Outside the Beltway

President Trump’s War on Environmental Reality

If you don’t collect the data, the problem disappears, right?

Michael Bailey · Thursday, December 18, 2025 · 3 comments

From the bottom of the ocean to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, President Trump has taken a recklessly destructive approach to the environment.

Under President Trump, the Republican Party has gone all in on a near-total abandonment of environmental protection and has adopted an even more aggressive stance against climate change mitigation. The attack on environmental protections is led by Trump, but it is widespread in scope. Conservative climate skeptics routinely dismiss climate change realists (that is, those who accept mainstream climate science) as emotional, anti-human, emotionally feminine, and irrational. Trump himself has called climate change a hoax and a scam, and his EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has described climate change realists as members of a cult.

One need go no further than EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s initiative, “Powering the Great American Comeback,” to see the administration’s abandonment of environmental protection laid bare. The plan rests on five pillars, no fewer than four of which have nothing to do with protecting the environment. In fact, they actively undermine environmental health. Instead, they commit the EPA to goals such as energy dominance, facilitating the AI revolution, and bringing back auto jobs.

The Trump administration has frequently mocked liberal administrations for losing sight of the core missions of federal departments. A familiar example is its ridicule of Defense Department initiatives that, in its telling, abandon “warrior culture” in favor of wokeness and equity. Yet here, the same critique applies—tenfold—to the Trump administration itself. The purpose of the EPA has never been to spur economic growth; it has been to protect the environment. If market-friendly mechanisms can achieve environmental goals more effectively than traditional command-and-control regulations, that is welcome. If genuinely “common sense” solutions exist, I’m all for them. But one should not lose sight that the mission of environmental governance is to protect public health.

My point is not that Trump’s approach is wrong in every particular—any more than Biden’s was right in every respect—but that the cumulative effect of these policies is profoundly misguided and dangerous.

Trump’s environmental—or environmentally relevant—policies are not all of a piece, and it is therefore helpful to examine them one at a time.

Prioritizing fossil-fuel primacy

On his first day in office, second term, Trump declared a national “energy emergency,” granting federal agencies sweeping authority to fast-track projects tied to oil, gas, coal (his “beautiful clean coal”), hydropower, critical minerals, and nuclear energy. There is a great deal packed into that declaration, but its political meaning was immediately clear: all systems go for accelerating and deepening America’s reliance on fossil fuels.

The philosophy behind the order is simple: make fossil-fuel extraction faster, cheaper, and more certain, and remove anything (including fragile ecosystems) that might slow it down. Declaring an emergency is not merely symbolic. It intimates that environmental safeguards are procedural luxuries (at best) rather than essential protections. Under emergency logic, environmental impact reviews become nothing more than bottlenecks, public comment becomes aggravating delay, and ecological risk becomes acceptable collateral damage. 

Given the thrust of this “emergency,” it’s no surprise that Trump has called for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the last truly wild places in the United States. Here, he is reviving plans first initiated during his first term and later rescinded by the Biden administration. The move is emblematic. Speed and certainty for extractive industries are prioritized over ecological preservation or cultural protection, even in landscapes long understood as deserving exceptional protection.

Trump’s vehicle policies move in the same pro-fossil fuel direction. Rather than encouraging efficiency or the adoption of electric vehicles, his administration has rolled back fuel-economy standards. While undermining EVs, it has also stripped away incentives to make gasoline-powered cars more efficient. Trump has even joked that he must support electric vehicles because he received hundreds of millions of dollars in backing from Elon Musk. (Gotta love a joke that hints at electoral corruption, right?) 

Whatever Trump may feel toward Musk these days, the administration’s actions tell a consistent story more in line with his pro-fossil fuel affinities than any personal obligations. It has eliminated tax credits for EVs, halted federal funding for EV infrastructure, frozen the Biden-era transition of federal vehicle fleets, and fought to block California from adopting its own EV standards and incentives.

Defenders of these policies invoke energy independence or consumer choice. But neither explains why environmental protection itself must be sidelined. A serious energy strategy would attempt to balance reliability, affordability, and environmental risk. Trump’s approach does not seek balance, despite the rhetoric it may employ; it seeks an accelerated reliance on fossil fuels. Even where legitimate tradeoffs exist regarding EVs—around, for example, EV infrastructure—the administration’s answer is pretty much a consistent retreat from environmental responsibility.

Retreating from alternatives to fossil-fuels

Trump’s environmental approach is not limited to boosting fossil fuels. It also involves actively placing barriers in front of alternative fuel sources. Especially renewable energy, and most especially wind energy. In this respect, the policy logic is inverted: where oil and gas are fast-tracked, renewables are systematically slowed.

