The first person to head the Environmental Protection Agency, which was created by President Richard Nixon, in late 1970, was an up-and-coming Republican politician named William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus, known to his friends as Ruck, came from Indiana, where, during a single term in the state’s House of Representatives, he had managed to get elected majority leader. On being chosen to lead the E.P.A., he moved quickly to establish the new agency’s credibility. Just a week into his tenure, he warned the cities of Cleveland, Detroit, and Atlanta that they could be sued for polluting their own waterways, and over the next few months he took action against several major corporations, including U.S. Steel. In an interview with Time a year into the job, Ruckelshaus described his strategy as focussing on the “violators with the greatest visibility in order to get the message across.” He likened the task of getting the agency organized while at the same time pursuing polluters to “trying to run a hundred-yard dash while undergoing an appendectomy.”

Since Ruckelshaus, the E.P.A. has had, depending on how you count, fifteen or sixteen more chiefs. Several of them have been, to put it politely, clunkers. Ronald Reagan’s first pick for the post, Anne Gorsuch (Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mother), implemented deep budget cuts, tanked staff morale, and ended up getting cited for contempt of Congress. (To clean up her mess, Reagan called Ruckelshaus back; hence the kink in the count.) Donald Trump’s first E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, produced an even bigger—or, at least, more bizarre—public-relations debacle. He was investigated for, among other things, charging the agency for first-class flights, travelling with a security detail to Disneyland, and installing a soundproof “privacy booth” in his office at a cost to taxpayers of more than forty thousand dollars. When he resigned, in the summer of 2018, Carlos Curbelo, then a Republican congressman from Florida, called Pruitt’s tenure “an embarrassment.”

Among this not so august company, the E.P.A.’s current administrator, Lee Zeldin, still stands out. In the two months since he was confirmed, Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from Long Island, has announced his intention to roll back dozens of environmental rules and to shrink his agency’s spending by two-thirds. Reportedly, he wants to eliminate the E.P.A.’s scientific-research arm, which employs more than a thousand people. In a two-minute video released earlier this month, Zeldin, wearing a green striped tie, seemed to go so far as to renounce the agency’s foundational purpose. The E.P.A., he said, would work to “lower the cost of living,” by making it cheaper to buy a car, heat a home, and run a business. Nowhere, the Times noted, “did he refer to protecting the environment or public health.” Zeldin’s assault on the E.P.A. is so broad that it could affect everything from arsenic pollution to zebra-mussel control. But the administrator has trained his heaviest ammunition on efforts to limit climate change.

The same day that Zeldin released his video, he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he boasted of “driving a dagger through the heart” of climate regulation. To carry out this bloody deed, the E.P.A. is planning to rescind a set of Biden-era rules aimed at curbing CO₂ emissions from power plants, unravel another set of rules aimed at curbing emissions from cars and trucks, and revise the way that the government assesses the damages of climate change. (This last move involves the so-called social cost of carbon.) Most gruesomely of all, the E.P.A. wants to revisit what’s known as the “endangerment finding.”

The finding, issued by the E.P.A. back in 2009, labelled CO₂ and other greenhouse gases a threat to the public’s health and welfare, and this, in turn, became the basis of the agency’s efforts to regulate them. The finding relied on scores of peer-reviewed studies and on voluminous reports by groups such as the National Research Council. Since then, the United States has experienced one climate-related calamity after another—including, most recently, the Los Angeles fires—and the evidence that increasing CO₂ levels are dangerous has only become more overwhelming. “There is no possible world in which greenhouse gases are not a threat to public health,” is how Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University, put it to the Associated Press.

With the help of the E.P.A., the Trump Administration is doing everything it can to make emissions grow again. It is bestowing favors on the fossil-fuel industry, by, for example, opening up more land in Alaska for oil drilling. It is also kneecapping the industry’s competitors: the President, in an executive order issued on his first day in office, announced that he would halt leases for offshore wind development. The other day, on social media, he said that he wanted the country to burn more coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel.