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Senate Confirms Lee Zeldin As America’s seventeenth EPA Administrator

The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm Lee Zeldin as the nation’s 17th administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Three Democrats ― Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) ― joined all 53 Republicans to approve the former congressman from Long Island, New York, as the top environmental regulator of a country facing cascading ecological and public health crises, from worsening air pollution, mounting disasters fueled by rising global temperatures, and a growing number of plant and animal species going extinct. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) abstained from voting.

Zeldin, 44, was widely seen as one of President Donald Trump’s more moderate Cabinet nominees and represented a departure from Trump’s picks to lead the EPA during his first term in office.

In 2017, Trump placed Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who had led a lawsuit at the Supreme Court against Obama-era power plant regulations, at the helm of the EPA. The devout evangelical Christian, who cited theological arguments to challenge basic scientific methods at an agency tasked with carrying out critical research and who had limited political experience outside his home state, became a lightning rod in the first Trump administration.

Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt reacts while testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies on budget on Capitol Hill in Washington in 2018.
Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt reacts while testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies on budget on Capitol Hill in Washington in 2018.

via Associated Press

By the time Pruitt resigned in July 2018, he faced an avalanche of ethics scandals that alienated even Trump’s fervent allies in Congress. The deputy administrator Trump promoted to the top job, Andrew Wheeler, was a former coal lobbyist who called on his past experience as a Senate aide to push through the president’s deregulatory agenda. Rather than questioning the basic realities of climate change, Wheeler enacted new, weaker power plant rules that eased restrictions on coal- and gas-fired generating stations without running afoul of the EPA’s long-settled requirement to regulate planet-heating gases under the Clean Air Act.

Much like the Obama-era regulations Wheeler managed to replace, the rules never took effect. Former President Joe Biden rescinded the regulation and proposed new, stricter rules designed to avoid the legal trap that ensnared the Obama administration’s so-called Clean Power Plan.

Zeldin, a largely secular Jew born and raised on the Acela corridor in the New York City suburbs, acknowledged the reality of climate change at his Senate confirmation hearing and promised to maintain independence from the fossil fuel industry if confirmed. He served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before managing to appeal to enough Democrats in his deep-blue home state to run a surprisingly competitive race for New York governor in 2022.

In Congress, however, Zeldin repeatedly voted to cut funding to the agency he is now seeking to lead. The country’s largest environmental groups opposed his nomination, but he won the endorsement of Mandy Gunasekara, a controversial former EPA official from Trump’s first term who authored a key section on the agency in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan.

“Administrator Lee Zeldin has a proven track record of finding solutions to the nation’s most pressing energy challenges,” said Mike Sommers, the chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, the leading U.S. oil and gas lobby. “We look forward to working with him to advance American energy leadership, from developing smart, effective regulations to ensuring consumers — not the government — can choose the vehicles they drive.”

Zeldin vowed to advance Trump’s deregulatory agenda and blamed the Biden-era EPA at his Senate hearing for inflaming the nation’s cost-of-living crisis.

“We can, and we must, protect our precious environment without suffocating the economy,” he said. “A big part of this will require building private sector collaboration to promote common-sense, smart regulation that will allow American innovation to continue to lead the world.”

Zeldin recognized the EPA’s authority to limit greenhouse gases under the Endangerment Finding, a legal standard the agency adopted after the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that planet-heating gases posed a risk to public health and therefore merited regulations under the Clean Air Act. But it’s unclear how much influence the Trump loyalist will have on his boss.

Lee Zeldin, President Donald Trump's nominee to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, testifies during his Senate Environment and Public Works confirmation hearing on Jan. 16, 2025.
Lee Zeldin, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, testifies during his Senate Environment and Public Works confirmation hearing on Jan. 16, 2025.

Tom Williams via Getty Images

In a flurry of executive orders on his first day back in office, Trump directed the EPA to look into ways to object to the finding.

Evergreen Action, a climate policy group formed by former Democratic staffers, called Zeldin a “Trump loyalist” bent on advancing an “agenda of environmental destruction.”

“Just days after Trump’s brazen attempt to block funding that Americans rely on, it is deeply disappointing that some Senate Democrats failed to stand against Zeldin’s nomination,” Lena Moffitt, the executive director of Evergreen Action, said in a statement. “The American people deserve an EPA Administrator who will fight for their health and safety — not a yes-man who will look the other way while Trump breaks the law to serve his billionaire donors and polluter allies.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental group that boasted of filing more than 100 lawsuits against the first Trump administration, expressed cautious optimism that Zeldin could temper more radical elements in the White House.

“While President-elect Trump has trafficked in climate denial, today Lee Zeldin accepted the scientific consensus on the causes and reality of climate change and said that the EPA has the legal authority to treat greenhouse gases as a pollutant,” Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement after Zeldin’s initial confirmation hearing. “This is a crucial start, but only a start.”

Despite his difference in personality and politics from Pruitt, Zeldin could face similar scrutiny of his personal ethics and finances.

This month, Business Insider reported that the former congressman earned $120,500 from unnamed clients writing op-eds and giving speeches. Financial disclosures showed Zeldin received consulting payments from a Qatari businessman linked to the felony corruption case against former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). At his confirmation hearing, Democrats pressed Zeldin on past campaign donations he had received from the fossil fuel industry.

“There’s no donation that anyone has ever provided me at any point, of any amount, that is going to influence any decision that I make in this position, or beyond,” Zeldin said.