EPA reorganization signals end to climate work

E&E News

05-05-2025

EPA is getting rid of the two offices that are primarily responsible for regulating climate and air pollution.
The move to eliminate the Office of Atmospheric Protection (OAP) and Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards (OAQPS) by the end of the fiscal year signals a likely end to much of the agency's climate work. EPA political appointees announced the reorganization plan during a Friday town hall with employees of the Office of Air and Radiation, which houses both OAP and OAQPS.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will likely move programs to curb smog, soot and toxic emissions into other offices. But most of OAP's work seems destined for the dust bin — including a program that requires the country's biggest polluters to report their greenhouse gas emissions.
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Instead, EPA will create two offices within OAR called the Office of Clean Air Programs and Office of State Air Partnerships. The clean air office will 'align statutory obligations and mission essential functions,' according to an agency press release.
'With these organizational improvements, we recommit to fulfilling all of our statutory obligations and exceptionally delivering on EPA's core mission of protecting human health and the environment,' Zeldin said in the release.
The reorganization plan announced Friday also includes axing the Office of Research and Development, a centralized arm for research and science that employs over 1,500 people. While Congress could block the reorganization, former EPA officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations said that was unlikely; the plan only requires general approval by appropriations committees, not enacting legislation.
EPA did not respond to inquiries about the changes to OAR. But Project 2025, which has proved influential in President Donald Trump's second term, calls for OAR to shift away from greenhouse gas regulations and instead focus on 'limiting and minimizing criteria and hazardous air pollutants in partnership with the states.'
EPA will still need to maintain some staff to work on climate regulations. But it is working to drop greenhouse gases from its list of regulated pollutants by reconsidering a 2009 scientific finding that underpins all Clean Air Act climate regulations.
On Friday, EPA also sent the White House Office of Management and Budget proposals to repeal Biden-era rules for power plant carbon and mercury — without replacing them.
It was a move that has been long expected — and is a first. The first Trump administration replaced climate rules with weaker ones.
Joe Goffman, EPA air chief under former President Joe Biden, said he wasn't surprised that the Trump administration opted for the more aggressive tactic of not regulating the second-highest-emitting sector for carbon pollution at all.
'When they have a choice between using a scalpel or a laser on the one hand, or a sledgehammer and a meat cleaver on the other, they'll choose the sledgehammer and the meat cleaver,' Goffman said.
End of pollution reporting?
Zeldin speaks frequently of the need to limit EPA's regulatory and analytical activities to those required to comply with 'statutory obligations.' He has said that the agency will only retain staff who work on such programs.
The Clean Air Act requires EPA to update standards in line with strict — and frequently missed — schedules for a variety of non-greenhouse gas pollutants like particulate matter and sulfur dioxide. Many of those programs, which are now administered by OAQPS, are likely to be absorbed by the new clean air office.
Some OAP programs may move there, too. The office oversees EPA's acid rain and ozone programs, for example, as well as the phase-down of heat-trapping coolants called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). There are at least some continuing 'statutory obligations' for all of those programs under the Clean Air Act and American Innovation and Manufacturing Act.
The latter law, which passed Congress in 2020 with strong bipartisan support and was signed by Trump, phases down climate pollutants in favor of alternatives for which U.S. companies hold the patents.
'Big companies like Honeywell have made big investments in HFC substitutes,' Goffman said. 'I think they're going to look to the EPA to continue to approve those substitutes, so they could market them.'
All of those programs will probably be transferred to the new clean air office from OAP, said current and past OAR staff, though they said Trump officials offered few details.
But relatively few of OAP's programs are likely to survive the reorganization.
EPA's greenhouse gas reporting program is probably on the chopping block, though oil and gas operations may still have to report their emissions for the time being. Congress mandated that reporting — and created a methane management program — in the 2022 climate law. Republican lawmakers could pull back that language later this year in a budget reconciliation package.
EPA's annual greenhouse gas inventory may also be eliminated, because it is a treaty obligation but not mandated by statute. So are a host of other domestic and international programs and partnerships designed to measure, track or reduce climate-forcing emissions, which mostly grew up through a series of executive and agency actions. They may include Energy Star, a high-efficiency product labeling program administered by OAP.
Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the loss of reliable federal data about greenhouse gas emissions would undermine climate action by states, local governments and the private sector.
'This kind of information is just vital for us to understand where the heat-trapping emissions are coming from and how that's changing over time,' she said. 'There's no reason to get rid of it, except to try to bury the evidence.'
The Trump administration delivered a 'skinny budget' Friday for fiscal 2026 that asked Congress to zero out the so-called Atmospheric Protection Program — a general name for EPA's climate reporting and inventory programs that hasn't been used in years.
It called the programs an 'overreach of Government authority that imposes unnecessary and radical climate change regulations on businesses and stifles economic growth.'