assessment found pollinators could be exposed to 1,500 times the lethal dose simply by collecting nectar and pollen near treated fields; documented health effects in study animals include reduced testicle size, lowered sperm count and liver toxicity. The approvals came from the same agency that, six months earlier, moved to weaken drinking-water limits on PFAS already in the water supply.
December 9, 2025
On the ground
An October 2025 version of the page, saved by the Wayback Machine, said human activities had released large amounts of carbon dioxide and that natural processes do not explain the warming observed over the last century. By December, the page mentioned only natural phenomena. Seven scientists and three former EPA officials told the AP the change is misleading. “Ignoring fossil fuel pollution as the driving force behind the climate changes we have seen in our lifetime is like pretending cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer,” said former EPA climate adviser Jeremy Symons.
January 12, 2026
On the ground
Trump’s EPA says it will stop counting the lives saved and health benefits of cutting fine-particle and ozone pollution, weighing only industry’s costs. No previous administration had valued human life at zero. The Biden EPA had estimated its soot rule would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths by 2032, with up to $77 in health benefits for every $1 spent.
February 20, 2026
On the ground
EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi announced the repeal of the tightened Mercury and Air Toxics Standards at the Mill Creek Generating Station in Louisville, saying it “rights the wrongs of the last administration’s rule” and will save hundreds of millions of dollars. Coal plants are the largest human source of mercury, which falls into waterways and enters the food chain through fish. Mercury and other toxic emissions harm children’s brain development and contribute to heart attacks in adults. Former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said weakening “pollution limits and monitoring for brain-damaging mercury” spikes “any attempt to make America – and our children – healthy.” Health and environmental groups sued in March.