“The Trump administration is trying to roll back decades of critical health and safety regulations that have saved millions of lives and are all that’s standing between us and runaway climate change,” Shiney-Ajay continued. “Trump doesn’t care about working people, all he cares about is pleasing the oil and gas billionaires who bankrolled his campaign. They know their industry is dying. Wind and solar are cheaper and safer than fossil fuels.”

“So, they are trying to buy their way to profitability by rigging the rules in their favor,” she added. “If they get their way, they will wreck our air, our water, burn down our homes, and hand future generations an unlivable climate.”

Matthew Tejada, a former deputy assistant administrator at the Office of Environmental Justice for over a decade before leaving the EPA in December 2023, now serves as senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). He toldCBS News Wednesday that “generations of progress are being erased from our federal government.”

“Trump’s EPA is taking us back to a time of unfettered pollution across the nation, leaving every American exposed to toxic chemicals, dirty air, and contaminated water,” Tejada said in a separate NRDC
statement Wednesday.

Tejada continued:

The grants that EPA moved to cancel are some of the most important to help make communities across the nation safer, healthier, and more prosperous. They are helping rural Virginia coal communities prepare for extreme flooding, installing sewage systems on rural Alabama homes, and turning an abandoned, polluted site in Tampa, Florida into a campus for healthcare, job training, and a small business development.

Those who have paid the highest price for pollution, with their health, are now the first to be sacrificed by Trump’s EPA. But they will not be the last. Every American should be worried about what this portends. We are witnessing the first step of removing environmental protections from everyone, as the chemical industry and fossil fuel producers get their way—and the rest of us will pay with our health and lost legal rights.

On Tuesday, the EPA also canceled grant agreements worth $20 billion
issued during former President Joe Biden’s administration as part of a so-called green bank meant to fund clean energy and climate mitigation projects. The move prompted a lawsuit by Climate United Fund, a nonprofit green investment fund.

In another alarming development,
The New Republicreported Wednesday that the FBI under Director Kash Patel is “moving to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration.”

Responding to Zeldin’s sweeping actions Wednesday, the environmental group Sierra Club said the EPA is “attacking safeguards to limit pollution from power plants and vehicles, methane and other deadly emissions from oil and gas sources, mercury and air toxics standards, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, wastewater regulations at coal plants, and many other critical protections for the environment and public health.”

“The standards that the EPA seeks to undermine are based on a strong scientific record and serve a number of public interests, including lowering the amount of deadly toxins fossil fuel-fired plants are allowed to release into the air and water; reducing pollution at steel and aluminum mills; and requiring fossil fuel companies to control pollution like soot, ozone, and toxic and hazardous air pollutants at power plants,” the group continued.

“If these rules are withdrawn, the American public will see devastating health impacts,” Sierra Club warned. “EPA estimated that just one of the rules would
prevent 4,500 premature deaths and save $46 billion in health costs by 2032. The health toll and cost of rescinding all the rules listed in the EPA’s announcement would be vastly higher.”

“Donald Trump’s actions will cause thousands of Americans to die each year.”

Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said: “Donald Trump’s actions will cause thousands of Americans to die each year. It will send thousands of children to the hospital and force even more to miss school. It will pollute the air and water in communities across the country. And it will cause our energy bills to go up even more than they already are because of his disastrous policies. But as they put all of us at risk, Trump and his administration are celebrating because it will help corporate polluters pad their profit margin.”

David Arkush, director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen’s Climate Program,
said that “no matter how the EPA disguises the decision to roll back pollution rules, today’s moves will make our air and water dirtier and make Americans sicker.”

“Zeldin is granting the wishes of Trump’s billionaire corporate cronies, plain and simple, at a massive cost to our health and wallets,” he added. “The announcement flies in the face of the EPA’s core mission to protect human health and safeguard our environment.”

Green groups vowed to fight the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental protections and justice.

“Come hell and high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives,” said CBD’s Rylander. “This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”

Jealous of the Sierra Club said, “Make no mistake about it: We will fight these outrageous rollbacks tooth and nail, and we will use all resources at our disposal to continue protecting the health and safety of all Americans.”