All Quiet on the Climate Front

In February 2025, several dozen EPA employees signed a letter to their new administrator, Lee Zeldin, objecting to what they saw as his overly partisan leadership and his plans to eliminate the agency’s scientific division. They didn’t expect much to come of it. What followed was an electronic manhunt: Zeldin’s team identified nearly 150 signatories, placed them on administrative leave, and fired several senior staff. The episode was a vivid opening to Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece, “Can the EPA Survive Lee Zeldin?”—and it set the stage for a conversation on Today, Explained about what is happening to America’s environmental regulatory apparatus, and why Democrats are increasingly reluctant to talk about climate change at all.

The EPA Under Lee Zeldin

Lee Zeldin was a Republican congressman from Long Island who first caught Donald Trump’s attention as a fierce defender during the first impeachment inquiry. As a representative of a low-lying coastal district experiencing sea-level-rise flooding, Zeldin had once joined a bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. But by the time Trump tapped him to run the EPA, he had pivoted sharply, calling climate change concerns “a religion” and the Biden administration’s climate programs “the green new scam.”