Statement from Protect Our Winters Calling for the Resignation of Lee Zeldin, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Photo by POW Creative Alliance member Sara Robbins

Today’s breaking news that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repealed the Endangerment Finding marks a dangerous new low for the agency and a stark indicator of its loss of direction at a moment when climate impacts are already affecting people and places worldwide. The Endangerment Finding is the foundational scientific determination that greenhouse gas pollution threatens human health and welfare, and the legal and scientific backbone of federal climate protections. Undermining it will weaken every tool we have to protect people from pollution, and ensure clean water, clean air and a healthy planet.

Under Administrator Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA has abandoned its core mission to protect human health and the environment. Instead, the agency has become an active participant in a sweeping, coordinated effort to dismantle foundational clean air and clean water protections in service of fossil fuel interests.

Protect Our Winters now calls on EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to resign immediately.

We see climate effects unfolding now across the globe, and in particular this winter in the American West. Scientific measurements and satellite data show that winter snowpack across much of the western United States is at historically low levels for this time of year. This so-called “snow drought” is driven largely by unusually warm temperatures, which cause precipitation to fall as rain instead of snow.

Mountain snowpack is not just a matter of winter scenery or ski seasons, it’s our biggest and most important reservoir. The snowpack feeds rivers and streams, sustains agriculture, supports hydropower generation, and moderates wildfire risk. When the snowpack is thin, water supplies tighten, fire seasons lengthen, and local economies that rely on healthy winter seasons suffer. These impacts from fossil fuel emissions are exactly what the Endangerment Finding recognizes and enables the EPA to address with protections.

Yet under Administrator Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA has advanced a sweeping agenda of deregulation that prioritizes short-term fossil fuel interests over science-based safeguards for people and the environment. 

Some of the most egregious actions taken by the EPA since January 2025 include:

• Repeal of the Clean Power Plan
• Delayed implementation of the Methane Rule
• Repeal of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) –
• Ending the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHG Reporting Program) –
• Dismantling the Regional Haze Program
• Abandoning the “Social Cost of Carbon”
• Terminating Environmental Justice and DEI (EJ/DEI)
• Dismissing the Science Advisory Board and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (SAB/CASAC)

These are not minor policy shifts, they are deliberate choices that will increase pollution, worsen health, and accelerate warming, at a time when communities across the country are already living with the consequences. Communities that depend on stable winters and clean reliable water supplies, farmers, outdoor recreation economies, Tribal nations, and rural areas, are feeling those impacts today.

An EPA that ignores science and dismantles the tools designed to protect public health and the environment cannot fulfill its mission. Administrator Zeldin has overseen the systematic unraveling of environmental protections while climate impacts mount.

For the Outdoor State, the 181 million Americans who recreate outdoors and the $1.2 trillion recreation economy that depends on clean air, clean water, healthy forests, and stable winters, this is an existential threat. Lee Zeldin must resign.