The Revere

By: Doris Lu

The Trump administration’s enormous demands for fossil fuel subsidies and its impact on the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory rollbacks are reshaping U.S. environmental policy, prioritizing industry profits over public health and climate goals.

“We will drill, baby, drill.” President Donald Trump declared during his inauguration on January 20th, 2025. This declaration resonated with a familiar campaign slogan from the 2008 Republican National Convention and marked the efforts of the Trump Administration to rewrite America’s environmental regulations. A single message lies within the chants of this slogan: economic growth and dominance over the environmental crisis. The next months would prove that this wasn’t just rhetoric. The Trump administration’s association with fossil fuel industries transformed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from a climate control organization into a driving factor of our country’s climate crisis. 

The Trump administration’s environmental initiatives date back to the early days of his first presidency. Between 2017 and 2020, his administration dismantled many of Obama’s climate rules, withdrew from the Paris Agreement, and weakened regulations under the Clean Air Act, among other actions. Many of these actions have been reignited even further since he entered his second presidency, as Trump once again withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement in January 2025. Having regained office amid an energy-price surge and the drive to succeed in global competitiveness, Trump portrayed environmental regulation as a setback to economic profit. This belief fueled the administration’s support of fossil fuel companies and their subsidiaries, aimed at stimulating economic growth and energy dominance. As a result, the EPA, having been influenced by the administration, implemented a large regulatory rollback, allowing it to abandon its long-term responsibility to protect public health and the environment.

Driven by a focus on boosting economic growth and assertion on the global stage, the Trump Administration poured unprecedented amounts of federal support into fossil fuel companies. According to the executive summary of the White House’s “Economic Benefits of Unleashing American Energy,” it is predicted that American energy dominance could increase GDP by at least 0.56-1.90 percent by 2035. Encouraged by this, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 added $40 billion in new subsidies for oil, gas, and coal; the largest increase since 2017, demonstrating the efforts willing to be put in not for the climate crisis, but for carbon-heavy industries that tear away at the environment and benefit the economy. The same logic underpinned Trump’s decision to expand oil and gas drilling on federal lands, including the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for gas and oil exploration. A decision to actively reverse decades of bipartisan conservation efforts. He also pushed for increased offshore drilling in regions such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, extending the reach of fossil-fuel development into previously restricted areas. At the same time, renewable energy tax credits were cut, raising the relative cost of producing green energy while lowering the costs for fossil fuel companies.

The EPA pursued the same goal through regulatory rollbacks, loosening pollution and climate constraints, all of which were ordered by the Trump administration. Initially established in 1970 under President Richard Nixon to protect human health and the environment, the EPA’s mission for decades was “to ensure that Americans have clean air, land, and water, and that national efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information.” However, in March 2025, following Trump’s executive order, “Unleashing American Energy,” the agency rescinded 31 environmental regulations. Among these were reconsiderations of environmental rules, power-plant emission limits, and vehicle emissions limits, all to reduce costs for fossil fuel companies. One of the reconsiderations included weakening the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) and a proposed end to the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, both of which were designed to track industrial pollution. Perhaps most damaging was its effort to challenge the Endangerment Finding, the 2009 ruling affirming that greenhouse gases endanger human health, which therefore undermined the scientific evidence for federal climate regulation. This displays a disregard for scientific safeguards to protect the environment, jeopardizing years of climate progress. By abandoning its original mission to protect Americans’ health and the environment to save funds for fossil fuel companies, the EPA revealed how deeply the Trump administration’s fossil-fuel demands had impacted the agency.

While these deregulations promised profits, they also intensified environmental and health risks. The EPA predicted that such rollbacks could cause over 1,200 additional deaths per year from increased air pollution, directly endangering human lives by loosening environmental protections. Moreover, marginalized communities received the shortest end of the stick. A joint report by the NAACP and the Clean Air Task Force found that “most fenceline communities in the United States are low-income individuals and communities of color who experience systemic oppression such as environmental racism.” The Trump administration’s deregulation has worsened this inequality, allowing industrial polluters to operate with fewer constraints near vulnerable populations. Economic prosperity, instead, has spiraled to further social and racial inequity.Environmental harm and the climate crisis are becoming more irreversible by the day. “Much of the carbon we are putting in the air from burning fossil fuels will stay there for thousands of years — and some of it will be there for more than 100,000 years,” said Peter Clark, an Oregon State University paleoclimatologist. Along with global warming, rising sea levels are predicted to rise 25-50 meters over the next few centuries, and 20 percent of the global population will be directly affected. This observes the long-term effects of the current output of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are only projected to be demanded more and more through the next decade, and that poses significant issues to our already prominent climate crisis. Although the crisis is reaching a point of no return, the only positive outlook is for future administrations to work to reinforce the EPA’s original mission and undo the damage of the Trump administration to the environment. Greed can no longer operate in this country; no amount of economic gain is worth destroying the planet, and progress can only be obtained with leadership that views climate protection not as a barrier to prosperity, but as a foundation for it.