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endangerment finding
Trump's Abandonment of Climate Regulation Proves His Is Not a Legitimate Government
The US government is refusing to fulfill its fundamental obligation to protect public health and safety at home, and showing open disdain for the lives and well-being of people worldwide.
Apr 05, 2026
The White House recently announced what might be its most brazen attack on climate science yet. Roughlyo months ago, the administration rolled out plans to repeal the federal government’s “Endangerment Finding”—essentially, its authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants.
This 2009 finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined that the increase in public health and safety risks caused by climate change—such as extreme heat, wildfire smoke, ozone pollution, and catastrophic weather events such as hurricanes and flooding—justified regulating greenhouse gases as pollutants.
That’s the legal underpinning for everything from vehicle fuel economy standards to the requirement for power plants and factories to measure and report their emissions. Since 2009, the scientific basis for these rules has only grown stronger. This is borne out by successive studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative global climate science institution.
The most recent report by the IPCC working group assessing the state of knowledge on climate science, a collaboration of 234 prominent scientists from across the world, found overwhelming evidence that the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land have warmed rapidly since the start of the industrial era—and that the warming is attributable to emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases.
The regime’s decision wasn’t driven solely by ignorance or stupidity. Fossil fuel oligarchs have essentially bribed the president (in response to his open solicitation, no less), and penetrated the highest ranks of government.
Another IPCC working group, consisting of 330 of the world’s leading scientists, found that more frequent and severe weather and climate extremes attributable to climate change, such as heatwaves on land and on oceans, droughts, and wildfires, have already resulted in “widespread adverse impacts” on “ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure.”
In recent years, other studies have found that climate change made many severe weather events in the US and across the world likelier and more destructive, including Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US in 2024, deadly flooding in Pakistan and a record-breaking heatwave in Iceland and Greenland in 2025, and devastating flooding in Southern Africa earlier this year.
The Trump regime has attempted to counter this overwhelming body of rigorous, peer-reviewed science with government-sponsored misinformation. It has published a report written by five handpicked scientists, purporting to show that there is too much uncertainty about human-caused climate change. Large numbers of scientists from a wide variety of disciplines have condemned this report as methodologically flawed and relying on cherry-picked evidence, and have provided a detailed rebuttal.
In typical fashion, however, the Trump regime has ignored mountains of incontrovertible evidence to race ahead with repealing the Endangerment Finding, giving themselves a legal fig leaf for their actions to enable expansion of polluting industries and dismantle environmental protections.
This is a direct attack on communities throughout the country who have lost their loved ones, their homes, and their livelihoods because of fossil-fueled wildfires, storms, and floods, and communities who will inevitably suffer similar disasters as a consequence of the regime’s refusal to address the threat of climate change.
It’s also an attack on communities experiencing, or increasingly likely to experience, similar disasters worldwide. It is nothing short of a declaration of war against humanity.
The regime’s decision wasn’t driven solely by ignorance or stupidity. Fossil fuel oligarchs have essentially bribed the president (in response to his open solicitation, no less), and penetrated the highest ranks of government. They’re getting the policy outcomes they want, enriching themselves at the expense of people and the planet.
The US government is refusing to fulfill its fundamental obligation to protect public health and safety at home, and showing open disdain for the lives and well-being of people worldwide. This is occurring in the broader context of a government that is practically at war with its own population, flagrantly violating basic human rights in pursuit of an extremist ideological agenda.
A government that refuses to fulfill its most basic responsibilities even as it assaults citizens and knowingly exposes people worldwide to serious harm is not a legitimate government. Governments worldwide need to recognize this reality, and do everything in their power to protect their own people, and stand up for human rights in the US.
This op-ed may be republished with attribution to InsideSources.com.
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'Game Over Zeldin': 160+ Climate and Health Groups Say EPA Chief Must Go
"The wreckage of Lee Zeldin's EPA will be measured in lives lost, jobs destroyed, the costs of illnesses that could have been prevented, and communities devastated."
Mar 24, 2026
A month after President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced what they celebrated as the "single largest deregulatory action in US history," a coalition of over 160 civil rights, environmental, faith, health, and labor groups came together Tuesday to call for the EPA chief's ouster.
