An Inside Job

One of the more insidious tactics used by powerful climate denialists is to sabotage the proper function of environmental regulators by depriving them of funds and/or personnel. For example, in North Carolina, one of the first moves of a Republican-led legislature was to slash the budget of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. In the following years, lawmakers would refuse to incorporate the state’s own data and findings in planning decisions.

On the federal level, this approach has plagued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at various points since its inception in 1970. In 1981, Ronald Reagan named Anne Gorsuch (mother of current Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch) as administrator of the EPA despite her having no expertise in environmental affairs. Her role was as a deregulator, along with many of Reagan’s other cabinet appointees, and during her tenure she severely downsized the agency and weakened federal air and water quality standards.

Notably, Gorsuch’s EPA saw a stark decline in enforcement actions against polluters, which reflected her perspective that the enemies were those within her own agency fighting to protect the environment rather than the corporations responsible for polluting it. She eventually was forced to resign in April 1983 after being held in contempt of Congress amid corruption allegations related to mismanagement of the Superfund program, which is responsible for cleaning up abandoned toxic waste sites.

Gorsuch’s tenure as EPA administrator had an ignominious end, but Republican operatives have still emulated her approach — namely, attempting to destroy from within. Donald Trump’s EPA was initially led by one of the agency’s fiercest enemies, Scott Pruitt, who sued it several times as Oklahoma attorney general. It follows that the EPA under Trump explicitly favored industry leaders over scientists and experts, relaxed dozens of key environmental rules, and dramatically underenforced federal environmental laws. Coincidentally, Pruitt also resigned following allegations of ethics violations.

These subversive appointments pose a serious problem. But even greater damage comes from the methodical dismantling of environmental protections that follows — a strategy that Republicans are already planning to escalate in the future.

Death By a Thousand Cuts

A second Trump term would almost certainly follow the standard Republican blueprint for shrinking and defanging the EPA. Project 2025 contains an expansive chapter on the EPA, declaring that the EPA under the Biden administration has pursued an “expansive, costly, and economy-destroying agenda” and decrying “activism” and “vendetta-driven enforcement.” The chapter’s nearly thirty pages go into specifics on how to roll back regulations in a range of areas, from air quality to hydrofluorocarbons to radiation. Its author also calls for climate policy to be the domain of individual states, rather than that of the federal regulator.

The concept of minimum federal standards is a bedrock of US climate policy dating back to the foundational environmental laws of the twentieth century, such as the Clean Air Act (1963) and the Clean Water Act (1972). At their core, these laws enable the EPA to enact and enforce regulations across a range of environmental indicators. The EPA also provides guidance to state and tribal authorities that may wish to develop their own standards, as long as they meet the baseline federal criteria.

Given this foundation, the insinuation of conservative ideologues that states should create environmental standards “from the ground up” is a radical departure from decades of norms and legal precedent. It should go without saying that these federal minimum standards are not incredibly restrictive, which is why states elect to create their own environmental regulations. But it is still important that the EPA maintain its baseline standards as well as a watchful eye for violators. When state regulators are vulnerable to elite capture, as the previous example of North Carolina in the 2010s demonstrates, minimum federal standards ensure that polluting industries do not have free rein.

While Republicans lead the charge in undermining environmental protections, corporate influence crosses party lines. Democratic lawmakers have also at times sided with polluting industries — particularly in energy-producing states — by supporting weaker emissions standards or backing fossil fuel projects. Still, it’s Republicans who have led the charge to tear down regulatory power, as we can see clearly in the stark differences between how Trump and Joe Biden have run the EPA.

Past examples of Republican-led sabotage of both state and federal environmental regulators make clear that the goal is not just to weaken or roll back the rules and regulations, but also to reduce the regulators’ enforcement capacity. By cutting budgets and reducing personnel under the guise of bringing wasteful government spending under control, the conservative agenda wishes to render these agencies toothless, unable if not unwilling to investigate and enforce against corporate wrongdoers.

This systematic gutting of our climate policy infrastructure also includes getting rid of scientists who are responsible for the research that informs our environmental standards, whom those on the Right would malign as political activists. The case of North Carolina also demonstrates, however, that even when climate experts share their findings and indicators, policymakers can choose to enact laws specifically excluding those findings from new requirements.

It is clear that Trump and his allies are uninterested in meaningfully addressing climate change and are more inclined to pursue policies that enrich themselves and their corporate cronies. Even the stricter rules and tighter regulations that the Biden administration has succeeded in enacting would only find themselves on the chopping block during a second Trump term.

A healthy, functioning EPA, along with state-level environmental regulating bodies, must be empowered to investigate and enforce against corporate malfeasance. Decades of precedent illustrate that Republican governance of these institutions, however, would only result in the subversion of their intended function — for the benefit of corporate greed, and to the detriment of clean air, climate adaptation, and Americans’ overall standard of living.