"Zeldin's EPA To Relax Drinking Water Rules" was the headline last week in the daily newspaper Newsday on Long Island, New York-- from which Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is from.
The subhead: "Plans to rescind PFAS limits, delay removal deadline."
The article on two pages began with telling how the EPA is proposing "to rescind federal limits on certain toxic 'forever chemicals' in drinking water-- established two years ago by the Biden administration".The Trump administration plans to roll back restrictions on four types of these chemicals, known as PFAS. Another proposed rule would allow water suppliers to request two more years to comply with limits on two other PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA. Water suppliers were initially given until 2029 to meet the standards under the Biden-era plan, but they will now be eligible for an extension to 2031."
It went on: "PFAS-- or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances-- have been used in thousands of industrial and consumer products, from nonstick plans to artificial turf to fast-food wrappers. There are tens of thousands of PFAS compounds, very few of which are regularly, and they do not easily break down-- thus the term 'forever chemicals.' They enter groundwater when they are washed down the drains of ordinary households--"
Newsday continued: "Researchers have found long-term exposure to PFAS, even in tiny amounts, increases the risk of prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, developmental problems in infants and children and other health programs."
It's difficult to rate who is the worst member of President Trump's cabinet but, certainly, Zeldin is on the top tier, amid stiff competition.
The New Yorker magazine has just run an article-- -seven full pages long-- which in the magazine is headlined: "Burning Man, Lee Zeldin's assault on the E.P.A." and online is headed: "Can The E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?"
A summary paragraph in the piece: "In a little more than a year Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters. He has packed the E.P.A.'s upper echelons with former industry lobbyists, scrubbed entire databases of information from its website, and dissolved whole departments. Under his leadership, the agency has ditched a long list of rules that industries had objected to, including regulations aimed at cutting Americans' exposure to arsenic, a known carcinogen; mercury, a potential neurotoxin; and PM2.5, a form of very fine soot that has been shown to cause asthma and lung disease. The E.P.A. has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action."
The article was by Elizabeth Kolbert, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and many other major journalism awards and for nearly 30 years a top staff writer at The New Yorker .
It provides a huge amount of details and concludes with Kolbert writing that the "effects" of Zeldin "will linger long after a new administrator takes over and the E.P.A. returns-- or doesn't return-- to its original mission."
An article in April in The New York Times was headed: "How Lee Zeldin Shifted the Mission-- and the Message-- of the E.P.A." It criticized actions and declarations of Zeldin including, it related, his writing on X, formerly Twitter: "The war on beautiful clean coal is OVER!....Natural gas, nuclear, coal, etc. can't be held back and at the Trump EPA WON'T BE HELD Back,"
The Times article quoted Christine Todd Whitman, who, it noted, is "a former Republican governor of New Jersey who led the E.P.A. under President George W. Bush" saying: "It's just staggering how far outside the parameters of what the agency is about he has taken it. He is completely undoing the mission of the E.P.A."
At the start of 2026, in January, the daily newspaper, Newsday, from where Zeldin hails, ran an editorial headed: "An EPA that doesn't live up to its name." It began: "The federal government agency in charge of protecting our environment and the people's health has warped into an entity adrift of that purpose. In the first year of this Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, headed by former Long Island Rep. Lee Zeldin, failed in its core mission of safeguarding and improving the quality of our air, water and food."
That is no surprise.
When he was nominated by Trump to be EPA administrator, the League of Conservation Voters sent a letter to members of the Senate signed by the Washington-based organization's president, Gene Karpinski, saying Zeldin's "abysmal 14% lifetime score on LCV's National Environmental Scorecard, long history in Congress and the NY state legislature opposing environmental and public health safeguards for our communities, and little environmental experience render him unqualified for the role." It called for a rejection of Zeldin's nomination.
The New Republic ran a piece headed: "Trump Picks New EPA Head Guaranteed to Destroy the Environment." The subhead on its article: "This will be a disaster."
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