Lauren Sommer
Appearances
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Yeah, well, so the EPA announced recently that it actually wants to do two things at once now. Protect health, yes, and also, quote unquote, revitalize the American economy. Its new administrator is named Lee Zeldin, and he rolled out a vision that's really focused on deregulation, which is in line with the Trump administration's goals more broadly.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Yeah, exactly. And Zeldin has said explicitly that the agency's goal now is to help fulfill Trump's efforts to, quote unquote, unleash American energy. And he says loosening regulations will ease the burden on businesses, which will eventually make it cheaper for Americans to do things like buy new cars or heat their homes.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Yeah, but critics worry that there will be real impacts on people's health from rolling back or weakening regulations that protect air and water. Take the Clean Air Act, for example. After its passage and in the past couple of decades, the concentration of major air pollutants in the air has dropped by about 80%.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
And EPA's own analyses show that the cleaner air prevents about 2.5 million asthma attacks every year. Wow. The science is super clear that loosening the rules would end up causing more people to get sick or even die early. Are there any other changes coming down the pike that might affect the EPA's work? Totally. So the big conversation right now is about employment cuts coming to EPA.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
In early May, Zeldin said the plan is to reduce the agency to Reagan-era levels of employment, which would mean cutting thousands of employees. And right now, it seems like a lot of those cuts would target an EPA branch called the Office of Research and Development, or ORD. It's where most of the science happens.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Like when a state asks the EPA to figure out if a chemical is unsafe, or they want to do those assessments that go into the air pollution rules that get updated every few years. But they're basically on the chopping block now.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Maybe. There's really a lot of unknowns right now. We'll start to know more when the cuts start to come in the next few weeks. Yeah. The Trump administration leaders, though, have said that they basically want the office dismantled.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
That's actually really cool. NOAA has also historically done a lot of research on weather, on fisheries, on climate change, all those things that Lauren just listed. And the administration is trying to cut that climate work basically in its entirety.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Yeah, again, there's still a lot of unknowns. But the proposed budgets for both this year and next year would take direct aim at NOAA's climate work and a lot of its research. And like for the EPA, The proposal wants to basically dismantle that research arm of the agency, which here is called OAR, which stands for Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Craig McLean led that research wing for years, and he says cuts of this magnitude would... The budget proposal also slashes support for some of NOAA's next generation satellites, which provide the basis for a lot of the weather and climate forecasting you see. And it would shrink funding for fisheries, even maybe move a lot of that work to another agency entirely. Oh. Yeah.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
So suffice it to say, there's a lot of concern out there from experts and scientists and people who used to work at the agency. And they mostly say, sure, there are totally ways to make the agency more efficient. But this is not it.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
The money can be there, but if there aren't people to do the science, it kind of falls apart. Exactly. And like people are worried about this because there has been some pretty intense weather across the country already recently. And we haven't even really hit heat season, hurricane season, wildfire season. There's a lot coming down the pike.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Gosh, what a question, Emily. I think it's going to be really interesting to see how long it takes for some of the changes in these agencies to trickle out into things that people actually experience in their everyday lives. And it's already starting for some.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Like Lauren said earlier, there were fisheries seasons that were delayed opening this year, and that has a huge deal for the coastal communities that rely on them. As for the rest of it, I think we're all just kind of waiting to see.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Yeah, so if you're someone who lives in a coastal community that's prone to hurricanes, or honestly, if you just want to check the weather forecast, then the changes at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, could affect you.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
So it's more than 200 employees. That's what the Department of Homeland Security told me, and they oversee FEMA. These are workers on probationary status, which basically means they were within one year of taking the job. But, you know, I spoke to people that had been at the agency more than a decade, and they were only on probationary status because they accepted a promotion for a new job.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
You know, one told me the firings were like doing surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
Right, yeah. So when disasters happen, it's really all hands on deck at FEMA. They put hundreds of people on the ground to connect disaster victims and, you know, enroll them for financial assistance. You know, that's for things like renting a place to live or rebuilding long term. Those FEMA staff come from every part of FEMA.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
And I talked to Michael Cohn, who was FEMA's chief of staff under the Biden administration, and he says the agency was already understaffed.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
Last year, during Hurricane Helene, FEMA had to use employees from other federal agencies to fill the gap because the need was so great from disaster survivors.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
Yeah, he said disaster recovery is better left to the states, and he's actually creating a council that will review and potentially overhaul FEMA. You know, local and state governments actually already run disaster recovery, and they request that FEMA come in. But aspects of FEMA's work are already changing because, you know, one thing the agency does is help develop building codes.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
These are the construction standards that help homes survive floods and hurricane winds. FEMA experts had already written recommendations about how to strengthen those codes. They were submitted to the International Code Council, which is an association that updates the codes every three years, and then local and state governments adopt them.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
But FEMA has asked for its name to be taken off those recommendations. According to people who are involved with that work and spoke with me, they want to remain anonymous over concerns about retribution from the Trump administration. And FEMA did not respond to our questions about why they made this request.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
Yeah, yeah. These are recommendations that come out of actual disasters, you know, seeing what hasn't worked. It's things like maybe raising up a house a little bit so floodwaters don't come in. And research really shows they add about one to two percent of the construction costs, but they've saved billions of dollars in damage that would have happened otherwise.
Up First from NPR
Migrants Leave Guantanamo, Israeli Hostages Update, Changes at FEMA
NPR's Lauren Sommer from our Climate Desk.