Terry Gross (3:07)

So the response that they got to that letter was most of them were terminated or put on leave.

Elizabeth Kolbert (3:14)

Yeah, they were put on administrative leave, which is, you know, sort of pending this investigation. And at the end of the day, so months later, many of them were suspended without pay for a few weeks. So they lost a few weeks pay, and several of them were fired.

Terry Gross (3:33)

Zeldin's response to this letter was to say, we have a zero tolerance policy for agency bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the agenda of this administration. The will of the American public will not be ignored. Is it the job of the EPA to carry out the Trump administration's agenda?

Elizabeth Kolbert (3:55)

Well, quite simply, the job of the epa, and this is their stated mission, and remains their stated mission, even now, is to protect public health and the environment. The EPA is really a public health organization. Certainly many of the actions that they take have the effect of, you know, protecting our waterways, protecting our air, and have implications for, you know, all species that share those waterways and share the air. But really, regulations are designed to be protective of human health, and that is its job. And that has meant there's always a tug of war between what industry wants, what public health and environmental groups want, and you could argue what the public wants. And the. The EPA has had to balance that, and certainly in different administrations, the balance has moved. You know, that needle has moved somewhat. But I think in general, administrators have seen their role as protecting public health, and that is not clear that that's what's going on right now.

Terry Gross (4:59)

There's a move you describe as a breathtaking assault on the Office of Research and Development, also known as the ord. So explain what this office does and why. It's very important.

Elizabeth Kolbert (5:13)

So the Office of Research and Development is often, or was often described as EPA's scientific research arm. And it was distinctive in a few ways from other departments at the epa. It was not in Washington. It was not really centrally located. It was dispersed in labs around the country. One of the biggest, biggest centers was in Research Triangle in North Carolina. And that was very purposeful. And the idea was the ORD was supposed to be independent from central command, independent from the politics of the latest administration. And it had many roles. It employed 1500 people, and it did everything from helping states and tribes that were confronting issues that lacked the resources to do a lot of their own science. It did things like set the cleanup targets for Superfund sites. It did a lot of research into the dangers of, you know, gazillions of chemicals that are out there. And it was also supposed to be doing this sort of horizon scanning of what are the environmental problems that we haven't sort of taken cognizance of yet, but that are coming our way. So it was an essential part of the epa, and a subset of that, is that their analysis often showed that chemicals, for example, were dangerous in very, very low levels. And that had big implications for industry that many industries didn't like and fought back against. And they had something called the Integrated Risk Information System, which was particularly despised by industry. And now all of that is gone. And so that's, you could argue, a very clear win for the affected industries.

Terry Gross (6:55)

So the Office of Research and development employed about 1,500 people. What were they told about their future? And what happened to that department? Does it exist anymore?

Elizabeth Kolbert (7:05)

Well, the short answer is, no, it does not exist anymore. And what happened was rumors began to circulate that they were going to get rid of it. And there were all sorts of conversations in the agency. People, for example, thinking that if the people who are eligible for retirement retired, maybe they could sort of try to protect the younger people in the agency. All of this happening sort of while these rumors were circulated, and then eventually they just eliminated it over the objections of Congress.

Terry Gross (7:37)

So is there an office that replaced the Office of Research and Development when that was basically eliminated by EPA head Lee Zeldin?

Elizabeth Kolbert (7:47)

Theoretically, yes. There is a new office, a much smaller office that is located within headquarters. So there's a lot of concern over what's happening to the independence of the science. And that's true. You know, the EPA is under this Trump administration gold standard science executive order. And gold standard science in the Trump administration seems to mean, you know, science that backs up what we want to do. So that's certainly a big concern among those scientists who are left at the epa.

Terry Gross (8:22)

You write that the most significant climate change rollback at the EPA under Zeldin has been the rollback of the endangerment finding. What is that?

