What The Hell America!

Environmental protections

On March 12, Zeldin announced sweeping measures to undo environmental protections and radically reshape the agency’s mission in what he has proudly called the “largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history.” 

As part of these actions, Zeldin has redefined the mission of the EPA. Rather than focusing on the agency’s twin tenets of environmental protection and public health, Zeldin has promised to fulfill “President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower cost of living for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions.” And he has used Fox networks to promote and justify this shift. 

Zeldin has claimed on Fox programs that current environmental protections need to be rolled back because they are “suffocating the economy” and that they have nothing to do with environmental protection but rather are part of former President Joe Biden’s “green new scam.” Zeldin’s arguments neatly position environmental safeguards into a pre-existing Fox News narrative that demonizes all climate action. 

On the March 16 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, host Charlie Hurt reflected this characterization of regulations back to Zeldin, saying: “Green New Deal things have nothing to do with actually cleaning the environment or clean air or clean water. It more has to do with spending money on pet projects that benefit basically, like, political supporters of the Democrat party.”

Such claims discount the role of environmental protections in public health and corporate polluter accountability. For example, Zeldin wants to loosen wastewater regulations for coal and other steam-powered power plants and relax limits to the amount of mercury and other toxic metals power plants can emit. Zeldin claims these regulations “improperly targeted coal-fired power plants,” even though coal plants emit “the vast majority of mercury and other toxic air pollution.” 

The EPA also wants to make it easier for manufacturers to release more particulate matter, or soot, even though “exposure to these tiny particles has been linked to asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes and other ailments.” In fact, one analysis, based on a 2024 report from the Environmental Protection Network that assessed the public health benefits of various EPA regulations, found that the targeted rules “were set to save the lives of nearly 200,000 people in the years ahead.” 

Environmental justice

Zeldin is redefining environmental justice efforts as “forced discrimination programs” in order to nix it as part of Trump’s executive order on “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferences.” 

To that end, he has closed the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and signaled that he is “eliminating all diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental justice offices and positions immediately,” leaving under-resourced grassroots environmental justice groups to take over these efforts. Hundreds of environmental justice grants are being canceled as well. 

On Fox, Zeldin has repeatedly suggested that the EPA previously used terms like “environmental justice” to “justify spending money not on actually directly remediating challenges to land, air, and water in America, but to funding left-wing activist groups.”

Zeldin used similar language in Fox coverage when he announced the closure of the EPA museum, calling it “another tribute to environmental justice” and saying: “What’s amazing is over the course over this last administration, all this talk about environmental justice and climate change, it was really to justify giving out tens of billions of dollars to their friends through self-dealing conflicts of interests, unqualified recipients.” Zeldin’s closure of the EPA museum was covered by at least 5 other Fox News programs.

Tijuana River sewage issue

The Tijuana River sewage issue is one of the first specific environmental issues Zeldin discussed on Fox News. Every year, billions of gallons of sewage and toxic industrial waste flow down the Tijuana River, across the U.S.-Mexico border, and into the Pacific Ocean. It is a complex, decades-old, transjurisdictional issue that environmentalists and governments at the local, state, and federal level have been grappling with for years. 

Zeldin has predominately characterized this issue as Mexico’s failure to stop pollution from crossing the border, while largely ignoring Mexico’s efforts to improve the problem and other progress made by the Biden administration. 

For example, in March 2024, federal funding was secured to make the repairs and updates needed at California’s South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant. And in December, Biden approved $250 million in additional funding “towards the full repair and expansion of the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant,” which is expected to be functional in the next five years.   

In January 2024, Mexico began rehabilitating a shuttered wastewater treatment plant, the San Antonio de los Buenos plant, and on April 28 of this year, the plant started treating waste again. Taken together, the improvements to the U.S. waste treatment plant and the wastewater infrastructure in Mexico are “intended to eliminate up to 90% of untreated wastewater reaching the coast.”

Fox News has aired at least a dozen segments on the issue, many of which have been shaped by Zeldin’s framing.