BY GINA MCCARTHY AND CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN
PUBLISHED JAN 15, 2026 AT 04:00 PM EST
As former Administrators of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), we each had the honor of working for the President of the United States. Despite the two presidents we served under having very different leadership styles, priorities, approaches to governing, and party affiliations, neither President George W. Bush nor President Barack Obama ever failed to support us in carrying out EPA’s critical mission to protect human health and the environment on behalf of all Americans.
As far back as 1970, when President Richard Nixon signed the EPA into law, the agency was given a clear mandate: to safeguard the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the environment that sustains us.
For decades now, every EPA Administrator has taken an oath to protect and uphold EPA’s mission while heavily relying on EPA’s incredibly professional, smart, knowledgeable, and dedicated staff to deliver rules, regulations, standards, policies, and practices that were based on sound science and the law.
While it was both an enormous privilege and a significant challenge for each of us to make decisions that directly affect the health of millions of Americans, we did our best to protect and save human lives.
That is why we are so appalled by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s planned repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding. His actions fail to follow science and the law and literally abandon EPA’s mission.
The Endangerment Finding was the United States government’s most extensive and comprehensive analysis of the scientific record on the significant hazards to our health and the environment caused by greenhouse gases. Repealing this Finding dismisses decades of scientific evidence, abandons the agency’s legal authority, and puts American lives at risk, including our children’s futures. We call on EPA to withdraw this proposal and honor the agency’s founding purpose.
The Endangerment Finding did not emerge from political ideology; it came from the EPA doing exactly what EPA was supposed to do. In 2007, the United States Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The Court directed the EPA to make a science-based determination about whether these pollutants endanger public health, and that is exactly what EPA did.
Efforts were undertaken across multiple administrations, including comprehensive research conducted during Democratic and Republican administrations with a full range of EPA scientists, not politicians, examining and uncovering overwhelming evidence that greenhouse gases pose significant risks to our health and environment, leading to the 2009 Endangerment Finding.
Since that time, the Finding has withstood every legal challenge. And, as we see it, the Finding is settled law based on settled science firmly grounded in the EPA’s Clean Air Act authority.
Current safeguards developed under the Clean Air Act have been put into place to limit greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles and other sources, providing cleaner air to communities across America, saving lives, reducing health care costs, and driving innovation across American industries. As a result, millions of premature deaths have been prevented, and trillions in health care costs have been avoided.
Repealing these protections would result in more asthma attacks and respiratory distress from pollution, more families displaced from their homes, and skyrocketing insurance costs fueled by disasters. They would leave more farmers facing declining crop yields from heat and changing weather patterns. And they would toss aside new businesses and investments in clean energy technology and manufacturing.
Under this Administration, the agency that was specifically created to protect Americans from these harms would betray its fundamental duty. EPA would choose short-term political wins over the long-term health of Americans.
The responsibility to defend the EPA’s mission doesn’t end when you leave office. We knew that our choices would ripple forward in time, affecting generations of Americans we would never meet.
We cannot stay silent when the agency we led is being directed to abandon its core purpose. Future administrators will inherit the consequences of this choice. History will judge whether leaders in this moment protected the vulnerable when it mattered most.
We urge this Administrator to withdraw this proposal. Follow the law. Honor the science. Fulfill the mission of the EPA. Do the job that Congress created this agency to do more than fifty years ago.
The question before Zeldin is simple: Will the EPA protect the environment and the health of Americans, or will it walk away from the very purpose for which it exists?
Christine Todd Whitman served as EPA Administrator under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003. Gina McCarthy served as EPA Administrator under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017.