Trump wants a world without the EPA. Here’s what that would actually look like

William Reilly, who served as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H. W. Bush, first moved to Washington D.C. in the late 1960s—before the EPA was established. He remembers a contest in which dogs were to retrieve items by swimming into the Potomac River. “After the first two dogs got out and vomited, it was closed down,” he says. At the time, the river was intensely polluted, full of raw sewage and industrial waste. 

Then came the EPA, which President Nixon established in 1970, and then it’s 1972 Clean Water Act. Now, Reilly notes, there’s a campaign to allow swimming in the Potomac, and every summer people flock to the river to kayak, canoe, paddleboard, and more. Reilly was speaking on a press call, along with two other former EPA administrators, in response to the Trump administration’s decision to roll back nearly three dozen environmental regulations.

Christine Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, remembers how, when visiting the beach as a child, “you had to be very careful of the tar balls,” she says. “We’d go down to the beach and we’d get tar all over our feet.” Floating balls of sticky tar were common in the ocean in the ‘60s and ‘70s, because of offshore oil tanker operations or even oil spills. “Nobody wanted to go in the water,” she says. Though sometimes tar balls still appear on beaches today, the frequency has dropped drastically, thanks to efforts by the EPA. 

This is what we’re in danger of returning to amid the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the EPA and roll back regulations. Lee Zeldin, the current EPA administrator, said such regulations have unfairly burdened industry. But experts say removing those regulations would be a catastrophic move that endangers all of our lives. 

Before the EPA was established, environmental regulations were left up to the states, many of which were plagued by dirty air and polluted waters. After the Trump administration announced its plans to roll back crucial environmental protections, people began sharing images on social media of pre-EPA America, showing cities shrouded in dense smog, mountains of waste, and even Ohio’s Cuyahoga River on fire.

“One reason I think there is less immediate understanding of the environment is people don’t remember how bad it was, and it truly was,” Reilly says. That’s not to say the country is perfect; there is still air pollution, water pollution, and risk from chemicals like PFAS. But there have also been major improvements. Between 1980 and 2017, we’ve reduced the emissions of six common air pollutants by 67%—even as the country’s population, energy use, and even GDP grew. 

“We cannot have a healthy, thriving economy if we don’t have a clean environment,” Whitman says. And if the United States steps back from environmental regulation, it could have reverberations around the world, because we’ve historically been seen as a leader. “If we withdraw from our involvement in trying to clean up the air, it sends a message to the rest of the world, ‘don’t bother.’”

Under Trump, Zeldin has made it the EPA’s mission to “unleash American energy,” a contrast to the agency’s long-standing mission to protect the health and environment, says Gina McCarthy, who served as the EPA administrator under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017.  That, in combination with the moves to rollback regulations and fire workers, is a “not so subtle way of ushering in a global age of pollution,” she adds, “at the expense of our ability to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and to continue to protect and preserve our national resources.” 

Though the courts may stop some of the Trump administration’s efforts, these previous EPA administrators worry that the government firings will still leave the agency without the ability to actually carry out any laws if they are reestablished. And if the laws are rolled back, that leaves Americans with far fewer crucial protections, particularly from polluting businesses. 

“We’re almost going to have an honor system where we’re going to trust corporations and businesses to behave in a way that they have been behaving when there were laws, but all of a sudden there are no laws,” Reilly says. “And so I honestly wonder if the malefactors are going to give us more burning rivers.”