When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was formed in 1970, President Richard M. Nixon said its mission would be to establish and enforce environmental protection standards, research the adverse effects of pollution and provide grants and technical assistance to help control it.

Now, the Trump administration has laid out a major course correction, calling for the rollback or elimination of dozens of environmental rules to boost the economy. Environmental advocates warn that the move threatens public health and struggling ecosystems like the Chesapeake Bay.

On March 12, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to reconsider, revise or terminate more than 30 different regulations and programs, some of which have been in place for years. In the crosshairs are protections for wetlands; limits on pollution from vehicles, power plants and factories; and the legal basis for taking action to reduce climate-altering emissions.

Zeldin cast the move as a needed boost for consumers and industry.  “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” he said, “to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.”

Many Republicans welcomed the announcement. West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, called it “exactly what needs to be done to secure American energy dominance” and help communities that she said were “negatively impacted by regulations and overreach from the Biden administration.”

Environmental advocates decried it as a betrayal of the EPA’s fundamental mission, despite remarks Zeldin reportedly made during an early March visit to Annapolis about how “it is imperative we continue to do what we can to protect” the Chesapeake Bay.

“This barrage of deregulatory declarations essentially removes the word protection from the Environmental Protection Agency and undermines the federal-state effort to save the Bay,” said Chesapeake Bay Foundation President Hilary Harp Falk.

Among the rules the EPA plans to change is a much debated one providing federal protection for wetlands and streams.

Congress, when it passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, declared federal jurisdiction over “navigable waters” and ordered a permitting program set up to regulate discharges of dredged or fill material into “waters of the United States,” including wetlands.

Isolated freshwater wetlands and even periodically dry stream beds help keep water-fouling nutrients and sediment from reaching the Bay while also providing critical habitat and soaking up floodwater. But whether those critical parts of the water cycle were intended for protection by the Clean Water Act has been the focus of legal and political wrangling ever since. 

The first Trump administration, at the behest of farmers, home builders, and oil and gas companies, repealed an expansive “waters” rule adopted by the Obama administration and replaced it with a much narrower one that limited federal oversight only to continuously wet places. 

Courts blocked that rule, but in 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in with  an even narrower interpretation of what the federal law protects  The Biden administration then produced a revised rule meant to follow the high court direction, but critics were unmollified and courts blocked its application in half of the states.

Now, the Trump EPA has vowed to work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to craft yet another version of the rule, one it says “follows the law, reduces red-tape, cuts overall permitting costs and lowers the cost of doing business in communities across the country.”

At this early stage, it’s hard to tell whether the EPA simply wants to clarify the existing rule or make more fundamental change, said Mark Sabath, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. But the agency has already pulled back federal oversight, he noted, in some cases that were still subject to regulatory scrutiny under the Biden administration rule.

Five of the six Bay watershed states and the District of Columbia have their own laws that offer at least some protection for wetlands and streams, so the impact of a federal rollback would seem limited there. Delaware is one of 24 states nationwide that rely entirely on the federal Clean Water Act for safeguarding their waters.

But there could be indirect effects even on states with their own protective laws, Sabath pointed out, because some lack the resources to do it all themselves and collaborate with federal regulators to evaluate permit requests.

The EPA’s vow to  roll back limits on climate-related air pollution may be even more consequential for Bay water quality, suggested Jon Mueller, director of the environmental law clinic at the University of Maryland law school.

The Biden administration tightened tailpipe emissions standards for cars, SUVs, pickups and other trucks, which critics have attacked as effectively mandating sales of electric vehicles. But Mueller pointed out that those standards aim to curtail emissions not just of carbon dioxide and soot but also of nitrogen oxides.  

Nitrogen is a major pollutant in the Bay and its rivers, triggering algae blooms that lead to “dead zones.” About a third of the nitrogen reaching the Bay comes from the air, a combination of nitrogen oxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and ammonia released from agricultural operations. When that nitrogen falls out of the air, it can be directly deposited into waterways, or it can fall onto land and ultimately wash into the water.

Preliminary computer model estimates produced for the Bay Program estimated that the climate mitigation measures called for in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act would reduce the amount of nitrogen landing on the Chesapeake’s 64,000-square-mile watershed by about 20% by 2035.

“These rules were definitely going to help protect the Bay and Bay states,” said Mueller, a former vice president for litigation for the Bay Foundation and former attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice handling environmental cases.

Despite the barrage of deregulatory announcements, Mueller said the EPA still has to follow the law and provide ample public notice and opportunities for public comment before repealing or replacing any rules. That could well take years, he noted, just as it took years to promulgate the existing rules.  

And with the deep budget and staffing reductions the Trump administration has begun to make, Mueller predicted it may have trouble mustering the resources to defend  its actions in court against the lawsuits likely to be filed challenging the weakening of environmental protections.

Karl Blankenship contributed to this story.