In 2025, Trump’s EPA team abandoned public health and the environment. In 2026, we turn the tide.

Hello, I’m Charissee Ridgeway, Senior Communications Advisor at the Environmental Protection Network (EPN) and the new editor/moderator of the EPN’s Substack. I recently joined EPN after serving at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

We know it’s been a while since you last heard from us. We’re back, and in 2026 we’re focused on turning the tide, building momentum, and taking action. This past year made clear just how fragile clean air, safe water, and public health protections can be, and how powerful people can be when they refuse to take them for granted. Check out EPN’s latest to see how we plan to do exactly that from EPN Senior Director of Public Affairs, Marc Boom.

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In 2024, voters elected Trump president for many reasons, but did voters actually want the EPA dismantled? Our first order of business after the election was finding the answer, and so EPN commissioned a public opinion poll for the first time in our history.

The answer was clear. They did not.

In fact, 64% of Trump voters and 88% of all voters were concerned that Trump would turn EPA over to someone who will “put the interests of polluting corporations ahead of protecting clean water, clean air, and public health.”

Which, of course, is exactly what happened. By summer 2025, only 29% of U.S. adults approved of Trump’s handling of the environment and climate change, and two-thirds believed EPA should be maintained or expanded—not reduced.

Americans care about their health. They care about fairness. They care about holding polluters accountable. And they are increasingly alarmed by what is happening at EPA.

The Damage Done

A week after winning the 2024 election, Donald Trump named former New York Congressman Lee Zeldin to head EPA. Zeldin had no environmental background but had been a fierce Trump defender during impeachment. The appointment signaled that loyalty and industry interests would trump science, expertise, and public health.

For the Environmental Protection Network (EPN), founded in 2017 by former EPA staff to defend science, public health, and environmental protections during Trump’s first term, the warning signs were unmistakable.

“Donald Trump’s plans for EPA are a five-alarm emergency—with the health of millions of Americans hanging in the balance,” EPN’s Executive Director, Michelle Roos, publicly warned at the time. “The fight to save EPA begins now.”

Michelle was right.

There is no minimizing the harm done at EPA over the past year. The agency’s current political leadership, made up of industry lobbyists and executives, has worked aggressively to sideline scientific expertise, weaken enforcement, and advance an outrageous deregulatory agenda tailored to the oil and chemical industries.

Using dubious legal authority, they canceled $2.5 billion in grants to communities with environmental justice concerns, undermining plans for critically important environmental and economic improvements.

The agency has been hollowed out. Nearly 4,000 positions—about a quarter of the agency—were vacated in 2025 through forced exits, intimidation, retaliation, and deliberate campaigns to put employees “in trauma.” Others have left involuntarily—some as part of a purge of all things considered “environmental justice” under Trump, and others as retaliation for sending Lee Zeldin a letter that told the truth of what was happening at EPA.

When inspectors, scientists, and engineers are pushed out, corporate interests go unchallenged, polluters get a free pass, and communities pay the price.

In total, the actions by EPA’s political leaders over the last year have endangered public health, eroded trust, and left communities more vulnerable to pollution.

But that is not the whole story.

Equally real, though far less visible amid the daily barrage of bad news, has been the determined, coordinated resistance. Communities, scientists, current and former EPA staff, lawyers, unions, states, and nonprofit organizations have relentlessly pushed back on the Trump EPA’s harmful agenda. That pushback has slowed, weakened, and in some cases stopped parts of this toxic agenda.

Throughout 2025, we saw again and again that public engagement, expert advocacy, and sustained pressure matter.

As 2026 dawns, this collective effort has laid a foundation for something critical—the turning of the tide. We have seen that progress is possible once we undo the public disengagement that polluters have been counting on.

Three Sources of Hope in 2026:

As destructive as 2025 was, it also revealed three clear, and growing, sources of momentum against EPA’s harmful approach. At first, these appeared as a trickle. By year’s end, they were gaining real force.

1) Communities everywhere are fighting back

Across the country, frontline community leaders and advocates have doubled down, fighting for environmental justice, even in the face of significant obstacles. People living with pollution don’t have the luxury of tuning out.

In heavily polluted neighborhoods in places like Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, industrial corridors in Houston and Chicago, and in cities throughout North Carolina, residents are organizing protests, filing civil rights complaints, and suing to challenge EPA’s retreat from environmental justice enforcement. Meanwhile, reports show community leaders, church groups, and local EJ organizations are gathering health data, partnering with national advocates, and pressing state regulators and city officials to step in where federal oversight has been weakened.

For example, in Seattle, as the federal government canceled $1.7 billion in environmental justice grants, the city moved in the opposite direction—awarding $1.2 million through its Environmental Justice Fund to grassroots organizations on the frontlines of climate change. The money, raised through a local payroll tax, is flowing directly to communities of color, immigrants, the elderly, and low-income residents.

