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With the Trump administration plunging our nation into chaos and millions of Americans struggling to meet basic needs, the president's appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just said the quiet part out loud: They will no longer consider the value of human life and people’s health.
In January, the agency’s political leadership announced that, when setting limits on air pollution that causes disease and early deaths, only the costs for companies to comply will be considered. It’s an unabashed statement that brings awful clarity to the administration’s priorities. They’re gutting protections for the air we breathe, the water we drink and the future we promised our children.
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The Trump administration has already handed out passes that excuse polluting industrial facilities across the U.S. from compliance with the latest Clean Air Act standards. All the corporations had to do was send an email and ask.
The administration, meanwhile, is trying to crush the cleaner industries that would make our country not only healthier but stronger economically. As our energy prices rise, the administration is blocking new clean energy projects while obstructing and delaying billions of dollars in private investments in domestic manufacturing and energy security and erasing hundreds of thousands of jobs and life-changing career opportunities.
Who’s benefiting from these backward policies? The administration has made decision after decision that will only increase our health care costs and utility bills. Trump’s EPA did not have our health in mind when it asked a federal court to throw out stronger standards for soot that were on track to spare 800,000 cases of asthma and thousands of hospital visits and premature deaths. It certainly didn’t make America healthier to put former chemical industry lobbyists in decision-making positions at EPA. Or to ignore decades of science and weaken oversight and protections for cancer-causing chemicals, such as formaldehyde.
Now, the Trump administration is poised to throw out the very idea that climate pollution is a threat, too.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s stated desire to “drive a dagger” through the endangerment finding provides a chilling context for these decisions. The finding is based on reams of scientific evidence demonstrating that climate pollution threatens our health and safety. And the Trump administration has spent a year unlawfully meeting in secret, dismissing objections, downplaying suffering and mischaracterizing research to overturn it.
It is another way of valuing human life at $0. It is another way of communicating to the American people that what you are seeing with your own eyes isn’t happening.
But we are seeing it. Every part of the country has experienced the dangers of extreme weather that climate pollution is making that much more destructive. Farmers have lost their livestock and livelihoods to heat waves. During Winter Storm Fern, hundreds of thousands of Americans went without power in freezing temperatures.
In 2025, the Guadalupe River in Texas was overwhelmed by flash flooding that killed 27 girls and counselors at Camp Mystic. Hurricane Helene in 2024 was the deadliest storm in the U.S. since Katrina. It killed 11 members of the same family in North Carolina. “Everything where I grew up is gone,” one survivor said.
It’s time to share the truth. It’s time to tell everyone what’s happening. Every image of a home charred to the foundation by an accelerated fire, every sodden pile of ruined furniture and stuffed animals waiting at the curb to be hauled away after another flood—not to mention mountains of data from satellites to ice cores to temperature records—is irrefutable evidence that the story the administration wants to tell just doesn’t match the facts.
Amanda Leland is executive director of Environmental Defense Fund.
Abigail Dillen is president of Earthjustice.
Manish Bapna is president and CEO of NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).
Loren Blackford is executive director of the Sierra Club.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.
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