Elizabeth Kolbert (8:33)

So the endangerment finding goes Back to a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts versus the EPA, which Richard Lazarus, a Harvard law professor, has called the most important environmental decision the court has ever issued. And in that decision, the EPA was sort of dragging its feet on doing anything about climate change, and Massachusetts decided to sue. And it revolves around this section of the Clean Air act that basically compels the EPA to regulate dangerous air pollutants, specifically dangerous air pollutants coming out of the tailpipes of cars. And the EPA had just basically been trying to sidestep this. And the court said, you've got to decide either the CO2, the greenhouse gases coming out of cars are dangerous or not, and if they are dangerous, you've got to regulate them. So that case basically set in motion this process of, quote, unquote, deciding whether CO2 is dangerous, which was really not much of a decision. Eventually, in the first year of the Obama administration, we got this finding. Yes, carbon dioxide, which causes global warming, is a threat to public health, is a danger. And then there was sort of a separate endangerment finding regarding emissions from power plants, CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. And those findings form the basis of everything the EPA has done since to try to rein in carbon emissions. And it's been an almost 20 year battle now as we've gone through different administrations. But even under Trump won, even under Trump's first sort of scandal scarred EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. The endangerment finding has always been accepted as settled. But what distinguishes Zeldin's EPA is the willingness or eagerness to take on the endangerment finding. Let's try to take this through the courts and see what happens again, because now we have a new, new Supreme Court. Maybe this time we can get a different decision.

Terry Gross (10:48)

He went against the previous EPA heads and decided to try to wipe out this endangerment finding.

Elizabeth Kolbert (10:59)

Right. Right now, the endangerment finding, they have published the sort of official revocation or rescission of that finding. So therefore, we do not find that CO2 is a danger under the Clean Air Act. We don't have to regulate it. And this is already in litigation. But I think what's so crucial about this is that not only is it eliminating the regulations that Biden had put into place, but if it gets to the Supreme Court, if they get a decision that reverses Massachusetts v. Epa, then it will be basically impossible for any future administration to use the Clean Air act to try to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. So they're really trying to handicap the agency going into the future. And that is a theme that keeps coming up.

Terry Gross (11:52)

And this was a big subject of a debate, an argument, I should say, that ran like around 10 minutes about what the Clean Air act actually says. And it was an argument between Zeldin, who was testifying before the House Appropriations Committee, and Rosa Deloria, a Democrat from Connecticut, a member of Congress who is the ranking member of the committee. I'm not going to play that. That just like went on and on and on and wasn't terribly clarifying. But I will play a clip from a podcast that you mentioned in your article in the New Yorker. The podcast is called Ruthless. You describe it basically as a conservative bro kind of podcast. So this is from last July and they're talking about the endangerment finding. And so here's Lee Zeldin explaining why it's so important to cancel the endangerment finding.

Lee Zeldin (12:48)

So this has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion. There are people who, I mean, most Americans, we care about the environment. We want clean air, land and water. Water conservatives love the environment, want to be good stewards of the environment. There are people who then, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country in the name of environmental justice. They will get tens of billions of dollars appropriated to their friends rather than actually remediating environmental issues. So they created this endangerment finding and then they were able to put all these regulations on vehicles, on airplanes, on stationary sources to basically regulate out of existence, in many cases, a lot of forms of segments of our economy. And it costs Americans a lot of money. What's the significance? How big is the endangerment finding? Well, repealing it will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America. So it's kind of a big deal.

Terry Gross (13:49)

So that was Lee Zeldin speaking last July on the podcast Ruthless. I found it interesting that he said this has been referred to as a dagger in the heart of the climate change religion. The first thing I want to ask you about is referring to climate change activism as a religion as opposed to actions to protect the health of people, animals and the earth itself.

Elizabeth Kolbert (14:19)

