What Trump’s Environmental Record Says About a Second Term
Mr. Trump and his allies envision a second term that would try to permanently eliminate protections for air, water and climate.
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Donald Trump during a visit to an area of Paradise, Calif., that was destroyed by wildfires in 2018. His administration’s response to devastating fires and catastrophic hurricanes in 2017 and 2018 would help to define his first term.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times
  
By Coral Davenport Christopher Flavelle and Lisa Friedman
Nov. 1, 2024
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On the campaign trail, Donald J. Trump has repeatedly said that he wants “the cleanest air and the cleanest water.”
But as president, Mr. Trump dissolved the nation’s protections for those basic elements, as well as public lands, endangered species and the climate. He sought to silence government scientists and gutted the federal agencies charged with safeguarding the environment. And he gave control of those agencies to lobbyists from the regulated industries.
President Biden has restored many of the 100 environmental rules and policies that were killed by the Trump administration. But if Mr. Trump wins next week’s election, he is expected to not only erase those regulations again but also try to make sure that they can’t be revived. He and his allies have mapped out a plan to dismantle the legal and scientific foundations of the federal government’s authority to regulate the environment, particularly on climate change.
“Trump’s the worst president for the environment in American history,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and professor at Rice University. “A second term will be brutal. He is going to go full throttle on having the trophy of shutting down the green movement and replacing it with an older-style gasoline and coal-fired America.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
A survey of Mr. Trump’s record on climate and the environment in his first term offers a preview of his even more aggressive vision for his second.
Climate Denialists and Fossil Fuel Lobbyists
Mr. Trump staffed his White House and cabinet with officials who disregarded the established science that human activity is heating the planet.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, the first administrator, Scott Pruitt, was replaced after an ethics scandal by a coal lobbyist, Andrew Wheeler. Nancy B. Beck, a former lobbyist for the chemical industry, became the chief chemical regulator at the agency, where she worked to loosen rules on toxic and hazardous chemicals.
At the Interior Department, an oil lobbyist, David Bernhardt, was appointed secretary and rolled back protections for endangered species while opening millions of acres of land to drilling. But several of those decisions were hastily made, and did not survive legal challenges by environmental groups.
  
Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. administrators, Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler; and Mandy Gunasekara, who served as Mr. Trump's E.P.A. chief of staff and who wrote a chapter on the agency in the Project 2025 plan.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times; Erin Schaff for The New York Times; Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press
To staff a second Trump term, his allies say they want seasoned, effective players like Mr. Wheeler, who understand the workings of government enough to quickly get to work to dismantle regulations.
“You need those experienced, battle-tested folks to ensure that the policy agenda is focused, that we don’t get sidetracked,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as the E.P.A.’s chief of staff during the first Trump administration, and wrote the chapter on that agency for Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a future Republican administration. Although Mr. Trump has publicly disavowed the document, much of it was written by his former staff members and aligns with his policy objectives.
“We want to reduce the size and scope of these federal agencies,” said Ms. Gunasekara. “For policy actions to be lasting, structural reforms need to be made.”
Uprooting Climate Policy
Mr. Trump’s first administration virtually deleted climate change from federal policy. He made the United States the only country to withdraw from the Paris accord, the 2015 global agreement among 195 nations to fight climate change.
At home, Mr. Trump’s top E.P.A. appointees dismantled rules to cut fossil fuel pollution from power plants, automobiles and oil and gas wells, essentially ensuring that billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions would continue to heat up the atmosphere.
President Biden restored those climate protections, rejoined the Paris agreement and revived, expanded, and strengthened regulations on fossil fuel pollution.
With Vice President Kamala Harris and John Kerry, the climate envoy, watching, President Biden signed climate change-related executive orders on his first day in office in 2021.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
A second Trump administration is expected to try to permanently bury those regulations. For example, Mr. Trump’s allies are keen to invalidate an Obama-era conclusion by the E.P.A. that carbon dioxide emissions harm human health, which forms the legal basis for virtually every climate regulation.
Mr. Trump would be aided by a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court that includes three of his appointees. In a spate of decisions over the past two years, the Supreme Court has hemmed in the government’s authority to regulate climate, air and water pollution.
And in June, the Supreme Court overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine, which held that courts should defer to the expertise of federal agencies when a law is unclear. That ruling is expected to undercut the authority of many federal agencies, including the E.P.A., to enact major new regulations.
“One tool we have now that we didn’t in the first term is that Chevron is no longer a leading legal doctrine,” Ms. Gunasekara said. “That creates better legal opportunities for taking durable actions.”
Expanding Mining and Drilling
During Mr. Trump’s term, he effectively changed the definition of public lands from natural resources to be preserved for future generations to land and water available for mining and drilling to the highest bidder.
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His administration allowed mining and drilling on nearly a million acres of land in southern Utah that had been protected by President Bill Clinton as part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and removed about a million acres from another Utah monument, Bears Ears. It stripped away protections for the habitat of sage grouse, an imperiled ground-nesting bird found in 10 oil-rich Western states, making it easier for oil and gas companies to drill on nearly nine million acres of land in the West.
