Trump EPA Repeals 31 Environmental Rules In Single Day, Resolving Long-Standing Industry Concern That EPA Continues To Exist

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced 31 separate deregulatory actions in a single news conference Wednesday, declaring it "the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history" and clearing in roughly fifteen minutes a regulatory backlog that had accumulated across the previous half-century of legal protection for American air, water, and land.

The 31 actions, delivered at a podium and unaccompanied by any deliberative process, target the endangerment finding that underpins federal climate authority, mercury and air toxics standards, power plant greenhouse gas rules, wastewater limits for coal plants, hazardous waste handling rules, and what one summary document described as "everything else that was bothering people."

According to sources within the administration, the rollbacks were assembled over a long weekend by a small team that consulted lobbyist memoranda, the Project 2025 chapter on the EPA, and a list provided by oil and gas trade associations identifying which rules they would prefer not to exist. The team, the sources said, was instructed to do "whatever the form letter says, but faster."

Asked whether the agency would conduct the cost-benefit analyses required by federal law before finalizing the rollbacks, sources within the administration said the analyses would be "back-filled in due course," and noted that the benefits of the rules being repealed had been "rebalanced to reflect the priorities of the present administration," a process they confirmed involved setting the value of a human life at zero in cases where regulating would inconvenience a donor.

Career EPA scientists, asked for comment, declined and instead forwarded reporters copies of their own resignation letters, several of which were dated for the previous calendar year.

At press time, Zeldin had announced a 32nd rollback, a rule preventing the EPA Administrator from announcing 31 rollbacks in a single day.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, whose donor base is heavily concentrated in fossil fuels and industries that face EPA enforcement.
§Lee Zeldin, a former real estate attorney who used the announcement to rebrand his career as a record-setting deregulator.
§American Petroleum Institute and the broader oil and gas lobby, whose deregulatory wish list was implemented essentially as drafted.
§Coal industry, granted a fresh reprieve via loosened mercury, coal ash, and power plant emissions standards.
§Chemical manufacturers, freed from cumulative risk reviews, hazardous waste constraints, and toxic release reporting expectations.
§Polluting facilities in poor and rural communities, where cumulative exposure was the chief beneficiary of the rules now being unwound.
§Industry trial lawyers and law firms on retainer, paid to delay every prior regulation and now paid again to draft the rollbacks.
§Project 2025 authors, whose operating manual the administration adopted despite candidate Trump's claim not to have read it.
§Russia, China, and other petrostates, who welcome the voluntary relinquishment of U.S. climate leadership.
§Future deregulatory administrations, given precedent that rules may be unwound by press conference rather than by the customary notice-and-comment process.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment