If Donald Trump learned anything from his dysfunctional first term, it was that loyalty is significantly more important than competency. After years of chaos and turnover in major cabinet-level positions, and amid comments regarding his “fascist” tendencies from former officials in the last months of the 2024 campaign, Trump’s allies have prioritized filling his second administration with unwavering loyalists who are aligned with his will.

Enter Lee Zeldin, a former congressman representing eastern Long Island from 2015 to 2023, whom Trump nominated as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator on Monday. Zeldin has no meaningful experience with environmental policy — but he is a prominent Trump defender. The fact that his loyalty alone apparently qualifies him to lead Trump’s EPA signals how detrimental his leadership will likely be to the future of clean air and water in the United States.

In Trump’s announcement, he stated that Zeldin will “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses.” Zeldin subsequently accepted the nomination, responding: “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”

The two EPA administrators of Trump’s first term were Scott Pruitt, an anti-environment lawyer who resigned following a slew of ethics violations, and Andrew Wheeler, a lawyer who initially worked for the EPA during the Bill Clinton years. After getting his MBA, Wheeler worked as a staffer for Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who brought a snowball to the Senate floor to prove that climate change was a hoax, and later lobbied for the coal industry.

Zeldin, for his part, is an Army Reserve officer and lawyer who served in Congress from 2015 to 2023. He was one of the fiercest critics of the federal investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia and served as part of Trump’s defense team during the first impeachment trial in 2020. He later received the Republican nomination for the New York gubernatorial election in 2022, losing to incumbent Kathy Hochul. After finishing his tenure as representative, Zeldin joined the America First Policy Institute (APFI) — described as a “White House in waiting” — as the chair of its Pathway to 2025 Initiative, thrusting him directly into the effort to reelect Trump.

Some parts of the climate advocacy community have responded tepidly to Zeldin’s nomination, perhaps hesitant to alienate him right out of the gate in hopes that some cooperation may be possible. Even so, Lori Lodes, executive director of the strategic communications organization Climate Power, released a statement blasting Zeldin for accepting over $400,000 from Big Oil and for his anti-environment votes while serving in the House of Representatives. Peter Bauer, the executive director of the group Protect the Adirondacks based in Zeldin’s home state of New York, said:

I expect Lee Zeldin to be very zealous in gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. I don’t think that since the EPA has been around over the last fifty years, I don’t think we have ever encountered a leader of that agency who will be so strongly at odds with its historic mission and wants to completely change its role in public policy and environmental policy. I think the combination of Zeldin and Trump is very worrying on a lot of levels.

During his time on the Hill, Zeldin earned a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters for his climate-related voting record. Some of his only pro-climate votes pertained to regulating PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” which are on the deregulatory chopping block along with dozens of commonsense clean air and water regulations under a Trump EPA.

The America First Agenda published by America First Policy Institute does not go into as much detail as Project 2025’s chapter on the EPA, instead placing environmental regulations under its pillar to “Make America Energy Independent.” This approach signals the priorities of a Zeldin-led EPA: if corporations must contaminate clean air and drinking water in the name of energy independence, the EPA will not stand in their way. Among the laws that it advocates “modernizing” are the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act — all bedrock components of the US environmental legal framework. This is not to mention, of course, that Trump will certainly withdraw from the Paris Agreement again, part of an overall foreign policy approach that is more adversarial than cooperative.

Long Island, the region of New York that Zeldin represents, has some of the state’s most highly contaminated water and poorest air quality — pollution caused in large part by the aerospace and chemical manufacturing industries, as well as underfunded septic systems that badly need public investment. Despite the evidence in his own backyard, Zeldin belongs to the misguided school of thought that the private sector can deliver climate results. An administration that views environmental regulation as “activism” that stands in the way of free-market activity and considers climate policy primarily a catalyst for fossil fuel expansion will certainly bode poorly for Americans already suffering from climate change’s impacts.

Because Zeldin has no meaningful experience in environmental policy, he is the perfect foot soldier for Trump, unlikely to take any strong positions of his own volition. He is much more likely to follow the established playbook that guided Trump’s previous EPA administrators: slashing budgets and personnel, viewing scientists with hostility and contempt, kneecapping EPA lawyers and the agency’s enforcement capacity, and allowing polluting corporations to run amok by weakening the regulations that otherwise constrain their destructive activities.