Well, one of the interesting things about Lee Zeldin is he, he represented this district in eastern Long island that's very vulnerable to climate change. Sea level rise and flooding are big problems. And when he was a member of Congress, he actually joined in 2016, the Climate Solutions Caucus, which is this bipartisan group ostensibly working to further climate change solutions. So he was not a climate change denier in a sort of full blown Trumpian sense. And now he has come to the EPA and speaks of driving a dagger through the heart of the climate change religion. Now what does he mean by that? Well, it's never actually spelled out what the climate change religion is as opposed to climate change science, but I think that one of the big issues of our Time, I have to say, is that we now have a government. You know, we turn to our government to protect us against big threats, or. Well, I can assure you that climate change is a big threat. And now we have a government that is denying actually its existence, even at the upper levels of the government. And when you talk about the sort of counter reality of the Trump administration, this seems to me to be exhibit A. We are hurtling into a future, a very, very hot and dangerous future, some of the impacts of which we are already seeing. We're seeing, for example, I just use one example, tremendous drought in the west this year that is partly, certainly due to climate change. And we are looking at what scientists are calling as sort of Super El Nino, which is this weather pattern that can cause all sorts of extreme weather around the world. So we are looking at a pretty dangerous summer even. We don't have to go very far into the future, and we're certainly looking at a very dangerous future. And we're just sticking our heads in the sand. And if that doesn't concern Americans, it should.

Terry Gross (16:28)

So another thing that he's saying in the answer that we just heard from the podcast is that basically people who are activists for climate change, they're willing to bankrupt the country and choose instead, like the most pessimistic worst case scenario. I've heard him talk about that this is like the most pessimistic worst case scenario. He chooses to be more optimistic, but he refuses also to bankrupt the country. If we acted more vigorously to protect the earth from climate change, would that bankrupt the country? And is what he is doing saving the amount of money that he says it will save?

Elizabeth Kolbert (17:13)

Well, if you just take just on a very simple monetary level, if you look at the analysis for repealing the endangerment finding, they say it's going to save $1.3 trillion. And that's mainly they claim through lower car prices. And if you look at their own analysis, there are scenarios in which it will cost us $1.4 billion, and that's just through buying more gasoline. And as gas go up, that scenario becomes increasingly plausible. So by their own analysis, you could save $1.3 trillion and you could lose $1.4 trillion. So that's not much of a gain there. But what these analysis do not even take into account are the economic losses from climate change, which are high and going higher every day, nor do they take into account the health risks. So this is another pollution of fossil fuel pollution. So this is another trend that we're seeing in this administration of calculating the cost, the cost to industry, the cost to consumers and not calculating the benefits. If you don't calculate in the health benefits, if you don't calculate in the benefits of avoided climate change, then of course you get a very skewed figure. And we have now seen this in a couple of instances where they've actually literally eliminated the calculation of lives saved on a monetary basis, saying that it's too uncertain to do that, it's too uncertain to factor in the benefits of life saved. Well, once you do that, obviously, you're going to get some pretty, pretty skewed figures.

Terry Gross (19:07)

Well, even just as a consumer, if the price of cars goes down, the price of insurance for your home in so many places in the country now is going up between wildfires and floods in places in Florida, insurance is really high, if you can get it at all. And certainly like after the west coast fires, insurance is really unaffordable for so many people.

Elizabeth Kolbert (19:32)

Yes, exactly. I mean, the financial implications of climate change are enormous. And we're just talking about the financial implications. We're not talking about people who will literally not have homes, not have crops potentially as a result. So we are already, there's no doubt about it in the US A very affluent society, we are already feeling very significant effects from climate change, as you say, from flood insurance and fire insurance. Those are definitely climate change related. And we're also seeing it in many other ways, simply homes falling into the ocean, for example.

Terry Gross (20:18)

It's time for another break, so let me reintroduce you. My guest is Pulitzer Prize winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Colbert. Her article on the current issue of the New Yorker is titled can the EPA Survive? Lee Zeldin, she's a staff writer at the New Yorker. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH air.

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Terry Gross (21:46)

So getting back to the endangerment findings. So right now that has been rescinded by the head of the epa, Lee Zeldin. There are many lawsuits right. About that rescission.

Elizabeth Kolbert (21:57)

Well, they'll probably all be consolidated into, you know, one big lawsuit.

Terry Gross (22:02)

Okay, okay. And that's working or will work its way through the courts and most likely end up in the Supreme Court, do you think?

Elizabeth Kolbert (22:09)

Well, I guess the question is whether the court will want to take it on given, you know, that it has this precedent of Massachusetts v. Epa. But I think that this sort of betting would be that, yes, it will make its way all the way to the Supreme Court. It's a very important case.

Terry Gross (22:25)

So in the meantime, the fact that it's been rescinded is how they're proceeding. They're not waiting to see what the courts have to say. Right now, they're acting as if it's legally rescinded.

