Enviros are reeling in Trump's ‘scorched-earth' second term

E&E News

4 days ago

It's a rough time to be an environmentalist.
Green groups spent the early days of this administration stunned as the Trump 2.0 team dismantled federal agencies, slashed spending and torpedoed regulations in a flurry that caught many of the administration's critics by surprise.
Now, as environmental nonprofits gear up for several more years of playing defense against an emboldened administration, the movement is scrambling to regain traction.
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Green groups are watching years of work on environmental regulations vaporize. The administration is purging the federal workforce — including staffers who work inside energy and environmental agencies. And the court system that President Donald Trump's critics are using to challenge the administration is overshadowed by a conservative Supreme Court that has already handed some big wins to the president.
'The reason for bad vibes is obvious: This is the most anti-environmental administration that our country and perhaps the world has ever seen,' said Bill McKibben, a longtime environmentalist and author. 'It is difficult to be hopeful in the face of all that.'
In its latest blockbuster move to slash environmental policies, the Trump administration this week announced plans to jettison the so-called endangerment finding, the scientific determination that underpins EPA's climate regulations. It's a seismic move that could fully upend the government's climate rules — and one that the first Trump administration avoided in part due to concerns about the political ramifications.
This Trump administration is different. The environmental movement is on its heels as it scrambles to respond. And as they gear up for defense in the policy realm, some green groups are also struggling with internal problems.
Some organizations aren't getting the same surge in donations they saw during the first Trump administration. Prominent green groups have laid off staff this year at a time they'd like to be boosting their personnel to fight back. And environmentalists are worried the administration will target environmental nonprofits' tax-exempt status, a move that would make fundraising even tougher.
POLITICO's E&E News interviewed more than a dozen green group leaders, climate activists and employees at environmental nonprofits for this story. They described a movement that's been forced to recalibrate as the Trump administration has slashed climate policies, targeted long-standing environmental protections and purged employees across the federal government.
'We just lost a decade's worth of work under the Trump administration and we're in the process of losing more as he guts federal agencies and they go after rewriting bedrock environmental laws,' said Erich Pica, president of the Washington-based green group Friends of the Earth.
Money woes
EPA employees and supporters take part in a national march in protest over Trump administration policies March 25 in Philadelphia. | Matt Rourke/AP
At Friends of the Earth, individual donations fell by about $1.3 million this year — an 11 percent drop over last year, said Pica.
Friends of Earth relies on small donations for about 70 percent of its revenue, Pica said. He attributed declining donations to factors including inflation, tariffs, and algorithmic changes to online advertising and email marketing.
'Friends of the Earth hasn't seen a significant Trump bump when it comes to small-donor fundraising,' Pica said. It's nowhere near the increase they saw in 2016, he said. He thinks that's due in part to donor and activist fatigue after 'eight years of Trump being the boogeyman.'
At Friends of the Earth, the steep decline in donations has led to staff layoffs, Pica said.
The organization laid off eight people in June as a result of restructuring and cost-cutting to address its budget deficit, Pica said.
The layoffs are 'terrible for our staff and staff morale,' Pica said.
That organization is also restructuring its communications work in an effort to adapt to the times, he said. That means more experimenting with what it means to be successful on TikTok, Substack, Instagram, LinkedIn and other emerging platforms, Pica said.
Other groups have laid off staff this year, too.
The Sierra Club laid off dozens of employees earlier this year. Those layoffs — attributed to budget shortfalls — fueled ongoing strife inside that group, where staff have been feuding with management for years. Sierra Club's executive director, Ben Jealous, went on unexplained leave in July, the group announced.
The Washington-based Ocean Conservancy told 21 employees in the spring that their positions were being eliminated,
The layoffs, the group's CEO Janis Searles Jones told staff in an internal email, were the result of factors including 'significant shifts in the policy and fundraising environment, unprecedented volatility, and unprecedented pressure on the philanthropic sector.'
Another group, Greenpeace, is in the throes of a high-stakes legal battle that could have dire financial and political consequences for the organization. A jury in North Dakota earlier this year ordered the environmental group to pay more than $660 million in damages to a pipeline developer, a sum Greenpeace doesn't have, the group's interim Executive Director Sushma Raman told E&E News in March.
Greenpeace is still challenging the jury's verdict, said Deepa Padmanabha, a Greenpeace senior legal adviser. 'This is still the beginning of the fight.'
Greenpeace has said it plans to fight 'all the way to victory' in that case, and it says that the outcome 'could establish dangerous new legal precedents' and that 'our entire movement's future could be in jeopardy.'
Pummeled on policy
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn before boarding Marine One and departing the White House on July 1. | Anna Moneymaker/AFP via Getty Images
Environmentalists have taken some big hits on policy priorities already this year.
The Trump White House and congressional Republicans have taken a hatchet to the Biden administration's signature climate change law. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by Trump on July 4, phases out Biden-era incentives to spur technologies including wind, solar and electric vehicles.
Green groups keeping tabs on the rollbacks of environmental regulations from the second Trump administration say they've never seen anything like this.
'As soon as the second Trump administration took office in January 2025, we witnessed an immediate and unprecedented attack on our environment and public health,' the Natural Resources Defense Council says on its website.
That group's Trump tracker says this administration 'has taken or proposed at least 270 actions that directly threaten the environment, climate, and human health' since Trump's second term kicked off.
Among the administration's moves that have environmentalists most worried are deep cuts to the federal workforce that oversees regulations, a revamp of how the National Environmental Policy Act is implemented and the move to revoke the scientific endangerment finding that underpins EPA climate regulations.
