Lee Zeldin, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is poised to spearhead a sweeping rollback of regulations related to meatpacking plant pollution, fertilizer chemicals and a wide range of other agriculture-related environmental standards.
In selecting Zeldin, a former New York congressman, Trump has echoed the deregulation priorities of his first term, setting the stage for potential legal clashes between agriculture industry groups and environmental advocates.
“Day one, and the first 100 days, we have the opportunity to roll back regulations that are forcing businesses to … struggle,” said Zeldin in an interview with Fox News, the day Trump announced his nomination in November. “President Trump, when he called me up — gosh, he was rattling off 15, 20 different priorities with clear focus.”
Zeldin built his political career representing a Long Island state house district before moving to Congress in 2015. He was one of the first Republicans to endorse Trump during the 2016 campaign, joined the president’s impeachment defense team and amplified doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
As EPA administrator, many environmentalists expect Zeldin to carry on with Trump’s first-term efforts to significantly dismantle environmental regulations.
Zeldin “will gladly take a sledgehammer to EPA’s most recent lifesaving regulations, putting politics over science and endangering our communities,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, an environmental law organization.
The organization actively opposed Trump’s environmental policy decisions during his first term, filing more than 130 lawsuits to uphold existing health and environmental safeguards.
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During his first term, Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental rules, according to a New York Times analysis. Among them was the narrowing of pesticide application buffer zones intended to protect farmworkers and bystanders from accidental exposure. Trump’s EPA also rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to developmental disabilities in children.
Trump also rolled back the requirement for concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, to report emissions of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, a move that marked a major setback in air quality monitoring.
The Biden administration pushed forward with stronger environmental regulations, including proposed updates to the Effluent Limitation Guidelines (ELGs) for meat and poultry processing facilities. Designed to strengthen wastewater discharge standards for meatpacking plants, the proposed rules met strong resistance from industry groups.
The Meat Institute, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Chicken Council, and the National Pork Producers Council argued that the proposed rules could cost meatpackers hundreds of millions of dollars, leading to the closure of numerous processing plants.
A closer look at water protection laws
Stacy Woods, research director for the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Trump’s first term significantly altered the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, allowing large agriculture corporations to pollute more freely. She expects more of the same during his second term.
“While it is hard to predict what exact requirements will be repealed in the coming months and years, any changes made to rules governing air, water, and toxic chemicals discharged from industries will likely weaken reporting requirements, monitoring limits and allow big industries to pollute with impunity,” Woods said in an email.
Omanjana Goswami, a scientist who also is part of the Food and Environment Program, said large companies often view pollution fines as just another cost of doing business, leveraging their market share to absorb penalties with minimal impact.
She referenced a report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists in April, which found that Tyson Foods — the nation’s largest meat and poultry producer — discharged hundreds of millions of pounds of pollutants from its slaughterhouses and processing plants into local waterways across the U.S. between 2018 and 2022.
“Weakening or rolling back rulemaking and investments made to increase competition in the agribusiness sector will reinforce corporate industrial agriculture’s power to pollute,” Goswami said.
Over the years, farmers and ranchers have experienced numerous changes in U.S. water regulations. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the bodies of water the EPA could regulate. Although Biden’s EPA issued a rule amending the law to comply with the ruling, many loopholes remain. The administration’s expansion of federal protections for small streams and wetlands has faced opposition from many farmers who see it as government overreach into private land management.
During his Senate confirmation hearing last week, Zeldin said he felt it was important for the EPA to provide “clean, clear and durable guidance” regarding the waters of the U.S..
“It should be as clear as possible so that your people can understand without having to go hire an attorney or someone else to assist them with compliance and definitions,” said Zeldin, answering Nebraska senator Pete Ricketts’ question on the subject.
J.W. Glass, EPA policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, believes the Trump administration will likely push for the narrowest possible definition of wetlands to cater to industry interests, even if such a definition ultimately conflicts with the Supreme Court ruling.
“Destruction of wetlands in agricultural areas will ramp up significantly, which will ultimately result in the degradation of rural water quality and the removal of natural flood protections that prevent water logging of crops,” Glass stated in an email.
However, Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, associate professor of applied economics and policy at Cornell University, said that discussions around deregulation often miss the broader context of agricultural production and its environmental impact.
“Agricultural production causes pollution, like many other economic activities. Does that mean ag is ‘bad’? No,” Ortiz-Bobea stated in an email. “It just means we have to account for that negative effect on the environment to improve the livelihoods of everyone. Now, how you achieve this is another problem.”
In 2022, the agriculture sector made up 9.4% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA. The biggest source of agricultural emissions was soil management, including the use of fertilizers, livestock manure, and nitrogen-fixing plants, which made up 75% of the country’s nitrous oxide emissions.
Ortiz-Bobea believes water quality is a critical issue in agriculture, noting that many streams in the United States remain polluted due to nutrient runoff.
He worries that the focus on deregulation is less about simplifying regulations to make them more effective and less burdensome for farmers, and more about removing regulations entirely.
“The concern with a focus on ‘deregulation’ is that it is often not about simplifying regulations so that they are more effective and do not impose unnecessary costs on farmers, but about eliminating those regulations altogether,” he said. “That means poorer environmental quality for everyone.”
How Zeldin might reshape enforcement
Trump has also indicated plans to significantly reduce federal budgets, which is expected to heavily impact the operations of the EPA.
During the first 18 months of Trump’s first term, the EPA lost nearly 1,600 staff members, accounting for an 8% reduction in the agency’s workforce, according to The Washington Post.
Among the specific roles impacted were 260 scientists, 106 engineers and 185 environmental protection specialists, highlighting a decrease in the agency’s technical and specialized expertise.
“EPA is currently underfunded and Trump has said he wants to make major cuts at the agency, especially in the offices that work on climate change and environmental justice,” said Judith Enck, former EPA regional administrator and president of Beyond Plastics.
“He will undoubtedly propose significant cuts to the agency and Congress should not go along with the cuts, especially given the seriousness of the environmental problems facing every corner of the nation.”
State-level defenses in an era of federal deregulation
State law could become a crucial defense against federal rollbacks of environmental protections, said Peg Sheaffer, communications director of Midwest Environmental Advocates.
“While the Trump administration will do its best to roll back environmental policy at the federal level, environmental protection is not governed solely by federal policy. In Wisconsin, our state laws can be an important backstop, no matter what a Trump EPA does,” Sheaffer said in an email.
Sheaffer added that federal environmental laws – like the Clean Water Act – generally set national standards, but it is up to individual states to implement, enforce, and tailor those laws to meet their specific needs.
In Wisconsin, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) oversees the administration and enforcement of the Clean Water Act, including permitting for large livestock facilities known as CAFO.
“Wisconsin’s CAFO permitting program will be a critical tool in protecting our environment in the event that the Trump Administration attempts to roll back the Clean Water Act,” Sheaffer said.
Another example has to do with Wisconsin’s Spills Law, a state law that gives the Department of Natural Resources the authority to hold polluters accountable.
“In some ways, the Spills Law is actually more powerful than its federal counterpart,” Sheaffer said. “That’s because the Spills Law imposes reporting, testing and remediation obligations on polluters regardless of whether the contaminant in question has been designated as hazardous under federal law.”
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