What is Trump’s view of the EPA?

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump decried the EPA as a job-killing bureaucracy that had needlessly hamstrung the American economy with costly regulations. He vowed to “get rid of it in almost every form,” leaving just “little tidbits” of environmental regulation. This view was welcomed by many hard-line conservatives and, of course, by industry. “The American people are drowning in rules and regulation promulgated by unelected bureaucrats,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who was one of the four Republican congressmen who sponsored a 2017 bill that would have abolished the EPA. “And the Environmental Protection Agency has become an extraordinary offender.” Since his inauguration, Trump has stacked the EPA’s senior leadership with officials openly hostile to the agency’s original mission. His first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, had sued the EPA 14 times as Oklahoma’s attorney general in behalf of the state’s oil industry. The second, Andrew Wheeler, is a former energy industry lobbyist and lawyer. The EPA’s senior deputy general counsel worked at American Petroleum Institute.