The Trump team's flood-the-zone approach to rolling out policy has complicated their opponents' efforts to keep track of everything they're doing.
The Center for Biological Diversity has launched a new centralized tracking system to keep tabs on Trump's 'fuselage of policies and ensure that every one of them was getting dealt with by ourselves or others,' said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the CBD.
The center calls it the 'Overcome Committee,' Suckling said of the effort, which tracks rumors about upcoming moves as well as actions taken by the administration. 'Without that, undoubtedly, things would fall through the cracks,' Suckling said.
Court fights
With the executive branch and Congress in GOP control, Trump's critics are turning to the courts, states and public opinion as they attempt to combat the administration and notch policy wins.
Some of the biggest national green groups, including the NRDC, Earthjustice and the Environmental Defense Fund, are relying on the courts to be a backstop in their fight against Trump's policies.
But the legal landscape has changed dramatically since Trump's first term. Three of the nine Supreme Court justices are Trump appointees, and the majority of the court is conservative. The high court so far this year has handed Trump some major victories, including allowing mass layoffs across the government and blocking lower courts from issuing nationwide injunctions thwarting his policies.
The stakes could not be higher.
Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice
Green groups still see the courts as a crucial battlefield, although they're changing their approach from the first Trump term.
The NRDC has 'a strong litigation strategy and is able to let people know when we're holding [the administration] to account,' Christy Goldfuss, the NRDC's executive director, said in a recent interview.
'At least so far, the courts seem to be the one place that we're able to still use facts and hold them accountable,' she said. There's been a shift in strategy since Trump's first term, she said, when 'everybody chased every single thing.' Now, she said, there's 'far more discipline on what we think is the right case.'
The NRDC isn't getting the same fundraising bump it saw in 2016 and 2017, but the group has started to see increased giving, Goldfuss said, pointing to the group's solid fundraising base of small-dollar and midlevel donors.
At another major green group, the EDF, 'fundraising continues to be strong,' said EDF President Fred Krupp. 'A lot of Americans are voting with their dollars that they want this extreme action to be fought.'
Environmental protections 'are in trouble in the United States because of the Trump administration, but the environmental community is very focused, and people appreciate the danger from this administration is much greater in Trump 2.0 than from Trump 1.0,' Krupp said.
Abigail Dillen, the president of Earthjustice, said her group has seen a boost in fundraising compared to the first Trump term.
'We're actually seeing an even greater outpouring of support,' she said. 'Thank goodness because we need it. I think that anyone reading the papers every day sees the importance of holding this administration to account.'
The Trump team is 'taking a scorched-earth approach,' Dillen said.
She sees this as the most challenging time the environmental movement has faced, Dillen said.
What's happening, she said, 'is a very concerted, well-orchestrated effort to ally with the Supreme Court, to close off the authority of future presidents to repair this and even to constrain Congress from repairing it. The stakes could not be higher.'
That makes green groups' mission more important than ever, Dillon said. 'The only way that we're going to come through this time is if there are enough people who will understand what's at stake and act on it.'
'This is our moment'
The day after Trump's inauguration, the CBD's Suckling showed his leadership staff the Muhammad Ali documentary 'When We Were Kings,' he said in a recent interview. Some watched together in person from the group's Portland, Oregon, office. Others tuned in via Zoom.
Suckling wanted his staff to see how Ali prepared for his 1974 heavyweight boxing championship match, where he toppled defending champion George Foreman.
Foreman was 'just a monstrous tank of a fighter who would scare the heck out of anybody,' Suckling said. 'Muhammad Ali rose to that challenge.'
Suckling's team is 'champing at the bit to fight,' he said. He called his staff the 'Navy Seals' of the environmental movement.
'This is our moment,' Suckling said. 'If there was ever a reason the center has built up 200 staff and a $34 million budget, it's to be able to deploy that staff and that budget against the biggest threat to America's environment in our nation's history.'
He said fundraising has increased for his group. Money 'is not going to be the limiting factor for us. It's going to be creativity and reorganizing ourselves to be able to be most effective and most speedy,' Suckling said.
Green groups and climate activists across the movement are looking for new ways to harness discontent with the Trump administration and concern for the environment.
Margaret Klein Salamon, executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund that supports climate activists, thinks the reignition of a 'mass movement' on climate is possible. There's a 'huge upsurge in the country of protest energy, but it's not really well directed or strategic,' she said.
If there was ever a reason the center has built up 200 staff and a $34 million budget, it's to be able to deploy that staff and that budget against the biggest threat to America's environment in our nation's history.
Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity
'The landscape out there for funding is really, really rough right now,' Salamon said. 'I think there's a lot of fear and a lot of hesitation. At least one major donor has told us explicitly that because of their fear of risk, they don't want to renew funding,' she said.
There's also 'more interest and potentially openness among philanthropy as well to hear new ideas, to think about movements. I think there is a combination of fear and opportunity,' she said.
A resurgence of the environmental movement will require a 'grassroots component,' said McKibben, who's working to mobilize activists for a September day of activism dubbed 'Sun Day' to 'celebrate solar and wind power.'
One thing Trump's critics on the left are expecting: Public discontent with Trump's cuts and regulatory rollbacks will snowball. They want to be ready to capitalize.
'Trump and MAGA by attacking people's health care, their wallets, their food stamps — alongside attacking clean energy and climate — provides an opportunity to really unify across issues,' said May Boeve, former executive director of the environmental group 350.org.
'Our opponents have given us this chance to work together, and I think that that's the only way out of this,' Boeve said.