Administrator of America's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Donald Trump. Trump has praised Zeldin for moving quickly to dismantle Biden-era regulations, including climate rules affecting energy production and vehicle emissions.
In early May 2025 Zeldin announced an EPA restructuring that would return staffing to Reagan-era levels—equivalent to a 25% reduction—and dissolve the agency's Office of Research and Development, which collates independent evidence on pollution informing EPA guidelines and regulations. Trump's proposed budget would also cut EPA funding by almost 55%, scrapping what the administration called "skewed, overly-precautionary modelling" and "woke climate research".
On July 29th 2025 Zeldin announced that the EPA would rescind the "endangerment finding"—the scientific determination from 2009 that underpins its powers as a greenhouse-gas regulator—arguing that the science behind it had been "warped". He declared: "Today the green new scam ends." Even the fossil-fuel industry was not ecstatic: leaving climate policy to the states means firms would have to comply with a patchwork of divergent regulations. The House appropriations committee wants to cut the EPA's budget by 23% next year.
On February 12th 2026 Donald Trump announced the termination of the endangerment finding. Zeldin called it "the single largest deregulatory action in US history". The EPA says the repeal will save Americans more than $1.3trn by easing the burden on fossil-fuel-burning industries and reducing the need to buy electric cars. American carmakers had already begun shifting their portfolios back to combustion-engine vehicles in anticipation; EV sales in America began dropping in September 2025.
Your conscience never stops you from doing anything. It just stops you from enjoying it.