Zeldin was confirmed by Senate Republicans and a trio of Democrats just over a week after Trump returned to power in January 2025. The "Game Over Zeldin" coalition, led by the Climate Action Campaign (CAC) and Moms Clean Air Force, argued in an open letter that no other EPA administrator "in history—Democratic or Republican—has so brazenly betrayed the agency's core mission" to "protect human health and the environment."
"Zeldin has dismantled protections that keep our kids, families, and climate safe, and our air and water clean," the letter notes. "He slashed vital funding, gutted agency staff, and has rigged the system to put corporate polluters first, at the expense of our health. Zeldin's EPA has rejected science and health data—and is refusing to count the value of human lives and health—in order to erode commonsense public health safeguards. He has decimated environmental justice programs and hard-fought progress—entirely eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights."
Dominique Browning, director and co-founder of Moms Clean Air Force, pointed out in a Tuesday statement that "in just the past few months, he has supported the Trump administration in using taxpayer money to prop up the coal industry; he has made it easier for polluters to spew mercury—a potent neurotoxin that damages the developing brains of babies—into our air and waterways; and he has rolled back the endangerment finding in an attempt to sabotage EPA's ability to cut climate pollution."
The 2009 endangerment finding underpins all federal climate policy. David Arkush of the watchdog Public Citizen—which is also part of the diverse coalition behind the new letter—warned at the time that if allowed to stand, the repeal "will hamstring the government's ability to combat the most terrible environmental threat in human history, harming Americans and the world for decades to come."
Young Americans and a coalition of environmental and public health organizations swiftly filed a pair of lawsuits over the rollback. Another group of 24 states, joined by various US cities and counties, sued last week. The most recent filing is expected to be consolidated with the first coalition's case, according to The New York Times, "making for one of the largest legal challenges to date against the Trump administration's unraveling of federal climate policy."
The new letter stresses the consequences of that unraveling, stating that "because of Zeldin's directives, we will suffer more health-damaging air pollution and be exposed to more toxic chemicals in our homes, in our food, in our products, and in our water. Zeldin's rollbacks will lead to more carbon dioxide and methane pollution that will contribute to worsening climate disasters."
"Families across the country, whether rural or urban, are already struggling with the consequences of Zeldin's actions," the letter adds. "The damage he is doing will span generations. Zeldin is deepening environmental injustices and will leave a terrible legacy for our children and grandchildren."
We refuse to stay silent while Lee Zeldin treats our lives like a line item to be deleted. The EPA is for the people, not polluters. His time is up; Lee Zeldin must go. #GameOverZeldin www.gameoverzeldin.com
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— Physicians for Social Responsibility - National (@psr.org) March 24, 2026 at 12:12 PM
CAC director Margie Alt declared Tuesday that "the wreckage of Lee Zeldin's EPA will be measured in lives lost, jobs destroyed, the costs of illnesses that could have been prevented, and communities devastated. We will be paying the price for decades to come."
"Zeldin ignored science as well as the legal and moral precedent," she said. "Instead, he looked at the numbers and made a choice: He decided that corporate bottom lines matter more than our lives. He decided you and your family are expendable. After a year on the job, it is clear that Zeldin is either unable or unwilling to uphold his oath of office or the EPA's fundamental mission. So let us be clear: Our lives are not expendable. Our health is not expendable. Our climate is not expendable. Lee Zeldin must go."
Other organizations that signed on to the letter include Beyond Plastics, Cherokee Concerned Citizens, Clean Air Council, Clean Water Action, Climate Hawks Vote, Earthjustice, Environmental Working Group, Environmental Protection Network, GreenLatinos, Indivisible Action Coalition, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Service Employees International Union, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and more.
"Administrator Zeldin's established pattern of placing polluter profits above the health and safety of people across the country cannot stand," said UCS president and CEO Gretchen Goldman. "The science establishing harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions is undeniable. The unprecedented, climate-fueled heatwave a large swath of the United States has been experiencing is only the latest example."
"The public deserves an EPA administrator who will face the challenge of the climate crisis and fossil fuel and toxics pollution head on with proven policy solutions," she argued, "not actively serve as an agent of destruction beholden to the whims of oil, gas, and chemical industry executives and an authoritarian, anti-science US president."
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Scrapping the Endangerment Finding: Payback for the Billionaire Climate Criminals
Who's responsible for rolling back the endangerment finding? We believe it is time to name names so future generations—and future climate justice tribunals—will know who is responsible for incinerating our futures.
