WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it will begin the process of dismantling dozens of Biden-era rules touching everything from electric vehicles to coal plants.

In a flurry of news releases, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency will roll back some of President Joe Biden’s most consequential climate and environmental regulations. He specifically cited rules aimed at speeding the nation’s shift to electric vehicles, slashing planet-warming emissions from power plants and safeguarding waterways from harmful pollution.

Taken together, the announcements herald a seismic shift in U.S. environmental policy, one that could ease restrictions on nearly every sector of the economy. Yet rewriting many of the rules could take the agency months or even years.

“Today is the most consequential day of deregulation in American history,” Zeldin wrote in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.”

Zeldin confirmed in the piece that the Trump administration will repeal a scientific finding underpinning much of the federal government’s push to combat climate change. The Washington Post first reported last month that the administration will target the “endangerment finding,” which cleared the way for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act by concluding that the planet-warming gases pose a threat to public health and welfare.

Environmentalists criticized the EPA’s actions Wednesday.

“Corporate polluters are celebrating today because Trump’s EPA just handed them a free pass to spew unlimited climate pollution, consequences be damned,” Charles Harper, the power sector senior policy lead at the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, said in a statement.

Business groups cheered the moves, with coal advocates specifically praising the reconsideration of the power plant rules, which would have pushed all coal plants by 2039 to either capture their carbon dioxide emissions or shut down.

Battles over clean water rules

Zeldin kicked off the announcements with an event at the EPA’s headquarters Wednesday morning, where he said the agency will narrow the definition of U.S. waterways — including wetlands, rivers and streams — that receive federal protections under the Clean Water Act. The Biden administration had expanded the scope of the Clean Water Act, passed in 1972 to protect all “waters of the United States” from pollutants including livestock waste, construction runoff and industrial effluent.

Environmental groups have argued that a broad definition of “waters of the United States” is crucial to restoring the health of degraded waterways and wildlife habitats across the country. But business groups have long complained that legal confusion over the definition has created regulatory chaos for landowners, farmers, ranchers and home builders.

Zeldin said the EPA will work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which also regulates the discharge of dredged materials into protected waterways, to solicit public input and craft a new regulation.

“Trump’s EPA is moving to radically restrict protections for our waterways and wetlands,” Wetzler said in a statement. “With this change, EPA is doing the bidding of polluters — taking an extreme approach that will leave communities across the country vulnerable to more pollution, flooding and environmental harm.” (Source: The Washington Post)

Story Date: March 13, 2025