Wind energy has become Trump’s favorite target. The man (really really really) dislikes wind energy. Like, a lot. Trump’s hostility toward wind power is so intense, it feels personal. That impression is difficult to avoid, and there are reasons to think it may be so (more on which in a moment).

The administration’s war on wind has been methodical. On his inaugural day, Trump declared, “We’re not going to do the wind thing. Big ugly windmills—they ruin your neighborhood.” To his “credit,” he has been remarkably faithful to that vow. His administration has prohibited permits for wind farms on public lands, including the Outer Continental Shelf. It has cut hundreds of millions of dollars from wind-support programs, including infrastructure needed to connect offshore wind farms to consumers. It withdrew a promised loan for a $11 billion transmission line designed to carry Midwestern wind power to population centers such as Illinois.

Perhaps most brazenly, the administration torpedoed the “Revolution Wind” project off the coast of Rhode Island when it was roughly 80 percent complete. That decision was later rescinded by a federal judge. Trump justified the move by invoking national security concerns, though, not surprisingly, without explanation or supporting detail.

Even where wind projects are proposed on private land, the administration has ordered additional federal bureaucratic hurdles to slow their approval. At the same time, it has removed similar impediments for coal—“beautiful clean coal”—all while insisting the nation faces an energy emergency. The contradiction is in plain view. As a result of these new federal obstacles, more than 500 renewable projects—roughly half of America’s planned new wind capacity through 2030—are now at risk.

The administration has gone further still, calling on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to investigate supposed health risks associated with wind farms. There is no credible evidence that such harms exist (or at least none of which I am aware), but when is collecting actual evidence ever the point with this administration?  The investigation itself will likely slow the issuing of wind energy permits, and that’s the point.  Plus, sowing doubt about environmental policy is more generally an ongoing goal of this administration.

Trump’s animus toward wind power may be ideological or merit-based in its origin, but it may also be personal. Here I dive into speculation. What is beyond doubt is that Trump has made a point of systematically dismantling policies associated with both the Obama and Biden administrations, for whom renewable energy was a priority. Undermining wind power is thus a way of repudiating their legacy. 

But there may be an even more personal origin of Trump’s animus of “Big Wind” as well. As documented by Snopes and reported by The New York Times, Trump’s hostility to wind energy appears to trace back to at least 2012 during a dispute over a proposed wind farm near one of his golf courses in Scotland. Trump mounted a legal challenge, arguing that the turbines would ruin the view and damage tourism. He lost at every level, including before the UK Supreme Court.

Trump is a man of world-class pettiness who enjoys nursing (and rarely relinquishing) a grievance. It is therefore entirely plausible that America’s national policy toward wind energy is being shaped, at least in part, by a bruised ego and a long-held vendetta.

Big Wind hurt the Big Windy’s feelings, and he is determined to punish them—and, as collateral damage,, the American people—until his ego is satisfied, which, let’s be honest, will be never.

But again, I speculate. 

What can be said without speculation is this: in 2024, the share of America’s energy supply provided by coal was eclipsed for the first time by wind and solar combined. That is a positive development for anyone concerned about pollution and climate change. But this progress is now in grave danger of being reversed by President Trump’s absurd and petty war on wind.

Deregulating environmental protections

Let’s start at the bottom of the ocean.

At present, no country on Earth has commercially viable deep-sea mining. Many nations are calling for at least a temporary moratorium, because we simply do not yet understand the ecological consequences of scraping and puncturing the seabed with industrial machinery. These are fragile, largely unexplored ecosystems, and the risks are poorly mapped at best.

The Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction. Natch.

In April 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14285, titled “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” which instructed federal agencies to fast-track permitting and development for deep-sea mining of critical minerals on the ocean floor. In practical terms, the order amounts to a green light for profit-seeking. “Hey Industry, go at it!  Extract minerals from ecosystems we barely understand!” This is not a marginal policy adjustment. It marks the opening of an entirely new frontier of resource extraction, with environmental risks that remain largely speculative because the science is still catching up.

When we move up from the seabed to the surface—to wetlands, wildlife, forests, and even urban settings—a second layer of Trump’s environmental assault comes into view with the systematic shrinking of environmental law itself.

