A Dagger Through the Heart: Inside the Administration’s Two-Pronged War to Dismantle the EPA

“I will be driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion,” Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, declared earlier this year. On Tuesday, at a truck dealership in Indianapolis, he began to sharpen that dagger. Zeldin announced the administration’s formal plan to revoke the government’s bedrock scientific and legal authority to combat climate change. It is the opening of a radical, two-pronged assault designed not just to roll back regulations, but to permanently cripple the EPA’s ability to function. It is a war waged on both legal and institutional fronts, an ideological crusade so extreme that it has managed to make even the fossil fuel industry nervous.

Part I: The Legal Attack – Revoking the “Holy Grail”

The primary thrust of the assault is the repeal of the 2009 “endangerment finding.” This is not just another regulation; it is the comprehensive, peer-reviewed scientific conclusion that a cocktail of six greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide, endangers public health and welfare for both current and future generations. It serves as the foundational legal authority for virtually all federal climate rules under the Clean Air Act. To revoke it, as Zeldin himself boasted, would be the “largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

To justify this monumental reversal of established science, the administration has engaged in a piece of political theater. Ignoring the EPA’s own vast body of research and the global scientific consensus, it commissioned a report from a hand-picked panel of five scientists well-known for their rejection of climate science. Their report, which went through an internal peer review described by the Energy Secretary as “brief,” recycles classic climate-denial talking points. They criticize the computer models used to predict climate change as overestimates, praise the atmospheric benefits of carbon dioxide for helping plants grow, and assert that America’s emissions are too small a share of the global total to matter. This stands in stark contrast to an open letter from leading climate scientists, who noted in June that “sixteen years later, the scientific evidence supporting the endangerment finding is even stronger, with zero countervailing evidence.”

Part II: The Institutional Attack – Blinding the Agency

While the legal attack targets the EPA’s authority, a simultaneous institutional attack targets its very ability to think. As reported by NPR, the administration is moving to shutter the EPA’s entire scientific research arm, the Office of Research and Development (ORD). This is the office whose thousands of scientists are responsible for analyzing the dangers posed by the full spectrum of environmental hazards: toxic chemicals, climate change, smog, wildfires, indoor air contaminants, and drinking water pollutants. The ORD is the scientific brain of the agency, managing the grant programs that fund the university and private sector research that informs all environmental policy.

In a stunning display of Orwellian doublespeak, Administrator Zeldin claimed the move would allow the EPA to “prioritize research and science more than ever before” by creating a new, politically palatable “Office of Applied Science.” Critics, however, see the move for what it is. “The obliteration of ORD will have generational impacts on Americans’ health and safety,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). Kyla Bennett of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility stated that eliminating the ORD would leave the EPA “flying blind,” unable to conduct or even apply science. This move, which is part of a plan to cut 23% of the EPA’s staff and has already seen the elimination of its Environmental Justice and DEI offices, was unsurprisingly praised by the American Chemistry Council—the lobbying arm of the very industry the ORD is supposed to help regulate.

Part III: The “Scorched Earth” Strategy

This two-pronged attack is not merely about undoing the work of the previous administration. It is a “scorched earth” strategy designed to permanently alter the balance of power. As conservative strategists like Myron Ebell have openly admitted, the goal is to end the “ping-pong match” between administrations and make it “much harder for a future Democratic administration, or a green Republican president, to undo.”

To achieve this permanent victory, the administration is making a high-stakes legal gamble. They are betting that the current, conservative-majority Supreme Court will provide the final vote to overturn its landmark 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. That was the case that first affirmed the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, a decision conservatives have targeted ever since. The administration believes that more recent rulings, such as last year’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo—which ended the long-standing practice of giving federal agencies deference in interpreting vague laws—have made the ground “more fertile” for a complete reversal. It is a “holy grail” strategy, an attempt to “get rid of the whole thing in one fell swoop.”

Part IV: The Unexpected Opposition

But the administration’s crusade is so radical that it has created a host of unexpected opponents. As Bloomberg reported, energy companies and some of the President’s own allies are “deeply divided” over the wisdom of this move. They see it as a risky, all-or-nothing legal gamble that could fail in court, undermining all other, more targeted deregulatory efforts.

Even more ironically, they fear it could backfire. A 2010 Supreme Court decision established that as long as the EPA is regulating climate change under the Clean Air Act, it effectively preempts a chaotic patchwork of “public nuisance” lawsuits against oil producers and power plants at the state level. By attempting to revoke the EPA’s authority entirely, the administration could inadvertently unleash a wave of the very state-level litigation that the fossil fuel industry has long feared, replacing a single federal regulator with fifty potentially hostile state court systems.

The Generational Blindness of the Crusader

What emerges is a picture of an administration pursuing a radical crusade so extreme that it has become detached not only from scientific reality, but also from the pragmatic, self-interested desires of the very industries it purports to serve. To understand this seemingly irrational gambit, one must look not just at politics, but at the calendar. Lee Zeldin is 45 years old.

When I first visited Los Angeles in 1980, its skies were a hazy, yellowish brown until at least noon. There was zero visibility off the coast, and the public beaches were a disgraceful mess. Today, thanks to the very Clean Air Act Zeldin is gutting, that city, like so many others, boasts sparkling clean silhouettes and a thriving culture of outdoor activities that would have been unthinkable forty-five years ago. The hard truth is that Zeldin doesn’t see the problem because he grew up with the solution. He, and a generation of policymakers, take the profound benefits of environmental regulation for granted because they have no living memory of the world without them. They did not witness the massive groundswell of public support in the 1960s and ’70s that led to these laws, and so they see them not as a hard-won victory for public health, but as a bureaucratic burden to be dismantled.

This is not just a policy disagreement; it is an act of profound generational vandalism. Someone has given the baby the keys to the car, and he is about to drive it straight through the house.