FROM: Sara Chieffo, Vice President of Government Affairs, League of Conservation Voters
TO: Interested Parties
MEMO: The Trump Administration’s Anti-Environmental Executive Actions are an Extreme Abuse of Presidential Authority and a Disaster for Public Health and the Climate

In just the few weeks since the Big Ugly Bill was signed into law, the Trump administration has doubled-down on destroying our nation’s growing clean energy production and gone even further to torch climate science and environmental protections. These actions will decimate the progress of some of America’s best and brightest scientists, undermine fundamental public health protections, and drive up families’ energy bills. These moves are an aggressive escalation of the Administration’s egregious overreach in trying to halt American innovation and kill clean energy projects without regard to the economic and environmental consequences.

Science Got in the Way, so Trump Eliminated It

On Friday, the Trump Administration announced it would eliminate the EPA’s Office of Research and Development and begin laying off hundreds of scientists and experts whose work and research is behind the regulations intended to protect the health of families across America.   

• This is a calculated effort to shut down independent science that could interfere with polluter-friendly actions. 
• These actions will threaten the health and safety of communities as the Trump Administration dismantles the offices and programs that track air pollution, toxic chemical exposure, contaminated drinking water, and more. 
• Disguised as an attempt to save the federal government money, this move is really just a gift to chemical and oil companies trying to hide the public health consequences they’re responsible for causing.

Career Staff Forced Out at the Behest of Right-Wing Interests

Last week, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin doubled-down on gutting his agency in another staff reorganization, further hollowing out EPA’s significant expertise, sidelining apolitical civil servants, and giving professional polluters a greater foothold at the agency. 

• The increasingly hostile work environment at EPA will jeopardize the basic mission of the agency. Major EPA functions like enforcement and Superfund cleanup are being gutted, buried, or folded into other offices and managed by the remaining staff who are strained and overworked.
• Career staff who’ve spent decades protecting air and water are being pushed out. Their expertise is being lost at a moment of rising climate-fueled disasters, and is clearing the way for industry-aligned political appointees to call the shots behind closed doors.
• The groups supporting this action are the very same ones who deny climate change and the growing severity and frequency of extreme weather events.

Trump’s So-Called AI Energy Plan is Just a Big Gift to Polluters

Today, President Trump released his AI action plan, which he previewed at the  Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh last Tuesday where he praised coal and gas as the future of AI, while banks, tech, and fossil fuel companies outlined plans to spend $90 billion to meet AI energy demands. The Trump administration can’t claim to be “modernizing the grid” when it is forcing utilities to keep aging, uneconomic coal plants online at an enormous public expense.

• These fossil fuel power plants have long been slated for closure due to health risks, high costs, and carbon pollution. Trump’s plan reverses that, forcing ratepayers to subsidize dirty power while blocking clean grid modernization efforts.
• The DOE analysis “justifying” forcing coal plants to remain online is based on the deceptive assumption that hundreds of gigawatts of planned solar, wind and battery projects won’t come online, even though they’re often the lowest-cost and quickest to deploy.

Trump Interior Department Imposes New Political Screens to Kill Solar and Wind Projects

On July 15th, the Department of the Interior (DOI) issued a sweeping new memo aimed squarely at delaying or killing clean energy projects, creating new review procedures that could destroy solar and wind energy projects by subjecting them to political screening. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) described this action as “playing favorites” and “putting the final nail into” the Senate’s hard-fought compromise to preserve solar and wind tax credits.  

• The policy imposes 69 separate layers of political review—major and minor decision points alike—giving Interior Secretary Doug Burgum broad authority to pick winners and losers in America’s energy future.
• This move would go beyond threatening projects on public lands. In an aggressive overreach, even private clean energy projects that require DOI involvement could get caught in the crosshairs, adding delay, uncertainty, and new layers of political red tape at the worst possible time.
• DOI’s action even threatens short transmission lines and upgrades to transmission facilities that require DOI review if they connect solar and wind projects on private lands to the grid – a direct attack on America’s ability to keep up with growing energy demand.
• With electricity demand surging, thanks in large part to AI-driven data center growth, this move threatens to push energy prices higher for families and make it harder to bring clean energy online quickly.

Looking Ahead to Continued Attacks

Earlier this month, the EPA quietly submitted a proposal to rollback the 2009 endangerment finding, the legal backbone of key federal climate protections on the books, as well as the agency’s tailpipe emission standards for cars and trucks, despite the well-known understanding of the harms of vehicle pollution on human health. Repealing the EPA’s declaration of the health harms of greenhouse gases would erase the federal government’s legal obligation to act on climate. 

• Trump and EPA Administrator Zeldin, in the pocket of the oil and gas industry, want to free EPA of any responsibility to regulate and address dangerous greenhouse gases, while erasing the legal basis for action on GHGs under the Clean Air Act to make it harder for future Administrations to act.
• The EPA’s own analysis found that the transportation sector accounts for the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions–rolling back these standards would cause more than 8 billion tons of additional climate pollution to be emitted into the atmosphere by 2055.

Bottom Line

The Trump Administration’s systematic dismantling of environmental protections in just the last few weeks represents a ramp up of their unprecedented assault on public health, climate action, and energy affordability. The elimination of critical scientific investments, replacement of career experts, creation of bureaucratic roadblocks to clean energy, and blatant disregard for the law all indicate the Trump Administration’s fundamental rejection of the federal government’s responsibility to protect American families from environmental harm and costly energy demands. These destructive policies will cement decades of environmental rollbacks that will be felt by Americans today and long into the future through higher energy costs, dirtier air and water, and worsening climate impacts. 

###