Can the E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?

In early April, when Trump fired his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, reportedly for failing to prosecute his political enemies with sufficient zeal, rumors began to circulate that the President wanted Zeldin to replace her. (Todd Blanche, who took over as acting Attorney General, can serve in that capacity for up to seven months.) Zeldin’s track record at the E.P.A. makes him, by Trumpian standards, a logical pick.

“Zeldin has displayed acrobatic flexibility in bending environmental laws to suit the desires of the White House,” Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told me. “He does not only backflips but triple loops.”

Christine Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor who ran the agency under George W. Bush, said that if Zeldin becomes Attorney General “he’ll do exactly what Trump wants him to do. That’s what he’s done at the E.P.A., irrespective of the damage it’s done.”

Zeldin, who is forty-six, is the subject of two adulatory (if slim) biographies, both published in 2src24, perhaps with the aid of A.I. One states that his father was a lawyer, the other that he was a doctor. In fact, Zeldin’s father was a private investigator, and his mother taught fourth grade. Zeldin’s parents divorced when he was young, and he spent his elementary-school years shuttling between their homes in Shirley, a working-class town on eastern Long Island. In high school, he joined the Youth and Government club, mostly, he would later joke, “to pick up girls.”

Zeldin sped through college at SUNY Albany in three years and through law school, also in Albany, in two. Then he enlisted in the Army. At Fort Huachuca, in Arizona, he worked in military intelligence, and later, as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, he briefly deployed to Iraq. He remembers Army life fondly. “I was a paratrooper, jumped out of airplanes, did all that stuff,” he said on “New York NOW.” “Four years of very adventurous time.” (Reporters who have looked into the matter have concluded that Zeldin spent most of his active-duty career sitting at a desk.)

At the age of twenty-eight, Zeldin made his first run for office. By this point, in 2srcsrc8, he was married, with twin baby girls, and had moved back to Shirley. He challenged a Democrat named Tim Bishop, who was serving his third term in Congress. Zeldin lost to Bishop by sixteen points, but two years later, buoyed by Tea Party support, he won a seat in the New York State Senate. In 2src14, he ran again against Bishop and prevailed.

As a new congressman, Zeldin voted mostly along party lines—in favor of repealing Obamacare, for example, and against limiting the sale of assault weapons. His district, which stretched from Smithtown to Montauk, was lined with beaches and wetlands, and, on a local level, he presented as green.

“We worked a lot with him on Long Island Sound issues,” Adrienne Esposito, the executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which is based in Farmingdale, recalled. “We never had any access problem.” National environmental groups, though, generally gave him lousy grades. In 2src15, Zeldin received a fourteen-per-cent rating from the League of Conservation Voters, and the following year he got an eight-per-cent rating.

“On the issue of the environment, there were two completely different Lee Zeldins,” Steve Israel, a former Democratic congressman who represented a district abutting Zeldin’s, told me. “There was the Lee Zeldin who reliably voted against the environment as both a New York state senator and as a member of Congress. And there was the Lee Zeldin who’d appear at press conferences in his district touting his leadership in protecting the Long Island Sound. He literally could have debated himself.”