Elizabeth Kolbert (22:39)

Yes. And they have also, in sort of separate actions rolled back or rescinded the latest sets of regulations that were designed under the Biden administration to reduce CO2 emissions from cars, which were very explicitly aimed at sort of speeding the transition to electric vehicles. And they have rescinded the Biden Administration's power plant rules, which were also pretty clearly aimed at eliminating coal fired power plants, which are, you know, big source of CO2 per unit of energy. You get a lot of CO2 for less energy if you're burning coal. So the idea was, and most coal plants in the country have already closed, but the idea is we were going to close basically the rest of them. And that is, you know, sort of an astonishing part of what's going on at the EPA now is to be a cheerleader for coal, which is not only the most greenhouse gas intensive fuel out there, but it's a very dirty fuel. It's putting, you know, mercury and arsenic into the air and it's creating coal ash, which is a very dangerous substance, which is sitting around next to all these old coal fired power plants, which has in recent years caused several very bad accidents.

Terry Gross (24:02)

One of the things we've been seeing during this second Trump administration is that the courts are so much slower than the ability of people who are heading agencies and cabinets, you know, Cabinet secretaries. The courts are slower than the leaders abilities to dismantle whole agencies and departments to terminate, like thousands of people. Experts, like tariffs are such a good example. Like the Supreme Court says that, you know, Trump's tariffs are illegal long after he collected the money from the tariffs and now he's supposed to give it back. That's going to be really difficult, probably both financially and bureaucratically. Have you ever seen anything like this where there's such a discrepancy between so many actions and the delay of the courts to actually give a definitive answer on those actions?

Elizabeth Kolbert (25:02)

Yeah, I think we have to conclude that's a very deliberate strategy. I was talking to William K. Riley, who ran the EPA under George H.W. bush, and he is no fan of current leadership, and he said to me they had a very shrewd strategy, move fast and break things. And by the time the courts catch up, you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. You know, you can't reassemble all the people he was talking specifically about, all the people who have left the agency. The experts that have left the agency are not getting them back. And they realize that that's not, you know, we're not telling them anything that they don't know. It turns out, you know, what was keeping previous administrations from doing this was a sense of, well, that's just not how government should work, you know, and now we've thrown those protocols to the wind and anything goes until the court catches up with you at point, you may not be able to undo the damage.

Terry Gross (26:02)

A subject of debate now has to do with the wording of the Clean Air Act. And this was a subject of debate Monday at the House Appropriations Committee meeting hearing between the Democratic ranking member of the committee and EPA head Lee Zeldin. So Zeldin was saying the Clean Air act doesn't mention climate change. Would you explain the significance of what he's saying and the validity of the argument he's making?

Elizabeth Kolbert (26:31)

Well, the Clean Air act was written, or what we consider the Clean Act. It was written in 1970 at a time when climate change was known about in certain circles, but it wasn't a major issue. It wasn't really being widely discussed, and the science was still pretty new. You could make the argument that the Clean Air act was extremely forward thinking in that it left open these possibilities. Well, we are going to discover new pollutants and that's one of the things we're arguing about. Does the Clean Air act have room, as you discover new things that are dangerous to regulate those? And once again, According to the 2007 Supreme Court decision, yes, you do. But what they are arguing now in this, you know, sort of contrary to that decision, they being the Trump administration, they being the Trump administration and they're sort of a grab bag of legal arguments. But they all do revolve around the wording of the Clean Air Act. And one of their arguments is that something is only a pollutant if it affects you in a local or regional way. Now, greenhouse gases are global. They're well mixed and their effect is not direct. So it's not directly when you breathe in that CO2, it's the indirect effects of, you know, dumping it in the atmosphere and warming the earth. And they are arguing that that is not what the Clean Air act meant by pollutant. So we have this, you know, very textual exegesis argument and only the court, I'm afraid, will solve this. But I think that people who worked on the Clean Air act who actually, you know, wrote the Clean Air act, would say that it was designed to be very forward looking. They knew that things were going to come up and they tried to leave room in the Clean Air act for future generations to use this act to do what needed to be done. But the court is going to settle this question. And as many people have pointed out, this current Supreme Court has, you know, three members who are appointed by Donald Trump.

