They used to fight for big polluters. Now these Trump appointees are in charge of your health.
Inside the Trump administration, many of America’s top regulators have deep ties to heavily polluting industries, raising concerns about the influence of major polluters on rules meant to protect public health.
For example, several leaders of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention — which is tasked with keeping harmful chemicals out of everything from cosmetics to cleaning products — come from groups that have pushed to weaken chemical safety rules.
Nancy Beck, the principal deputy assistant administrator, is a former executive from the American Chemistry Council, a group that has spent millions of dollars lobbying the government and fighting stricter oversight. She also served in the EPA during the first Trump administration during which time she helped weaken a proposed ban on asbestos and made it more difficult to regulate cancer-causing “forever chemicals.”
Lynn Ann Dekleva, who works alongside Beck, previously held senior roles at both the chemical giant DuPont and the American Chemistry Council, where she fought against regulations of cancer-causing formaldehyde. Dekleva also served in the first Trump administration. A later internal EPA investigation found that, during her tenure, EPA staff were pushed to approve new chemicals using less stringent assessments and feared retaliation.
And Doug Troutman — now America’s top chemicals regulator — spent nearly 20 years leading the American Cleaning Institute, an organization known to question any science that found cleaning chemicals to be harmful to people’s health.
“With industry insiders at the helm of the Trump EPA, the chemical industry is getting what they’ve wanted: watered down protections against the most toxic chemicals,” says Environmental Defense Fund’s Sarah Vogel, who leads the organization’s health work.
These appointments are a part of a larger pattern within the Trump administration of placing people with deep ties to major polluters in key decision-making roles at government agencies. It’s a practice that has alarmed watchdog groups, as well as health and environmental advocates.
Lawmakers have also expressed concern. U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island called Troutman just “one more industry proxy embedded at the polluter-captured EPA.”
Internal EPA emails show polluters are calling the shots
Led by President Trump’s appointees, the EPA has shown an unusual willingness to grant favors to the nation’s worst polluters, even if it comes at the expense of people’s health.
According to internal EPA emails obtained by Environmental Defense Fund, Trump appointees consulted their industry contacts when setting up an unorthodox way for polluters to get exemptions from Clean Air Act standards — by simply emailing and asking for a “presidential exemption.”
The emails indicated that the design of these presidential exemptions was driven primarily by the assistant administrator of the EPA's office of air and radiation, Aaron Szabo, a former lobbyist whose clients included the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers association. Szabo now oversees how the EPA implements key provisions of the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws. (He’s also a contributor to Project 2025 — a policy playbook for the second Trump administration — which recommends that the EPA roll back pollution standards and revise the designation of certain hazardous substances).
More emails show that Talen Energy, the parent company of a coal power plant granted a presidential exemption, met with Trump EPA appointee Abigale Tardif, another former fossil fuel lobbyist, multiple times.
Already, 71 coal-fired power plants that release mercury, arsenic and other toxics have been granted exemptions. Exposure to mercury can cause lifelong brain damage in children, cardiovascular issues in adults and weaken the immune system.
“These records show that Trump EPA officials with industry ties are helping some of the nation’s worst polluters call the shots,” says EDF attorney Richard Yates.
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Former industry leaders are now inside every environmental agency
Industry insiders aren’t just running the EPA.
When the Revolving Door Project and Public Citizen dug into the backgrounds of regulators across the Department of Energy, Department of the Interior (which oversees how federal lands are used) and the EPA, they found a deep bench of former fossil fuel and chemical industry executives in key roles.
These officials have already started dismantling rules that govern air pollution, vehicle emissions, greenhouse gas reporting, exposure to toxic chemicals and more. Over the course of 2025, federal agencies acted on 80% of regulatory requests sent to President Trump by manufacturing groups.
Some administration officials have been surprisingly candid about this fact.
Brittany Kelm, a senior policy adviser to President Trump, publicly described the administration’s approach as “white glove service” for the fossil fuel industry and says that she’s a part of a “concierge” team assembled to carry out the president’s energy priorities, which include keeping coal plants open (even past their retirement dates), expanding domestic mining and fast-tracking fossil fuel infrastructure — all while rolling back climate protections.
Lee Zeldin
EPA Administrator
Background: Former New York Representative with an anti-regulatory record and little environmental experience.
Why it matters: Under his leadership, the agency has gutted scientific research, weakened pollution rules and moved toward repealing the “Endangerment Finding” — the foundation for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
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Doug Burgum
Secretary of the Interior
Background: Former governor of North Dakota who criminalized anti-pipeline protests — he is now aggressively anti-wind, even though he once supported the clean energy source in his state.
Why it matters: Burgum chairs President Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, tasked with streamlining permitting for oil and gas projects. His agency has opened public lands to oil and gas drilling and sought to stop multiple offshore wind projects, falsely claiming wind energy is “unreliable.”
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Chris Wright
Secretary of Energy
Background: Founder & CEO of Liberty Energy, a hydraulic fracturing services company.
Why it matters: The Department of Energy controls energy permitting and approvals and manages billions of dollars in infrastructure and climate funding. Under Wright, the department has prioritized increasing fossil fuel development and prevented aging coal power plants from retiring while canceling funding for clean energy and efficiency programs.
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Coming soon: The climate “dagger” and a battle over toxic chemicals
Right now, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is working on finalizing his proposal to repeal the Endangerment Finding — the scientific determination that greenhouse gases are causing climate change, making them harmful to people’s health and welfare and therefore subject to regulation.
Zeldin calls the repeal “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
In the meantime, a Congressional battle over regulating toxic chemicals is also heating up.
As soon as Donald Trump returned to office, chemical industry lobbyists launched an aggressive campaign to weaken the Toxic Substances Control Act, which is the federal law underpinning how the government regulates the safety of chemicals used to make everyday items, ranging from electronics to plastic.
This law is the reason the U.S. has been able to ban or restrict cancer-causing chemicals like trichloroethylene, which is often used as a de-greaser, methylene chloride, found in paint strippers, and asbestos — protecting workers and families.
Recent polling found that the law is popular, with 82% of Americans in favor of it across party lines.
Yet the chemical industry is lobbying hard that new chemicals are needed to construct data centers and must be fast-tracked, without being hindered by the safety reviews that the Toxic Substances Control Act requires.
Health and environmental groups point out that innovative chemicals of the past, like PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” can harm the environment and people’s health for decades after their introduction, which is why a strong Toxic Substances Control Act is necessary for public safety.
Yet, on January 15, House Republicans released the text of a bill to weaken the law.
“The chemicals we’re exposed to every day should be rigorously evaluated so that we know they’re safe,” says EDF’s Maria Doa, a scientist who worked on chemical safety at the EPA for more than two decades. “The chemicals for review under TSCA have been prioritized specifically because of the risks they pose to our health, and rewriting this process to lowball risks will only rig the rules to benefit the chemical industry.”
The bottom line
With Zeldin at the helm of the EPA and industry lobbyists in other key roles, rules that once protected Americans from pollution are being radically weakened.
Hundreds of expert staff and scientists have been fired at the EPA, and now political appointees are driving efforts to weaken or eliminate dozens of key clean air, water and climate protections.
Trump administration leaders have made no attempt to hide their agenda, announcing new attacks on health and environmental protections almost weekly. For example, the EPA recently announced that it plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the economic benefits to families of less death and disease — a radical shift in agency policy.
Ultimately, the future of U.S. environmental policy comes down to the American people asking a simple question: Is it the federal government’s role to protect people from harm — or to protect big polluters from accountability?
