Does ‘Gut From the Inside’ Count as ‘Administrating’ the EPA?

Among the various names we are all now forced to remember, meet or re-meet Lee Zeldin: former House rep for New York’s first district and close-but-no-cigar candidate for New York governor, he has been tapped to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Unlike most cabinet-level or adjacent positions, the EPA’s head isn’t called a Secretary, but an Administrator. And now, again, we get to watch as the idea of “administrating” is massaged and maneuvered into something closer to “attempt to destroy.”

“Lee Zeldin is a great pick,” Mandy Gunasekara told the New York Times — which isn’t a great sign, considering that after serving as the EPA’s chief of staff in Trump’s first term, she went on to write Project 2025’s EPA section. The blueprint in there is basically to destroy the agency — huge budget and staff cuts, removing sources of scientific expertise, and so on.

As a legislator, Zeldin accumulated a lifetime score of 14 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, which tracks environment-related votes in Congress. According to the Times, Zeldin pegs his primary role is to “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions,” which doesn’t seem great for a regulatory agency. It has been a while since he specifically talked about climate change, but a decade ago he said “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”

In Trump’s first term, we had Scott Pruitt, who while in Oklahoma dissolved the Attorney General office’s Environmental Protection Unit before taking his talents to D.C. Then there was Scott Wheeler, a literal coal lobbyist. If one squints, one might say the Zeldin pick is an improvement — but gutting the regulatory state is a shared goal for these folks, so I’m not sure the specific backgrounds matter all that much. Zeldin will try and “administrate” the way that taking out your garbage, or demolishing a house, or committing insurance fraud arson, is “administrating.” The air, water, and climate will depend on him not being competent at it.