Together, the moves were the largest erasure of public lands protection in U.S. history.
His Interior Department rescinded the nation’s first safety regulation on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. It loosened safety rules on underwater drilling equipment imposed after the 2010 BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It ended an Obama-era order that prevented coal mining on public lands and weakened limits on emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells.
Mr. Trump capped his first year in office by achieving something Republicans had long sought: opening part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling. In doing so, he overturned six decades of protections for the largest remaining stretch of wilderness in the United States known as ANWR.
Seismic lines from decades-old exploration streak the 1002 Area of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.Credit...Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times
The Trump administration awarded 11 drilling leases in ANWR. Two companies ended up terminating their leases and the Biden administration canceled the rest; the Alaskan refuge was never developed or drilled.
Mr. Trump has promised to put the Alaskan wilderness “back in play.” It is one of the few policies he has mentioned among general promises that oil and gas companies would have unfettered access to what he calls “the liquid gold beneath our feet.”
His allies, however, have included specifics in Project 2025.
William Perry Pendley, who led Mr. Trump’s Bureau of Land Management and was removed from that job by a federal court, wrote the chapter on the Interior Department in which he said the top priority should be to manage the “the vast storehouse of hydrocarbons” — gas, oil and coal — that lies beneath public lands and under federal waters.
In addition to reinstating oil and gas leases that the Biden administration had cancelled, that would mean making it cheaper for companies to drill and mine on public lands, ending endangered species status for animals like the grizzly bear and indemnifying oil, construction and other industries if they kill or injure birds while doing business. Project 2025 also calls for a repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows presidents to create national monuments protected from commercial activities like drilling and mining.
Burying Science, Silencing Scientists
The first Trump administration sought to muzzle scientists. The E.P.A. dismissed independent scientists who served on review boards charged with ensuring the scientific integrity of federal regulations on pollution and toxic chemicals. The director of the U.S. Geological Survey, a former petroleum geologist named James Reilly, tried to limit the scientific data used in modeling the future impacts of climate change, and hundreds of scientists quit during his tenure. A State Department analyst, Rod Schoonover, resigned from his job in 2019 after he was blocked by the Trump White House from submitting written congressional testimony on climate change.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to attack federal scientists was perhaps most clearly demonstrated by his approach to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a division of the Commerce Department and the country’s premier climate science agency, in the summer of 2019.
As Hurricane Dorian menaced Florida, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Alabama would “most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” Moments later, Alabama staff at the National Weather Service, a division of NOAA, posted a message of their own: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian.”
Dorian did not hit Alabama, and had never been predicted to do so. Yet Mr. Trump insisted that he had been right and displayed a map of the hurricane’s path that had been altered with a Sharpie marker to show the storm reaching Alabama. (The episode became known as Sharpiegate.)
A chart of Hurricane Dorian’s path with its altered route in black.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and his staff demanded that NOAA denounce its own meteorologists. NOAA’s leader, Neil Jacobs released an unsigned statement, saying the Weather Service’s post was “inconsistent with probabilities from the forecast products available at the time.”
The statement generated fury inside and outside NOAA. Almost a year later, the Commerce Department’s inspector general reported that the Trump administration was preventing the release of her findings on the incident. When it was eventually published, it laid bare the pressure exerted by Mr. Trump and his staff.
Project 2025 calls NOAA “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” adding that the agency “should be broken up and downsized.”
Politicizing Disaster Response
Even as Mr. Trump was dismissing climate change as a hoax, the consequences of a warming planet were becoming evident. In Mr. Trump’s first year, Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria; a series of brutal wildfires also roared through California in 2017 and 2018.
Mr. Trump’s reaction to both events would help to define his first term.
After Maria knocked out power across Puerto Rico in 2017, Mr. Trump visited San Juan, throwing paper towels into a crowd of disaster survivors.
Congress provided $20 billion to help the island recover. The White House released just $1.5 billion, claiming the government of Puerto Rico could not be trusted to spend it properly. The Biden administration unlocked the remaining $18.5 billion.
Tossing paper towels to the crowd of people seeking relief from Hurricane Maria in a church in San Juan, P.R., in 2017.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mr. Trump also threatened to withhold disaster aid from California after catastrophic wildfires, blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for failing to manage the state’s forests.
“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire, because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him and that politically it wasn’t a base for him,” Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA, said in 2020.
Project 2025 says states and localities, and not the federal government, should be largely responsible for disaster response and recovery. It also seeks to eliminate FEMA grants, including grants that are designed to make communities more resilient against climate disasters.
FEMA grants “have become pork for states, localities, and special-interest groups,” the document says. “Funds provided under these programs do not provide measurable gains for preparedness or resiliency.”
Have Climate Questions? Get Answers Here.
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Coral Davenport covers energy and environment policy, with a focus on climate change, for The Times. More about Coral Davenport
Christopher Flavelle is a Times reporter who writes about how the United States is trying to adapt to the effects of climate change. More about Christopher Flavelle
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities. More about Lisa Friedman
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