The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday a sweeping proposal to eliminate the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, a federal data collection system that has tracked emissions from thousands of the nation’s largest polluters since 2010. Administrator Lee Zeldin, citing President Donald Trump’s anti-climate executive actions, described the program as unnecessary bureaucracy, a characterization that has drawn widespread condemnation from environmental advocates, former agency officials, and even some industry voices.
Zeldin said in a statement that “the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.” He added that “Alongside President Trump, E.P.A. continues to live up to the promise of unleashing energy dominance that powers the American dream.” The agency estimated that ending the program could save businesses up to $2.4 billion in compliance costs over the next decade.
Critics say the move would gut one of the government’s most basic climate tools. Since 2010, the program has collected data from about 8,000 facilities, including coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and landfills. That information has helped guide federal climate policy, shaped local health decisions, and been shared with the United Nations, which requires developed countries to submit domestic emissions tallies under the Paris climate agreement.
“President Trump promised Americans would have the cleanest air on Earth, but once again, Trump’s EPA is taking actions that move us further from that goal,” said Joseph Goffman, who led the EPA Office of Air and Radiation during the Biden administration and is now with the Environmental Protection Network. “Cutting the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program blinds Americans to the facts about climate pollution. Without it, policymakers, businesses, and communities cannot make sound decisions about how to cut emissions and protect public health.”
Goffman added, “By hiding this information from the public, Administrator Zeldin is denying Americans the ability to see the damaging results of his actions on climate pollution, air quality, and public health. It’s a further addition to the deliberate blockade against future action on climate change—and yet another example of the administration putting polluters before people’s health.”
The administration argues that the program’s elimination is about reducing costs, but environmental groups called it an attack on transparency and accountability. Patrick Drupp, the Sierra Club’s director of climate policy and advocacy, warned, “EPA cannot avoid the climate crisis by simply burying its head in the sand as it baselessly cuts off its main source of greenhouse gas emissions data.” He said, “The agency has provided no defensible reason to cancel the program; this is nothing more than EPA’s latest action to deny the reality of climate change and do everything it can to put the fossil fuel industry and corporate polluters before people. The Sierra Club will oppose this proposal every step of the way.”
Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, described the rollback as “the Trump administration’s latest pro-polluter move to eliminate the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program” and “just another brazen step in their Polluters First agenda.” She added, “under the guise of saving Americans money, this is an attempt on the part of Trump, Lee Zeldin, and their polluter buddies to hide the ball and avoid responsibility for the deadly, dangerous, and expensive pollution they produce.”
Alt continued, “If they succeed, the nation’s biggest polluters will spew climate-wrecking pollution without accountability. The idea that tracking pollution does ‘nothing to improve air quality’ is absurd. If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Hiding information and allowing fossil fuel companies to avoid accountability are the true goals of this rule.”
The BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups, echoed these concerns. Executive director Jason Walsh said, “the Trump administration continues to prove it does not care about the American people and their basic right to breathe clean air. This flies in the face of the EPA’s core mission—to protect the environment and public health.” He noted that “The proposal is wildly unpopular with even industry groups speaking against it because they know the value of having this emissions data available.”
“Everybody in this country deserves to know the air quality in their community and how their lives can be affected when they live near high-emitting facilities,” Walsh said. “Knowledge is power and—in this case—health. The administration shouldn’t be keeping people in the dark about the air they and their neighbors are breathing.”
The announcement also reverberates internationally. The United States missed an April deadline to submit emissions data to the United Nations, a requirement under the Paris accord. Trump began the yearlong withdrawal process from the pact on his first day back in office. The proposal to end the program further erodes U.S. commitments to international climate reporting, even as Europe launches new satellites dedicated to tracking carbon pollution.
Environmental law experts underscored the practical consequences of cutting off verified data. Carrie Jenks, executive director of the environmental and energy law program at Harvard Law School, explained that methane is “roughly 80 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the short term.” She said, “Not having the government verify this data is hard, but there could still be some voluntary efforts to collect it.”
Some industry groups also voiced concern. The American Petroleum Institute said the oil and gas industry already reports greenhouse gas emissions “to a variety of stakeholders.” Dustin Meyer, senior vice president for policy, economics, and regulatory affairs at the API, said, “the oil and gas industry has a long track record of reporting greenhouse gas emissions to a variety of stakeholders, and we remain committed to doing so in a transparent and accurate way.”
The proposal follows other Trump administration rollbacks, including a decision just one day earlier to reverse rules on unsafe levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in drinking water. Earthjustice attorney Katherine O’Brien said the PFAS decision “prioritizes chemical industry profits and utility companies’ bottom line over the health of children and families across the country.”
The EPA will publish the emissions proposal in the Federal Register and open a 47-day public comment period before finalizing the rule, likely within the next year. Environmental organizations have already signaled they will challenge the rollback.
As Goffman put it, “With this move, they’re taking away the practical and material capacity of the federal government to do the basic elements of climate policy making.”
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