Abigail Dillen, President of Earthjustice: “Lee Zeldin and the Trump administration
are abandoning the EPA's mission. When they make an announcement like this, taking a hatchet to all of the protections for clean air, clean water, freedom from toxic chemicals, we all have so very much to lose."
Sam Sankar, Senior VP for Programs: "There's not a lot of legal pathways to actually rolling these regulations back. There's two primary ways that you do it.
"One is the traditional rulemaking process, which is what we saw a lot of during the first Trump administration.
"The other way you do it is by saying that the underlying law doesn't actually authorize the regulation. You declare that the words, say, of the Clean Air Act don't mean what everybody has thought that they meant. if you do that, you're not going through that big factual or scientific finding.
"But then you're dealing with a legal problem and a political problem as well. You're telling the voters that not only did they vote for President Trump, but they voted for dirtier air, more toxic drinking water, and basically just less healthy lives."
Patrice Simms, VP of Litigation for Healthy Communities: “When Zeldin talks about this idea of the greatest deregulation in history, what he's really talking about is abandoning rules like the soot standards — the PM standards.
"This is a rule that will prevent some 800,000 asthma attacks, avoid 290,000 lost workdays, and save 4,500 lives per year. And let's be clear that the pollutants that these kinds of sources emit cause cancer, developmental impairment. They cause heart attacks, stroke, cardiovascular disease. They cause asthma attacks and neurological harm. They up-end people's lives and destabilize entire communities.
"And these impacts to these communities, the harms that come to these communities, most heavily land on the shoulders of children.
Abigail Dillen: “There is no way to reconcile the greatest day of deregulation in EPA's history with protecting people's health in this country.”
