Safe Space: Zeldin Ducks Drama Amid Cabinet Ousters

Three of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members have resigned in the past two months and rumors swirl about who else will get the ax ahead of the coming midterm elections.

But not Lee Zeldin.

The head of EPA is sitting comfortably in the eye of the storm, leveraging his unexpected appointment to become one of the most stable and effective of Trump’s lieutenants.

“The president set a pretty clear agenda for EPA, and [Zeldin] has executed on it,” said Joseph Brazauskas, who led the agency’s congressional and intergovernmental relations office in Trump's first term and is now a partner at Bracewell. “And I think the president noticed that.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi got the boot in early April in part because Trump reportedly was dissatisfied with her unsuccessful efforts to prosecute his political enemies. The president reassigned Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March to a newly created role as Trump's special envoy for the Shield of the Americas. Former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned Monday in the face of numerous allegations of misconduct. And Navy Secretary John Phelan stepped down this week, amid an ongoing naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, other high-ranking Trump officials are rumored to be on the outs with the president, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.

But the chatter following Zeldin largely focuses on potential promotions to higher-profile roles in the administration, including suggestions that he could nab an attorney general nomination.

In his year at the agency, Zeldin has delivered a slate of speedy regulatory rollbacks while stoking conservative approval on social media and in frequent appearances on right-leaning outlets.

Zeldin completed the endangerment finding repeal, ripping out the underpinnings of federal climate regulations — a marquee action of Trump’s first year back in office — in less than a year. Billions of dollars in grant awards were undone with a stroke of a pen.

Steve Milloy, an adviser to President Donald Trump’s first transition team, said the secret to safely navigating an administration role is “pretty simple.”

“You need to be executing on the president's agenda,” he said. “He has some very definite things that he wants done, and his perception is that Lee Zeldin is getting them done at EPA, and Pam Bondi was not getting his agenda done at [the Department of] Justice.”

Meanwhile, Zeldin has a limited role in international issues. That allows him to heap praise on Trump’s actions in Iran without having to face tougher questions about the administration’s strategy or goals.

Volatile gas prices are also someone else’s problem. Energy Secretary Chris Wright this week had to walk back comments about prices at the pump taking a while to cool off after Trump slammed Wright’s remarks.

Trump broke with other recent GOP presidents in his first term by nominating “someone who can manage the EPA the way it needed to be managed, versus putting someone more moderate there to sort of placate the media and more establishment Republican types,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the conservative American Energy Alliance.

Past Republican EPA administrators sometimes publicly disagreed with the White House. Former President George W. Bush openly clashed with his first EPA chief, Christine Todd Whitman, on the agency’s willingness to consider regulating climate pollution via the Clean Air Act.

William Reilly, EPA’s chief under former President George H.W. Bush, called Zeldin “a perfect clone of the president.”

“He has the same disinterest and lack of knowledge of science. He thinks that breathing coal smoke is healthy and good for you,” said Reilly, who last year joined other former administrators in an op-ed urging the Trump EPA to preserve its authority to regulate climate pollution. “He does not really believe in the regulatory mission of the agency.”

Head down in a scandal-rich Cabinet

The EPA administrator has angered Democrats and environmental groups, who have called on him to resign. And there has been some amount of dissatisfaction with Zeldin from Trump’s base.

Zeldin has taken some fire from the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement headed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., over pesticides like glyphosate and his subordinates' chemical industry ties.But Zeldin has tried to ameliorate those concerns by aligning himself with Kennedy on fluoridated drinking water and microplastic contamination.

The EPA administrator has reached out directly to MAHA activists too. After a handful of movement leaders started a petition calling on Zeldin to step down, he met with some of them and pledged to release a MAHA agenda for the agency, though it has yet to arrive.

Many MAHA activists are skeptical the agenda will include actionable items from their wish list, such as emergency reviews for dozens of pesticides and a moratorium on permits for plastic facility expansions.

EPA told POLITICO’s E&E News that Zeldin’s relationships with the White House remain strong.

“The administrator greatly enjoys working for President Trump, and with his fellow Cabinet members, proudly serving the American people,” said EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch.

“Leadership” from the White House, she said, has “been paramount to the success of the Trump EPA.”

“Administrator Zeldin is an incredible asset to the President’s energy dominance agenda,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers. “He has successfully restored common sense to the EPA by reforming costly permitting processes, announcing the biggest deregulatory action made by any administration, and making historic strides to ensure every American has access to clean air and water.”

