Lee Zeldin introduced himself to EPA staff last year as someone who had experienced first-hand the risks some U.S. communities face from climate change.<\/p>\n
In his first speech<\/a> to agency staff in February 2025, the newly confirmed administrator said his home town on Long Island \u201cgot crushed\u201d during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.<\/p>\n \u201cRising sea levels, it hits my street,\u201d he told staff gathered in a room named for conservationist Rachel Carson at EPA headquarters in Washington. Firefighters had to evacuate his young daughters through the rear window of the family car after his wife \u201ctotaled\u201d it because of the flooding, he said.<\/p>\n Benjamin DeAngelo, then the career director of EPA\u2019s Office of Climate Adaptation and Sustainability, said he found those comments encouraging, even though Zeldin didn\u2019t firmly connect the dots from sea-level rise to warming temperatures.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the time, I took it as a positive sign that, yeah, indeed, adaptation work might be supported,\u201d he said in an interview with POLITICO\u2019s E&E News.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t turn out that way. In the first 15 months of President Donald Trump\u2019s second term, EPA staff dedicated to climate adaptation and resilience have mostly either left the agency or been reassigned. That includes the dozen staff who worked in the office DeAngelo led \u2014 a subsidiary of EPA\u2019s Office of Policy that was created in 2024 to play a coordinating role and was formally dissolved last fall.<\/p>\n But DeAngelo said the agency has also bled expertise on adaptation and resilience from its now-defunct Office of Research and Development and the program offices, including air and water.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not aware of any significant climate adaptation work happening at EPA now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Asked about EPA\u2019s retreat from adaptation under Zeldin, spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said the agency was \u201ccommitted to policies grounded in gold standard science, sound economics, and genuine environmental progress, not in the fear-mongering and speculative modeling peddled by those invested in costly, unreliable \u2018green\u2019 scams.\u201d<\/p>\n EPA in recent months has also removed countless mapping tools and databases from its website that were used by states and cities, philanthropies and businesses to assess and prepare for climate risks. Some, like the EJScreen environmental justice mapping tool<\/a> \u2014 which reflects exposure to climate risk and other environmental burdens across the country \u2014 are now being hosted on nongovernmental servers.<\/p>\n A group of independent researchers called Climate Literacy has collected many of those deleted federal tools on its website<\/a>.<\/p>\n EPA under Zeldin also canceled hundreds of finalized grant awards under programs authorized by former President Joe Biden\u2019s 2022 climate law, which aimed to help communities shore up their defenses against climate risks or remediate other pollution.<\/p>\n DeAngelo\u2019s office helped communities with fewer resources compete for those, among many other things.<\/p>\n Adriana Hochberg, a former Biden political appointee who worked with DeAngelo to set up the adaptation office, said she thought it might have staying power.<\/p>\n EPA\u2019s sustainability work had survived the first Trump term, she noted. \u201cThey focused on engaging with industrial partners on sustainability issues,\u201d she said. \u201cSo, maybe naively, folks thought, \u2018Well, you know, we will probably be OK, given that we were OK before.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Advocates for climate-vulnerable communities said they were surprised that EPA under Zeldin moved so quickly to take EPA out of the climate adaptation business. Zeldin had, after all, represented one of the nation\u2019s most climate-exposed congressional districts<\/a> for eight years through 2023.<\/p>\n New York\u2019s 1st District sits on a barrier-island coastline that is already experiencing erosion and sea-level rise that is projected to get worse. The New York State Climate Impact Assessment<\/a> estimates that Long Island will see between 2 and 3 feet of sea-level rise by the close of the century, and might see more. Already it is exposed to storm surge and tidal flooding.<\/p>\n The federal government is spending heavily to help Zeldin\u2019s former district prepare for that future. The Army Corps of Engineers picked up the full $2.4 billion tab to raise the elevation of thousands of homes and fortify sand barriers that are being washed away.<\/p>\n As a congressman, Zeldin advocated for federal dollars to make Long Island more climate resilient. In the same introductory speech at EPA, he referenced the $44 million in post-Sandy resilience funding he helped secure to shore up a historic lighthouse.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause of coastal erosion, Montauk Lighthouse would have been collapsing into the ocean,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n He also introduced legislation<\/a> to require federally funded projects to use science-based projections to account for future flood risks to infrastructure. To be sure, Zeldin described the bill as a responsible budget initiative, not a climate adaptation measure. Before becoming EPA chief he rarely spoke about climate change, beyond stating that it was \u201creal.\u201d Since his confirmation, by contrast, he has described mainstream climate science as flawed<\/a>.<\/p>\n Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which is based on Long Island, said Zeldin\u2019s policy reversals took her by surprise.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen he was a congressman, we worked with him on a wide variety of environmental issues \u2014 Long Island Sound protection, opposing drilling for oil on the East Coast, all of which he supported,\u201d she said. \u201cNot only did he support it, but he championed these positions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPeople ask me all the time, \u2018Why did you think he\u2019d be OK as EPA director?\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m like, \u2018Because I worked with him for almost 10 years on environmental issues.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n DeAngelo said he had expected Zeldin would support \u2014 or at least tolerate \u2014 adaptation planning and analysis at EPA.<\/p>\n \u201cEarly on under this administration I thought we were going to be OK,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n That work \u2014 which started in the Obama administration, continued under the first Trump administration and expanded greatly under Biden \u2014 wasn\u2019t incompatible with Trump\u2019s deregulatory ambitions, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was nothing in the adaptation portfolio that was regulatory in nature,\u201d DeAngelo noted. \u201cIt was more about providing information, providing tools. And there was also a connection to grant programs and the [2022 climate law] funding.\u201d<\/p>\n The office DeAngelo headed was designed to coordinate adaptation planning that was already underway across EPA offices. In the Biden administration, program offices developed specialized plans to keep climate risks from interfering with the work they did and the programs they ran.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were plans within plans,\u201d said Vicki Arroyo, the Biden EPA\u2019s former policy chief who added it to the Office of Policy. \u201cThe idea is that you can\u2019t really fulfill your mission to protect human health and the environment if you\u2019re not really factoring in the changes that are already underway.\u201d<\/p>\n EPA also made \u201caccelerate resilience and adaptation\u201d to climate change a central objective of its five-year strategic plan unveiled in March 2022.<\/p>\n The next strategic plan hasn\u2019t been released yet. But DeAngelo, who now works in consulting, said he was told early on that climate adaptation wouldn\u2019t be in it.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was a big blow to our office, because that was something our office always pointed to as essentially a lever to help coordinate activities across EPA,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Trump political appointees also minimized briefings with office staff during the transition and early months of the administration, he said.<\/p>\n Hochberg, who now serves in a senior administrative role for Montgomery County, Maryland, said that in deprioritizing resilience, Zeldin\u2019s EPA is \u201cputting people\u2019s lives at risk\u201d by making it harder for communities to prepare for climate change.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, it is just the evidence of the Trump administration\u2019s what I would call willful ignorance and hubris that are in negligence,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Correction: A previous version of this report incorrectly stated that EPA political appointees declined to meet with adaptation office staff. Meetings did occur, though not with Administrator Lee Zeldin himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lee Zeldin introduced himself to EPA staff last year as someone who had experienced first-hand the risks some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":["post-624688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}