Terry Gross (28:34)

Well, we need to take a short break here, so I'm going to reintroduce you. My guest is Pulitzer Prize winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Her article on the current issue of the New Yorker is titled can the EPA Survive? Lee Zeldin, we'll be right back. This is FRESH air.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (28:50)

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Terry Gross (30:21)

so before we get back to Lee Zeldin, I want to ask you of something that's happening on a parallel track. The independent board that oversees the National Science foundation was basically terminated. So what does the National Science foundation do and what was the board's role in doing it?

Elizabeth Kolbert (30:45)

Well, the National Science foundation disperses, I'm sure, billions of dollars to do scientific research. You know, that's their job. And they have an advisory board that sort of guides them in a very high level those decisions. And anyone will tell you who is in academic science that the National Science foundation has been really hard hit during this administration. It's really hard to know whether you're going to get your grant or not, even if it's already been awarded. But by terminating that board, once again, we're getting another very clear signal that we don't value science. Now, to live in a highly technological world where basically everything that we do and everything that we're surrounded by is in some all the technologies that are an integral part of our lives are products of science and say that we are just not interested in science anymore. Once again, it's something that you would think would be eliciting more opposition because clearly we are putting ourselves, as many people would say, at a competitive disadvantage with other countries who are eager to grab, you know, our best scientists. But it gets at this fight with reality, honestly, that is at the heart of the Trump administration. If it's, if it's an incon, if it's something that's inconvenient, if we don't like, you know, what the facts tell us, we're going to try to suppress them.

Terry Gross (32:15)

I don't know if you can speak to this or not, because this isn't really like your beat, but is there something transactional going on here between the Trump administration and lobbyists for companies that are polluters?

Elizabeth Kolbert (32:29)

Well, I can't point to you direct ways in which Donald Trump is sort of lining his own pockets through this. Although there was a very famous moment during the 2024 campaign where he said to fossil fuel industry executives, raise a billion dollars for me and it'll be worth it to you, basically. And they did raise, I believe the estimates were about half a billion dollars for him. And the fossil fuel industry has, I think, to use this sort of untechnical term, made out like bandits under this administration there. The administration has moved to dismantle any competitors to the fossil fuel industry. We just the other day got news that two more offshore wind projects were being canceled, and the government's going to pay back the companies that lease that land. So that's money going out of the US treasury, and they're supposed to use that to search for fossil fuels. So there is a very, very concerted effort to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's gotten a lot of tax breaks under this administration, new tax breaks, even more tax break, while we sort of dismantle the nascent clean energy industry that might be a competitor. Now, why is this going on? Is this some ideological crusade? Is this some. Certainly some people are getting very wealthy off of it. But I think that as a society, once again, you would think that there would be more pushback against this because clearly fossil fuels are not the fuels of the future. And we are sort of letting a lot of clean energy technologies, basically, they were already being dominated by countries like China and were just basically letting that happen without putting up any fight. And I think that very soon, not in the distant future, but in the pretty near future, we're really going to regret that.

Terry Gross (34:26)

I want to ask you about the Maha moms, the Make America Healthy Again Moms. And they were considered to be Trump allies in part because many of the Maha moms are anti vax. And Trump and some members of his administration, most notably RFK Jr have been or remain anti vaxxers. However, they have gotten pretty upset about some of Lee Zeldin's actions at the Environmental Protection Agency because he is not regulating some chemicals that are known to harm children. So tell us more about what's making the Maha moms upset.

