EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says the Trump administration is poised to launch the most sweeping deregulatory campaign in American history — one that, in his words, will outpace “entire federal governments … across entire presidencies.”
“We will in one year do more deregulation than entire federal governments in the past have done across all federal agencies,” Zeldin said during a policy discussion with Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matt Boyle.
Zeldin framed this effort as a corrective to what he described as policy failures by the Biden EPA, particularly from 2023 and 2024. “We inherited a big mess,” he asserted. “We want to fix everything, large, small … We want to do it all at the same exact time.”
Central to that agenda is a proposed rescission of the Obama-era 2009 “endangerment finding,” which served as the legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. Zeldin called it “the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States of America.”
He pointed to specific rules that the finding made possible, including what he characterized as “those annoying off-cycle credits” and the automatic engine stop-start systems that shut vehicles down at red lights or stop signs. These, he suggested, were exactly the kind of burdens the administration intends to eliminate if the rescission is finalized.
He criticized the 2009 finding as a legal stretch built on “mental leaps,” mocking its logic as backwards. “I read through the Obama endangerment finding from 2009, and all through it I find these examples where it talks about how Section 202 of the Clean Air Act doesn’t say we can’t, so therefore, I guess we can,” he contended.
Zeldin stated the EPA will “follow the plain language of the law,” especially in light of recent Supreme Court rulings that limit agency discretion. He pointed to Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which overturned the Chevron doctrine, along with Sackett, West Virginia v. EPA, and Michigan v. EPA, as support for his view that Congress, not the agency, should decide whether to pursue massive greenhouse gas regulations.
“These cases make clear — if an agency like EPA is going to have regulations into the hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, maybe that should be a debate in Congress,” Zeldin remarked. “Maybe they should have a vote. Maybe they should decide, instead of unelected bureaucrats, and some federal agency doing all that because Congress didn’t have the will — so they punted to their friends over at some agency to grab power themselves with some creative interpretation of the law.”
If Americans want greenhouse gas regulations, he maintained, they should lobby lawmakers to rewrite the law, and then “we follow the law.”
“We’re going to follow our statutory obligations. It’s a wild concept that’s upsetting a lot of people, but we’re not going to be apologetic about it. We’re proudly fulfilling this agenda,” Zeldin concluded.
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