Mar 24, 2026
The February rollback of the "endangerment finding"—which provides the legal basis for regulating climate change—was many years in the works. It's the ultimate payback for a politically engaged fossil fuel industry and the climate criminals who use their wealth, power, and position to block efforts to help us transition to a post-oil, gas, and coal era.
Who's responsible for rolling back the endangerment finding? We believe it is time to name names so future generations—and future climate justice tribunals—will know who is responsible for incinerating our futures. Researchers at the Climate Accountability Research Project have tracked several of the key individuals working to undermine climate protection for the last two years
On February 12, 2026, Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced the rescission of the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, repealing regulations for GHG emissions of motor vehicles. According to The New York Times, a small group of fossil fuel-funded right-wing operatives have pushed to roll back government regulation of greenhouse gases for the past 16 years and have finally succeeded. Myron Ebell, a leading climate denier and fellow at the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, stated that “no amount of public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy.”
So who the heck are “Russ and Jeff, and John and Mandy?” Russell Vought, Jeffrey Clark, Mandy Gunasekara, and Jonathan Brightbill are well-known operatives within right-wing circles. For example, Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s director of the US Office of Management and Budget, and Jeffrey B. Clark, former acting administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, are veterans from the first Trump administration.
Rolling back the endangerment finding will have devastating and irreversible consequences to the planet.
Clark has been fighting the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases since 2005. In 2022, Vought was vice president of the Heritage Foundation and managed Project 2025, the blueprint for many Trump initiatives. Vought hired Clark to draft executive orders for a future Republican president to easily reverse President Joe Biden’s climate initiatives. In 2023, Clark described climate change regulation as part of a plot to “‘meta control’ Americans.” Following the 2024 election, Vought and Clark were both asked to serve in Trump’s second administration where they were able to push for the repeal of the endangerment finding.
The “Mandy and Jonathan” are lesser known right-wing operatives. Mandy Gunasekara is an environmental attorney, former chief of staff for the EPA during the first Trump administration, and author of the Project 2025 report chapter on reforming the EPA. Gunasekara fought against policies from the Biden administration regarding emission reduction and self-identified as the “chief architect” behind Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. The Climate Accountability Research Project identified Gunasekara as a Climate Criminal in 2024 because of her historical role in rolling back greenhouse gas regulations.
In 2015, Gunasekara infamously handed the late Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) a snowball to use as a prop on the Senate floor as “proof” that climate change wasn’t a real threat. Gunasekara was serving as an aide to Sen. Inhofe, who was considered to be one of Congress’ most outspoken climate skeptics at the time. Gunasekara was also a former visiting fellow with the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, where she helped draft a policy agenda that “unleashes American energy production, and reduces barriers to economic freedom.”
Following Gunasekara’s resignation from the EPA in 2019, she founded the Energy45 Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization “to promote the Trump energy agenda” and inform the public on the "environmental and economic gains made under the Trump administration.” The sources of funding for this organization have remained anonymous, and the organization has even been dubbed as a “dark money group” by Open Secrets.
In 2023, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, which featured Gunasekara’s 32-page chapter “Mandate for Leadership,” outlining a conservative agenda to move the EPA away from its focus on climate change. Key policy proposals outlined in her chapter include resetting scientific advisory boards, scaling back greenhouse gas regulation programs, and updating the 2009 endangerment finding. Gunasekara’s chapter also included the “Day One Executive Order,” which included a list of immediate actions to be taken on the first day of President Trump’s second term, with orders like “stop all grants to advocacy groups and review which potential federal investments will lead to tangible environmental improvements” and “revise guidance documents that control regulations such as the social cost of carbon.”
Jonathan Brightbill is currently the general counsel of the US Department of Energy. Brightbill argued against Obama-era climate policies while serving in the Justice Department in the first Trump administration.
In 2022, Gunasekara and Brightbill began their secret campaign to end the endangerment finding, in which they secured $2 million in funding from right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation. The funding allowed Gunasekara and Brightbill to draft regulatory documents that would simplify the abandonment of the endangerment finding. Over the years, the two collected an “arsenal of information” to dispute the scientific evidence of climate change. The evidence collected along with their detailed plans of attack helped the Trump administration end the endangerment finding.
Rolling back the endangerment finding will have devastating and irreversible consequences to the planet. There will come a day, maybe sooner than we think, when climate criminals like “Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy” will be held to account.
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