Elizabeth Kolbert (35:14)

Yeah, so, you know, the Maha moms, who are somewhat heterogeneous group and different people have different priorities, but many, many influential, you know, Maha moms, which is itself is sort of not a very technical term, are worried about, you know, what their kids are eating, you know, what they're eating, what their kids are eating, what impact is that having what's in our food supply. What's in our water supply, you know, and for some reason, which I have to confess I'm not sure I ever fully understood, but I guess had to do with his association with Bobby Kennedy, who at various points in his career has been very vocal about these issues. They thought that, you know, the Trump administration was going to, you know, finally level with the American people about, you know, these dangerous chemicals in the food supply and do something about it. Instead, what happened at the epa, one thing that happened pretty early on was that several chemical industry lobbyists took very high ranking positions at the Office of Chemical Safety at the epa. So that was one thing that disturbed them to see, you know, that the lobbyists who are lobbying to keep a lot of these chemicals around were actually taking these positions at the epa. And we have seen their influence in various decisions that have come out of that office. And another thing, what really ticked them off or what really seemed to precipitate this open sort of rupture, was the EPA approved a bunch of pesticides that have chemicals that could be defined as pfas, as these forever chemicals. It gets very technical what molecule actually makes a PFAS compound, but they're sort of PFAS or pfas, adjacent compounds that could be sprayed on crops. And that prompted a Maha mom named Kelly Ryerson to draft a petition to say that Lee Zeldin should be fired. He really wasn't putting public health first. And that petition quickly garnered a lot of signatures, including once again, of some prominent Maha influencers. And that in turn prompted Lee Zeldin to invite a bunch of Maha moms to his office to talk to them, and also then prompted a series of announcements that supposedly, once again, supposedly were Maha mom wins. You know, he kept portraying these decisions as Maha wins, though if you look beneath the surface, it's a lot more doubtful.

Terry Gross (37:52)

What makes it doubtful?

Elizabeth Kolbert (37:54)

So one of the decisions they were touting as a Maha win had to do with chemicals called phthalates, which are in a tremendous number of consumer products and are thought to be potential endocrine disruptors. And in that case, they were setting standards, new standards for phthalates, but they involved only workers exposure, not consumers exposure. So that was sort of a very restricted category. And another decision they touted as a Maha win was a decision to reevaluate a pesticide called Paraquat, which has been linked to Parkinson's disease. But it turned out when you sort of looked into that, that that decision to reevaluate Paraquat had actually been made by the Biden administration.

Terry Gross (38:43)

So the war with Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has shown us some of the dangers of depending on fossil fuels because those fossil fuel, like the ships that carry the fossil fuels, fuels aren't getting through the strait. And this is having a much larger effect on countries in Europe, in parts of Asia and Africa. I think Trump might not be feeling terribly affected by this because he thinks that we're winning because we have a sufficient amount of fossil fuel, although we're paying a fortune for it at gas stations now. But has Zeldin or other people in the EPA been speaking to that dependence on fossil fuels as opposed to independent clean energy?

Elizabeth Kolbert (39:36)

When Lee Zeldin took over the epa, as we talked about before, it had a very simple mission. It still officially has the mission to protect public health and the environment. But he added these other pillars to that. He called them pillars. And one of those was restoring American energy dominance. And a lot of actions have been taken by this EPA in the name of restoring energy dominance that really, I think many, many people would argue are directly counter to protecting public health and the environment. So the EPA has definitely been very much a part of this effort by the Trump administration to pump up fossil fuel production in this country and to do something really beyond that. And this gets to this, you know, the far reaching nature of what's going on right now, this phenomenon called lock in to lock in fossil fuel infrastructure. So if you, if you put up that plant, if you put in that pipeline, that becomes something that's that much more difficult to, you know, you have to, before the lifetime of that facility, if you want to close it down early, you're obviously, you know, costing a lot of money and you've wasted a lot of money in that case. So if you, if you sort of try to lock in as much infrastructure as possible, the odds that that infrastructure is then going to be used for its lifetime goes up. So they're trying to actually, you know, put as much fossil fuel infrastructure into the ground on the theory that that will then be used for the next 30, 40, 50 years. And that is precisely, precisely what we should not be doing. We should not be building any more fossil fuel infrastructure. We should be turning towards other forms of energy. So this has very, and this is across agencies, across the entire federal government right now, but it has very, very long lasting and serious consequences.

Terry Gross (41:30)

Let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Elizabeth Kolbert. She has a new article in the New Yorker where she's a staff writer. The article is called can the EPA Survive? Lee Zeldin, we'll be right back. This is FRESH air.

