Trump Spends First Half Of Second Term Dismantling Federal Climate Protection, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Government Was Still Trying To Slow The Warming Of The Planet

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration confirmed this week that 15 months of sustained federal action against environmental regulation had succeeded in its core objective, ensuring that the United States government is no longer meaningfully engaged in the project of slowing the warming of the planet on which it is located.

The effort began on the first day of the term, when the President again withdrew the country from the Paris Climate Accord, declared a "national energy emergency" to accelerate fossil fuel projects, and halted federal approvals for offshore wind. In the months that followed, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to reconsider the scientific "endangerment finding" that serves as the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases, rescinded vehicle tailpipe standards, and, in a single afternoon, announced 31 separate rollbacks that Administrator Lee Zeldin described as the largest deregulatory action in American history. The administration characterized the dismantling of the rules as the completion of a long-delayed promise rather than the abandonment of one.

"We are drilling, we are mining, and we are doing it on land that was being wasted on protection," said a senior administration official, who noted that the reopening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the National Petroleum Reserve, and several national forests had freed acreage previously committed only to remaining intact. "The previous people wanted to leave it in the ground. We respectfully disagree."

To ensure the policy could not be easily reversed, the administration laid off thousands of researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the EPA, and the U.S. Geological Survey, disbanded scientific advisory boards at the EPA and the Interior Department, and removed references to climate change from federal websites. Officials explained that the simultaneous elimination of the rules and of the personnel capable of measuring their effect represented sound management, since a problem that is no longer monitored cannot generate inconvenient data about itself.

By early 2026 the administration had ordered a review aimed at stripping protections from multiple national monuments, citing a 1906 conservation law that it noted had been conserving land for well over a century without interruption. Department of the Interior representatives stressed that the warming itself would continue uninterrupted, and that the United States would experience the resulting heat, flooding, and wildfire on the same schedule as every other nation, now without the administrative burden of attempting to prevent it.

At press time, the administration confirmed that it considered the threat of federal climate policy to be fully neutralized, citing the steadily shrinking number of rules, scientists, and protected acres left to defend.