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With Donald Trump, there isn’t the thinnest layer of respect for America’s 60-year legacy of environmental protection. For crying out loud, Richard Nixon, of all the commanders in chief, established the Environmental Protection Agency.
In the first hours of his second term Trump signed 40 executive orders. Six of those January 2025 actions were specifically intended to wreak industrial havoc on water, air, wild habitat, and oceans, and were largely directed at aiding fossil fuel producers and their customers while diminishing three generations of resolve to conserve natural resources.
That senseless work to undermine bedrock health and ecological protections accelerated last week when Trump celebrated the most painful smack ever across the face of modern American environmentalism. On February 12, the EPA wrecked years of work to control climate-warming air pollution and prevent avoidable deaths attributable to foul air and a hotter planet. How? By ending the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fueled power plants and vehicles.
The administration also wants to wrench the 1972 Clean Water Act the same way for the country’s developers. How? By ending the Act’s prohibitions for filling and developing millions of acres of wetlands.
Readers of Circle of Blue are well aware that in these 13 eventful and dispiriting months the administration has engaged in an aggressive assault on longstanding environmental law and conservation practices. On that first day in office, for instance, the president closed the continental shelf for wind energy projects with one executive order while simultaneously signing another that intended to expand markets for coal and natural gas and make it easier to drill offshore for oil. A third order pulled the U.S. out of the global Paris Climate Accord, which was signed by nearly all the nations of the world in 2015 to reduce climate-altering emissions.
The president’s targets encompass every realm of environmental protection and conservation – managing national forests, parks, and wilderness areas, protecting habitat and species, keeping pollutants out of air and water, cleaning up toxic dumps – that have made America cleaner, greener, healthier, and more prosperous since the Wilderness Act was signed by President Johnson in 1964.
Thousands of federal scientists and resource managers have now been driven out of their jobs. Research centers closed. Monitoring for dangerous compounds in air and water diminished. The president proposed a fiscal year 2026 budget that would have cut EPA funding by more than half. Even the clear waters of Minnesota’s 1.1 million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a designated wilderness since the day the Wilderness Act was enacted, could get polluted by a copper mine that the president is helping a Chilean company get built just outside the Canoe Area’s protections.
Yet even as the administration displayed every intent to do as much damage as it could to America’s world-leading program of natural resource and public safety protection, the sound of distant bugles of resistance – clear signals of countermeasures and opposition – began to be heard, particularly in the Great Lakes region.
It started when a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers from the eight states convinced the president to include $368 million in his proposed budget for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). The initiative, one of the largest and most successful resource conservation programs in the world, has invested over $5 billion in eight Great Lakes states since its genesis in 2010. In that time wild habitats have been preserved, species have been saved, fisheries expanded, and toxic sediments cleaned up.
The initiative’s durable achievements, though, exposed a glaring rift in federal policy: the clear conflict between environmental progress financed by the government and the current administration’s distaste for such actions. Alan D. Steinman, a research professor at Grand Valley State University’s Annis Water Resources Institute, says such conflicts are common now in federally funded restoration projects. “It’s insane when you try to mesh these two,” he said.
Concern developed that Congressional Republicans would try to significantly reduce or eliminate the GLRI. That didn’t happen. Thanks to Great Lakes lawmakers, the budget that Trump signed last month added $1 million more to fund the GLRI, raising the total for fiscal 2026 to $369 million.
That same bipartisan group of lawmakers, moreover, were influential in blocking the administration’s plan to radically cut the budgets of the EPA, U.S. Geological Survey, National Park Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and several more federal environmental agencies. Instead, the House and Senate restored most of that funding, enabling conservation, water and air monitoring, research, and program management to continue.
Similar countermeasures are occurring at the state level, with Michigan in the lead. In January the state Attorney General, Dana Nessel, filed a first-of-its-kind antitrust lawsuit in federal district court against four oil companies – BP, Shell, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil – and the largest U.S. oil trade association, the American Petroleum Institute.
Nessel accused the companies and trade association of violating federal law and state antitrust statutes by colluding and acting as a “cartel” to limit renewable energy and electric vehicles while suppressing information about the dangers of climate change. Among the other negative consequences of this administration’s actions: driving up utility costs, impeding electric vehicle sales, and diminishing employment in the massive auto sector. Michigan is one of 11 states that have sued oil companies for deceiving the nation about the threat to water, land, and communities from climate change.
In another countermeasure, Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy issued striking new rules late last year that require operators of large livestock feeding facilities to prevent manure from contaminating state waters. The new requirements are a response to a state Supreme Court decision in 2024 that assured that EGLE has full authority to regulate discharges from industrial livestock and poultry operations. EGLE’s new manure management requirements are a direct challenge to the Trump administration and the EPA, which have decided to essentially ignore one of the largest sources of water pollution in Michigan and nationwide.
And while President Trump wants to increase the use of coal and natural gas to generate electricity, Great Lakes states reject that approach. Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Wisconsin passed legislation requiring utilities to halt coal and natural gas combustion by mid-century. And Illinois late last year also approved legislation to advance clean energy production and protect consumers from fast-rising electricity prices. The legislation also provides funding for clean and renewable geothermal energy production.
President Trump’s illogical environmental priority, pursued with reckless arrogance, is to return the country to a previous era of smog you could see and water so filthy it was dangerous for drinking or swimming. States have awakened to the need to prevent those outcomes. One important reason is the persistent and effective opposition mounted by the Great Lakes region’s nonprofit environmental law and advocacy groups.
Among the leaders is the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center, which has six offices in Great Lakes states and is active in 20 federal lawsuits challenging the administration.
Howard A. Learner, ELPC’s executive director, described his organization’s countermeasures this way: “I am rolling up my sleeves with a terrific team of people meeting the moment to take on the Trump administration’s attempt to tear apart the environmental system that we all have spent our careers trying to put together.”
As have I.