Former leaders of the Environmental Protection Agency who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents spoke Friday against the Trump administration’s announcement this week that it will roll back dozens of major environmental rules.

“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives,” Christine Todd Whitman said during a call with reporters. Whitman, who was also elected New Jersey governor as a Republican, was EPA administrator during President George W. Bush‘s first term in office.

William Reilly, who led the EPA under President George H.W. Bush and served in the administration of President Richard Nixon, called the current EPA’s actions “a catastrophe” that threatened to undo more than 50 years of environmental progress.

Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator during President Barack Obama‘s second term, said the announcements that the EPA made Wednesday marked “the most disastrous day in EPA history,” and accused the agency’s current leadership of siding with polluters.

“This EPA administration is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry more than it is complying with the mission of the EPA,” McCarthy said.

The three veteran government officials came together from across party lines after current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unleashed a blitz of announcements Wednesday to reconsider 31 regulations dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, toxic air pollution, clean water protections and waste from fossil fuel extraction.

Zeldin called it the biggest deregulation action in U.S. history and said he was driving a “dagger through the heart” of climate regulations.

Some major beltway business groups cheered Zeldin’s announcement. The American Petroleum Industry praised Zeldin for pursuing “commonsense policies that advance American energy dominance.”

Marty Durbin, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said business had been “crippled with an unprecedented regulatory onslaught” during the previous administration.

Reilly said those business groups are abandoning “a long history of collaboration and mutual improvement” that brought economic progress along with ecological protection.

“Their unqualified approval of the evisceration of environmental laws and enforcement is deeply disappointing,” Reilly said of the Chamber.

McCarthy said smart regulation encourages innovation and job growth in clean energy and environmental technology while reducing costs from the public health impacts of pollution.

Whitman cited statistics showing the health benefits of EPA regulations far outweighing costs. EPA data shows that between 1970 and 2019, the period covering roughly the agency’s first 50 years, air pollutants decreased 77 percent while the U.S. gross domestic product grew 285 percent. Jobs in the U.S. grew by more than 200 percent.

“I am sick and tired of people saying this is a zero-sum game,” Whitman said.

Reilly predicted a “lingering mistrust of corporations” would result from business support of the environmental rollbacks.

The three former EPA administrators all predicted that Zeldin’s EPA will likely lose legal challenges to many of the proposed rule changes.

“I believe the courts will stop some of the most egregious actions,” Reilly said. But Reilly, Whitman and McCarthy all expressed concern that the Trump administration’s deep cuts to EPA staff and efforts to sideline scientists will have a more profound effect undermining the agency’s ability to develop and enforce rules.

The former officials all shared their memories of environmental conditions before the EPA and landmark laws protecting clean air and water came about, when air was often hazardous to breathe in many cities and tar balls routinely stained the feet of beachgoers.

Reilly recalled a pet competition in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s that included dogs racing to fetch items from the river.

“After the first couple of dogs got sick, they had to stop,” he said.

Today, Reilly said, people windsurf on the Potomac River, and about two-thirds of U.S. waterways meet the Clean Water Act’s goal to be fishable and swimmable.

“This is fabulous progress,” Reilly said. “But you can lose it.”