Under the banner of deregulation, the Trump administration initiated more deregulatory environmental actions in the first hundred days of his second term—well over one hundred—than during his entire first term. And the rollbacks continue nearly by the day. These actions weaken limits on pollutants from power plants and scale back protections for the nation’s waterways. For example, the administration has narrowed the definition of “Waters of the United States,” removing many wetlands and small streams from Clean Water Act protection. As a result, according to one analysis, only twenty percent of America’s wetlands would warrant protection under the CWA under Trump’s definition, a significant reduction. 

Wildlife protections have been hit in a similar fashion. Proposed revisions to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) would require agencies to factor in the economic costs of protecting a species, something the law has explicitly forbidden for half a century. The effect is more mining and oil extraction on lands that would otherwise be set aside from development for endangered species.  We revisit a familiar theme here: the purpose of the ESA was never economic growth; it was species protection. Under Trump’s revision, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would be asked to weigh whether a species is “worth” being declared endangered.

But wait, there’s more! The rollback does not stop there. The administration will open nearly 60 million acres of national forest to road-building, logging, and mineral excavation.

Moving out of remote forests closer to home, at least for those of us who live in urban areas, the administration is dismantling federal offices dedicated to environmental justice. This matters. Urban heat islands are real, well-documented, and dangerous, contributing to asthma and other serious health problems. They are also disproportionately located in poorer and minority communities. Under the new approach, federal agencies are no longer permitted to account for–or hardly mention, for that matter– these disparities. Addressing them is apparently too “woke,” too Obama-era, and therefore off-limits.

The assault continues in less visible but no less consequential ways. According to The New York Times, the Trump administration has proposed nearly doubling what is considered safe exposure to formaldehyde, a known carcinogen found in many consumer products, as part of a broader overhaul of how carcinogens are regulated. Similarly, the EPA has proposed rolling back a Biden-era rule requiring industry to report releases of PFAS, the so-called “forever chemicals.” While the new rules are framed as making reporting more “practical” and less “duplicative,” their real effect is to introduce broad exemptions that substantially weaken oversight.

From the blatant to the subtle, air-pollution regulations have also been rolled back. On the blatant end, Trump has weakened limits on coal-plant emissions of mercury, lead, and arsenic. But let’s give credit where it’s due.  Trump is an equal-opportunity pollution enthusiast.

More subtle, but arguably more consequential, is the administration’s push to impose “sunset clauses” on environmental regulations, forcing them to expire automatically unless affirmatively renewed. The American political system is famously built for inaction; just consider how difficult it is to keep the lights on by passing a budget. Virtually every action I’ve discussed above was an executive action; virtually none of these actions required congressional initiative. Trump knows that once environmental protections are set to expire by default, renewing them will be politically challenging at best. Getting Congress to override executive inaction, whether Trump’s or someone else’s, will be virtually impossible. 

In this way, environmental protection is not just weakened but set up to expire. 

Reversing climate-change policy

If Trump (really really really) dislikes wind energy, he abhors climate change mitigation policies.

Trump’s second term began with an immediate withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the international effort to address climate change. This was an unmistakably clear signal of what was to come.

His most consequential move, however, is subtle and likely to escape the attention of most observers. Trump has set in motion the revocation of the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” the scientific and legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gases. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this move. Issued in 2009, the endangerment finding concluded that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act. This ruling underpins nearly all federal climate policy, and without it, the legal basis for climate regulations essentially collapses without direct congressional action.

Of equal importance, Trump is eroding the government’s infrastructure for dealing with both climate change and environmental threats. He has degraded the ability of federal agencies to collect information, formulate policy based on merits, and to implement such policies. His proposed cuts to the environmental budget cuts are staggering. Trump’s proposed 2026 budget calls for an eventual 55% cut to the EPA. Implementation and enforcement of rules requires personnel, of course, so shrinking the agency is a straightforward way to limit its power, a strategy echoed in his approach to the Centers for Disease Control.

As a target of the administration’s environmental cuts, the EPA is far from alone. The NASA science budget, the National Science Foundation budget, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are all facing possible future cuts of over 25 percent.  Hit hardest are the core research offices. 

In short, from the ocean floor to land-based drilling and mineral extraction, from protections of forests and waterways to the quality of our atmosphere and even satellite monitoring, the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental policy have been systematic, sweeping, and ruthless.

Scrubbing environmental information from public view

Reasonable people of good faith can—and do—disagree about policy. Free citizens in a pluralistic regime  naturally hold different priorities, and even when they agree on the goals, they may battle intensely over how to achieve them. These debates are in principle normal, healthy, and necessary in a liberal democracy. But without reliable information, we lose the shared framework that makes such discussions possible.  Without a shared framework, we lack a coherent world. In its absence, we are more likely to rely on charlatans, evidence-free claims of faith, or the pronouncements of charismatic figures. 