Zeldin’s secure spot in the Cabinet differs with Trump’s first EPA administrator, former Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, who resigned after roughly a year and a half following a slow drip of ethical and occasionally oddball scandals. Pruitt did not respond to calls for comment.

Zeldin, by contrast, has avoided the kinds of transgressions that draw bad headlines and erode a Cabinet member’s standing.

“Administrator Zeldin has been in Washington previously for a long period of time serving as a member of Congress,” said Brazauskas. “So I think he understands how things work in town and has executed based on his previous experience.”

Furthermore, the administrator’s aggressive pursuit of Trump administration priorities means the president has no need to replace him, said Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s first EPA transition team.

“I think the attacks on Pam Bondi were both from the conservative side and the left side,” he said. “Trump took advantage of that to say, ‘We've got to get somebody who's more aggressive.’”

But Zeldin, he said, has “been as aggressive as you could want.”

“He's not really on the hit list, and he might be on the promotion list,” said Ebell.

Trump picked Zeldin ‘because he could trust him’

Conservatives said they were initially surprised when Trump named Zeldin — a former moderate GOP lawmaker who had defended the president during his first impeachment trial — as his second-term EPA chief.

But they came to see Zeldin’s lack of previous experience with environmental regulation as an advantage. He didn’t bring preconceived ideas to the job about which deregulatory actions were and were not practical, they said. He didn’t know Clean Air Act lawyers who could talk him out of undoing the endangerment finding, they said, after Trump issued an Inauguration Day directive that he “consider” doing so.

“He didn't appoint Zeldin to EPA because Zeldin was some expert on the environment,” noted Milloy, who publishes the climate-contrarian blog Junk Science. “He appointed him because he could trust him.”

Trump didn’t prioritize getting rid of the endangerment finding in his first term, but it was discussed. EPA eventually rejected petitions to reopen the finding under Pruitt’s successor, Andrew Wheeler.

Chapin Fay, who served as Zeldin’s campaign manager for part of his 2014 congressional race and known him for more than a decade, said it was “not an accident” the EPA head remains in good favor in the administration. He noted Trump has called the administrator his “secret weapon” and Zeldin was “everywhere” on the 2024 campaign trail.

“He was out giving speeches, he was campaigning for him in swing states, and he became an incredibly effective surrogate communicator,” said Fay, now founder and CEO of Lighthouse Public Affairs.

“The second thing is loyalty,” he added. “When Lee sets his mind to something, it gets done very well and very quickly — on time, under budget, all those kinds of things. I think Trump has seen that. He's also avoided a lot of the drama in some of the more higher-profile agencies.”

Life after EPA

Reports that Zeldin was being considered to replace Bondi kicked up almost as soon as she was fired early this month, seriously enough to have the topic broached during a meeting between the two men shortly before Bondi left.

It’s not clear whether a formal nomination for attorney general is imminent. The White House points to positive statements Trump has made recently about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

But at 46, Zeldin is an ambitious midcareer politico occupying a role as EPA boss that has more frequently led to private sector careers than higher office. He might head elsewhere in the Trump administration if given the chance, according to a former Zeldin congressional aide granted anonymity to speak freely.

“There isn't a doubt in my mind that there would be a position in the government somewhere where he would say he couldn't do it,” the ex-staffer said about Zeldin. “I think he thinks he's the right guy for any job.”

The first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, filled that role under President Richard Nixon before becoming acting FBI director, then deputy attorney general and — very briefly — acting attorney general when he was ousted in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.” He later served a second stint as EPA administrator under former President Ronald Reagan.

Conservatives agreed that Zeldin’s path upward in politics would more likely be through higher-profile executive branch positions than by running again for statewide office in New York. Zeldin’s tenure at EPA has burnished his conservative credentials.

Ebell called his recent appearance at a Washington conference hosted by the climate skeptic Heartland Institute “encouraging.”

But Zeldin’s association with the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulatory policies may be an obstacle to his running again for governor in Democratic-leaning New York state, as he did unsuccessfully in 2022.

“I don't know if that's what he's thinking, but he is an ambitious man, and he must be thinking these things out,” said Ebell.

Contact Alex Guillén on the encrypted messaging app Signal at alexguillen.10; Jean Chemnick at jchemnick.01; and Kevin Bogardus at KevinBogardus.89.