Sponsor/Advertisement Voice (41:45)

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Announcer (42:44)

This message comes from exceptional communications with Steal this Story, Please, a film about fiercely independent journalist Amy Goodman. In Steal this Story, Please Academy Award nominated filmmakers Carl Diehl and Tia Lesson craft a riveting portrait of journalism's power and peril in an era of political attacks on press freedoms and on truth itself. Now playing in select theaters nationwide, featuring opening weekend Q&As in most cities. Learn more at steelthistory.org what did he

Terry Gross (43:16)

do before he was appointed to the EPA that impressed Trump?

Elizabeth Kolbert (43:23)

So Lee Zeldin was a congressman from Long island from 2014 to 2022, and in 2019, I think, is when he really attracted President Trump's attention. That was when we got what would later come to be known as Trump's first impeachment inquiry. That was the one that was launched over allegations that Trump had tried to pressure the Ukrainian president into investigating Joe Biden. And Lee Zeldin was a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, and as such, he was part of the closed door depositions. We eventually got the transcript from those depositions, but they were originally closed door depositions. And he really threw himself into the fight to protect the president, both behind closed doors and publicly. He often denounced the proceedings regularly as illegitimate, a charade, a fairy tale. Those are just a few of the descriptions he offered. And Trump started really to notice that he was one of his fiercest protectors. He started to retweet what Zeldin was tweeting out there. In one particularly frenzied morning, he tweeted him out something like, retweeted him something like nine times in three minutes.

Terry Gross (44:45)

And what did he do in support of Trump after Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election?

Elizabeth Kolbert (44:51)

Well, he was one of those Republicans out there very vigorously arguing that there had been irregularities in the voting, which obviously never, have never been substantiated. There are still people out there obviously arguing that, but we've never gotten any proof of that. And on the day of January 6, which will a day that will, I guess, live in infamy to many people, he was interviewed by Laura Ingraham on Fox News. He was interviewed with Darrell Issa, who was a very conservative pro Trump Congressman who called this a bad day for the President. Many Republicans did that day. It was a pretty bad day. But Lee Zeldin was out there saying actually it wasn't really a bad day for the President. So I assume the President noticed that too. He then proceeded that evening to vote against certifying both the results from Pennsylvania and from Arizona. So he was one of about 120 House members that voted against both of

Terry Gross (45:50)

those while out of office. During the Biden presidency. He founded a consulting firm whose clients included the America First Policy Institute, which hired people from the first Trump administration and became a source for people in Trump's second administration. It was sometimes even referred to as the White House in waiting. I guess that also won Trump's favorite.

Elizabeth Kolbert (46:15)

Yes, I think in the process of working with a lot of these people, you know, sort of former once and future Trump people, I think that he was popular among that group that was around Trump and that sort of ensured him a place in the next administration.

Terry Gross (46:33)

So you mentioned that there were rumors that Seldon would be considered as a replacement for Attorney General Pam Bondi. Todd Blanche is filling in as acting Attorney General and he's certainly been loyal to President Trump. Do you think that Zeldin is actually being considered now for Attorney General?

Elizabeth Kolbert (46:56)

I'm definitely not inside the Trump administration. I think that Blanche is the acting AG. He can serve. I think it's like 210 or 230 days in that position and then either Trump has to nominate him or he has to nominate someone else. And I think we will have to wait and see what happens. It's very clear that Blanche wants the job, has been said to be auditioning for the job. But whether he will ultimately get the job or not, I don't know. The first person whose name surfaced as soon as Trump fired Pam Bondi was Lee Zeldin's. But the presence of Blanche now in that acting role obviously complicates things.

Terry Gross (47:40)

Elizabeth Kolbert, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

Elizabeth Kolbert (47:43)

Thanks so much for having me.

Terry Gross (47:45)

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for the New Yorker. Her article on the current issue is titled can the EPA Survive? Lee Zeldin, Tomorrow on FRESH Air, our guest will be Richard Gad, the creator and star of Baby Reindeer. It was an unexpected hit on Netflix in 2024 and won six Emmys. The series drew on Gad's experiences being sexually abused and then stalked. Now Gad explores toxic masculinity and repression in his new HBO series, Half Man. I hope you'll join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram. P R FRESH air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Boldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Roberta Shorok directs the show. Our co host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

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