Trump picks former congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the EPA

“He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” Trump said in a statement.

The EPA will play a direct role in Trump’s pledges to speed the construction of gas-fired power plants and curb President Joe Biden-era regulations that reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from the electric and transportation sectors.

Zeldin would take office with a sweeping mandate to roll back several rules targeting power plant pollution. The measures are seen as hastening the closure of coal-fired power plants, even as US demand for electricity soars to serve data centers, factories and other needs. The agency pulled a similar maneuver during Trump’s first term in office, easing former President Barack Obama’s sweeping Clean Power Plan and replacing it with more lenient pollution targets.

Zeldin, in a social media post, said he would work to “restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI.”

Zeldin is a former Republican Congressman who represented the eastern end of New York’s Long Island from 2015 through 2023, after spending four years in the New York State Senate. He’s a Jewish army veteran, who ran for governor of New York in 2022 but lost by six points to incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul.

His record on the environment is mixed. In 2018, he joined a bipartisan delegation of New York lawmakers including Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, to call on then-Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke to oppose drilling off the coast of Long Island.

The League of Conservation Voters has given Zeldin a lifetime score of only 14% for routinely voting against environmental legislation while in Congress. In his final year in office, in 2022, his score was only 5%.

Praise, criticism

“It’s going to be great with someone with a fresh perspective coming to institute major reforms,” Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the agency during Trump’s first term, said in an interview. “If Lee Zeldin can turn around the Republican party across New York, he’s absolutely the man to turn around the EPA.”

Environmentalists blasted the choice on Monday. Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, said the decision to name “an unqualified, anti-American worker who opposes efforts to safeguard our clean air and water lays bare Donald Trump’s intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs and our future out to corporate polluters.”

Trump has made clear he wants to see the EPA rewrite tailpipe pollution standards set under Biden for model years 2027-2032 that are so strict they effectively compel automakers to sell more electric and plug-in-hybrid models.

Zeldin may also be tasked with relocating EPA headquarters to outside Washington. Members of the president-elect’s transition team have been discussing moving the roughly 7,000 federal employees at EPA elsewhere, the New York Times reported last week.

Zeldin is the second Republican from Trump’s birth state to be selected for the Cabinet, after he tapped Elise Stefanik over the weekend as his ambassador to the United Nations. Both appointments were first reported by the New York Post.

When he was in Congress, Zeldin helped mount Trump’s impeachment defense.

(By Ari Natter and Jennifer A. Dlouhy)