As I suggested above, I embrace a pragmatic liberalism regarding the environment. If market mechanisms can achieve environmental goals efficiently, I support them. But however we proceed, we need information.

In times of uncertainty or disagreement, calling for more information is usually the least radical—and sometimes the most responsible—position. We may eventually need to act decisively, but in some cases it is prudent to continue collecting and analyzing data. This has long been a standard of good-faith deliberation and was historically the approach of some conservatives on climate change. Because mitigation policies are costly and deliver their greatest benefits in the future, it was arguably a good-faith (if not wholly persuasive) argument to call for ongoing data collection and investment in research and development in search of a (comparatively) low-cost technological magic bullet.

With Trump, however, even these minimal commitments to good-faith deliberation are abandoned. He is not merely declining to seek better information, he is actively dismantling the infrastructure that makes such knowledge possible.

It is worth emphasizing that while many details of how climate change will affect the planet remain uncertain, some fundamentals are well established and widely accepted by experts. There is virtually no meaningful disagreement about the reality of climate change, its anthropogenic cause, and the fact that, on balance, it will impose significant and harmful costs on human societies.

Recent meta-analyses of climate science show that virtually 100% of scientific papers describe climate change as real and caused by human activity. To put that level of consensus in perspective, scientists are in slightly greater agreement about the reality of anthropogenic climate change than American adults are that smoking a pack of cigarettes a day poses serious health risks!

The Trump administration, however, stands apart from the experts, as well as from significant global majorities of people. Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax and a scam—claims he has made even on the world’s largest global stage, the United Nations.  More importantly, he has moved dramatically beyond rhetoric, acting systematically to undermine the collection, analysis, and public dissemination of climate data.

His administration is moving to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, widely regarded as “one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.” 

At the same time, two satellite programs that measure global CO₂ concentrations, among the most sophisticated tools available, have been slated for cancellation. In addition, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) support office responsible for maintaining the Mauna Loa Observatory, which has monitored atmospheric CO₂ every day for decades, is also on the chopping block.

Just over a week ago, The New York Times reported that the EPA website had removed references to human activity as the cause of climate change. More broadly, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) has documented hundreds of significant changes to federal environmental websites within the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, a pattern that has continued well beyond that initial period. Hit especially hard for deletion are mentions of environmental justice and, of course, climate change. 

The nation’s most comprehensive climate report, the National Climate Assessment, due in 2028, has been defunded and its authors dismissed. The report is required by law, though it is now unclear how—or whether—that legal obligation will be met. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Climate Assessment is the most authoritative climate report in the United States. It typically draws on the expertise of roughly 400 contributors and takes years to complete. In its place, the Trump administration assembled a group of five climate skeptics, who somehow miraculously have already produced a report, the gist of which is, “Bruh, this whole climate change thing? Like, chillax.” 

Trump’s EPA has also moved to end a program requiring industries to collect and report data on methane leaks. The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which gathered emissions data from roughly 8,000 industrial facilities, had been one of the most comprehensive sources of information on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The administration has gone further still, granting oil companies permission not to report emissions, as required by law, for periods of up to a decade. 

Beyond these high-profile moves, dozens of (or more) environmental studies have been blocked or delayed, and countless others defunded. 

Finally,  NOAA will stop tracking the costs of the nation’s most expensive natural disasters—those causing at least $1 billion in damage. Such events are often cited as evidence that climate-related disasters are becoming more frequent or severe as the planet warms. 

But if you don’t collect the data, the problem conveniently disappears, right?

Implications: 

From the bottom of the ocean to the upper reaches of the atmosphere—and even into the scientific and information systems we rely on to understand them—President Trump has pursued a recklessly destructive approach to the environment.

Trump’s environmental agenda does not merely reshape the world; it seeks in Big Brother fashion to rewrite the evidence of it. He is not simply ignoring environmental science, he is deliberately making it harder for citizens and policymakers to understand environmental problems and respond to them intelligently.

This approach is profoundly wrong-headed and, ultimately, immoral. What we are facing is not a disagreement over marginal tax rates, where reasonable people can differ in good faith. It is a struggle over whether citizens and lawmakers have access to the basic facts required for enlightened self-governance and, arguably, for the sustainability of our quality of life. 

Trump’s environmental policies are an assault on reality itself. It is yet another contribution to the most serious predicament of our time, our deepening and dangerous epistemological crisis.