In New Orleans, the Climate Action Equity Project brings community leaders from every city district to co-design resilience strategies, from flood protection to coastal restoration—filling the gap left by withdrawn federal support.

The federal retreat didn’t make pollution disappear; it made local leadership more urgent. These communities are proving that pressure for change can’t stop just because new leaders in Washington want to look away.

Another landmark example came when three Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program intermediaries—the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative in Baltimore, the Minneapolis Foundation, and Philanthropy Northwest—won a lawsuit via a strong summary judgement after EPA unlawfully terminated millions of dollars in grants solely to eliminate community-led environmental justice initiatives. The court ruled that EPA’s violation is “especially clear” since Congress had expressly established the program to advance environmental justice.

Although EPA is appealing the decision, hundreds of grants from these organizations are now moving forward—improving health, economic stability, and environmental conditions in communities long overburdened by pollution.

Beyond this case, state attorney generals, organizations like Lawyers for Good Government, and others are continuing the fight on behalf of communities in court and the prospect for more reversals appears good.

2) Trump’s toxic EPA agenda is weakening under pressure

Trump’s efforts to gut EPA’s public health protections and intimidate the civil servants who carry out the agency’s mission have been devastating. But they are no longer going unanswered. Headwinds from career staff, unions, states, the public, the courts, and Congress are growing stronger — and together, they are slowing, weakening, and in some cases reversing parts of this agenda.

Inside the agency, resistance has been real and costly. More than 140 career EPA employees put their jobs on the line to warn the public that Administrator Zeldin’s actions meant EPA was no longer living up to its mission. Efforts to silence these employees through retaliation and firings are now being challenged in court, while federal unions, the Environmental Protection Network, and allied organizations continue to stand with career staff. Attempts to bypass unions have also faltered: the House passed bipartisan legislation to repeal Trump’s executive order stripping union rights, and an arbitrator ruled that one of Zeldin’s signature union-busting efforts violated EPA’s labor contract with the American Federation of Government Employees.

Taken together, these internal and external pressures are changing the terrain EPA leadership is operating on.

Public pressure has also forced EPA leadership to retreat from several high-profile rollbacks. Plans to weaken long-standing asbestos protections and roll back drinking water standards for PFAS “forever chemicals” triggered swift backlash from scientists, advocates, and communities, and in multiple cases, EPA has backed down. Widely supported, consumer-facing programs like Energy Star have proven harder to dismantle once public scrutiny kicked in.

What’s happening inside EPA and on Capitol Hill mirrors something else we’re seeing clearly: the public is paying attention again.

3) The public did not sign up for this. And they are catching on.

The public opposition reflected in EPN’s post-election poll has only grown more visible. By summer 2025, just 29% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the environment and climate change, and nearly two-thirds said EPA should be maintained or expanded—not reduced. That matters, because sustained public attention is one of the few forces powerful enough to slow even the most aggressive deregulatory agenda.

Signs of that pressure are already emerging in unexpected places. In December, leaders aligned with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement—a key Trump constituency—launched a petition calling for Administrator Zeldin to be fired. It has now gathered more than 15,000 signatures. When even parts of the political base begin to revolt, it signals that the costs of dismantling EPA are becoming harder to ignore.

That growing recognition is not just anger—it is leverage. As EPN Senior Advisor Jeremy Symons wrote recently, Trump’s toxic agenda at EPA is becoming toxic with the public.

Americans understand something fundamental: when corporations cut corners and emit more pollution to boost profits, the rest of us pay the price—through higher health risks, mounting medical bills, and long-term damage to communities. At the Environmental Protection Network, we believe truth still matters, especially when EPA experts are silenced. And the truth is this: weakened safeguards, sidelined science, and a hollowed-out workforce have already left Americans more exposed to toxic harm.

The Power of Volunteers

EPN’s work is powered by volunteers—mostly former EPA staff—who refuse to stand by while the agency’s mission is dismantled. Their experience and credibility are what make EPN effective when facts are under attack.

In 2025, EPN volunteers across the country put that expertise to work. They spoke with the media, wrote articles, trained advocates, supported communities facing pollution, and served as trusted experts in legal and policy challenges. Even when EPA’s current leadership ignored the facts, our volunteers made sure the truth was documented—because today’s record becomes tomorrow’s accountability.

Over the course of the year, EPN submitted public comments on 19 rollback efforts, provided congressional testimony six times, supported litigation, and delivered pro bono technical assistance to hundreds of frontline communities.

This collective effort shows what happens when expertise is organized and shared: science is defended, communities are not left alone, and the fight for public health remains very much alive.

Turning the Tide

The past year has shown both what is at risk and what is possible.

In 2026, EPN will continue to push back against harmful policies, stand with communities and EPA staff, defend science, and make the consequences of these decisions visible to the public. We will keep informing those who care but have not yet engaged—and help turn concern into action.

Clean air, safe water, and public health are the foundation for everything else. The past year showed what happens when those protections are taken for granted. The coming year will show what’s possible when people decide they won’t be.

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