If Donald Trump learned anything from his dysfunctional first term, it was that loyalty is significantly more important than competency. After years of chaos and turnover in major cabinet-level positions, and amid comments regarding his “fascist” tendencies from former officials in the last months of the 2024 campaign, Trump’s allies have prioritized filling his second administration with unwavering loyalists who are aligned with his will.
Enter Lee Zeldin, a former congressman representing eastern Long Island from 2015 to 2023, whom Trump nominated as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator on Monday. Zeldin has no meaningful experience with environmental policy — but he is a prominent Trump defender. The fact that his loyalty alone apparently qualifies him to lead Trump’s EPA signals how detrimental his leadership will likely be to the future of clean air and water in the United States.
In Trump’s announcement, he stated that Zeldin will “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses.” Zeldin subsequently accepted the nomination, responding: “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”
The two EPA administrators of Trump’s first term were Scott Pruitt, an anti-environment lawyer who resigned following a slew of ethics violations, and Andrew Wheeler, a lawyer who initially worked for the EPA during the Bill Clinton years. After getting his MBA, Wheeler worked as a staffer for Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who brought a snowball to the Senate floor to prove that climate change was a hoax, and later lobbied for the coal industry.
Zeldin, for his part, is an Army Reserve officer and lawyer who served in Congress from 2015 to 2023. He was one of the fiercest critics of the federal…
Auteur: Casey Wetherbee
