Gound-Level Environmentalism: Trumpism's Unexpected Outcome Part One
Introduction
America’s current environmental protection enterprise – the complex but effective blend of institutions, laws, and personnel at every governmental level – will not survive the Trump presidency unscathed. Trumpism’s Project 2025 pledged to favor profits over protection. Part One of this article anticipates how its implementation will remodel agencies, rewrite laws, and exile federal experts.
However, Part Two foresees that Americans’ shared commitment to environmental health, beauty, and conservation will incite a response unseen in most of our lifetimes: localized, ground-level, grassroots citizen mobilizations. Similar upwellings of emotion, activism, and politicking founded, over a half-century ago, our system of using law and science to safeguard our natural environment.
PART ONE
Obvious Concerns
Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to turn American environmental policy inside out. As his presidency unrolls, watch for administrative and congressional efforts to unravel the fabric of environmental law. Administrators, judges, elected officials, and organized citizens have been weaving that cloth since 1946, so Trump’s project will take time and effort. His first obvious rip in the green tapestry was nominating Lee Zeldin to head EPA. A former New York Republican congressman, Zeldin’s dismal League of Conservation Voters score was a feature, not a bug.
Trump vows to use executive authority to withdraw the United States from the Paris Accords designed to slow climate heating. As campaign crowds chanted “Drill, Drill, Drill!”, he promised to boost oil and gas production on federal lands. And he insists that “on Day One” he’s slapping tariffs on all Chinese imports, immediately raising the cost of green technologies that are now accelerating America away from carbon-fired electricity production.
Early Targets
Trump’s extra-governmental (and possibly extra-constitutional) “Department of Government Efficiency” (aka DOGE), Elon Musk’s pet project, seems poised to target for quick budgetary elimination any federal agency project aimed at promoting carbon transition or publicizing climate heating’s economic and social risks.
Trump-backing Congress members will meanwhile aim at “job-killing” administrative rules that mediate some environmental impacts caused by private and federal projects that build roads, transmission lines, and nuclear-generating stations. Expect Congressional Review Act attacks on a range of environmental rules within the next six months.
And it’s almost a no-brainer to predict Trump’s budgets – at least over the next couple of years – will try to zero out any Executive Branch project, employee, or office bearing the words “environmental justice.”
Turmoil Ahead
Project 2025 projected this. The Trumpists who will soon become key federal administrators wrote Project 2025 as their manifesto and action plan to enforce Trumpism on environmental law. Don’t expect federal courts to do more than tap the brakes: recent Supreme Court decisions have already started eroding the administrative legal rationale for environmental agency actions.
Trumpism will trigger administrative and legal turmoil within our environmental protection legal system. Make no mistake. The complex structure of power, law, and personnel, built over 75 years by many hands of both political parties, will not look the same by December 2028.
And yet, expect the unexpected. Americans will respond as Trumpism tries uprooting familiar bureaucratic safeguards. Americans probably won’t march and rally to save federal jobs or even federal agencies. But I do expect, based on history, that they will speak out to save places, to preserve opportunities, and to safeguard their natural birthright.
Stay tuned for part two of this story.