By MICHAEL PHILLIS, ALEXA ST. JOHN and MATTHEW DALY

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has transformed the Environmental Protection Agency in its first year, cutting federal limits on air and water pollution and promoting fossil fuels, a metamorphosis that clashes with the agency’s historic mission to protect human health and the environment.

The administration says its actions will “unleash” the American economy, but environmentalists say the agency’s abrupt change in focus threatens to unravel years of progress on climate-friendly initiatives that could be hard or impossible to reverse.

“It just constantly wants to pat the fossil fuel business on the back and turn back the clock to a pre-Richard Nixon era” when the agency didn’t exist, said historian Douglas Brinkley.

A lot has happened this year at “Trump’s EPA,” as Zeldin frequently calls the agency. Zeldin proposed overturning the landmark finding that climate change is a threat to human health. He pledged to roll back dozens of environmental regulations in “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” He froze billions of dollars for clean energy and upended agency research.

Zeldin has argued the EPA can protect the environment and grow the economy at the same time. He announced “five pillars” to guide EPA’s work; four were economic goals, including energy dominance — Trump’s shorthand for more fossil fuels — and boosting the auto industry.

Zeldin, a former New York congressman who had a record as a moderate Republican on some environmental issues, said his views on climate change have evolved. Many federal and state climate goals are unattainable in the near future — and come at huge cost, he said.

“We should not be causing … extreme economic pain for an individual or a family” because of policies aimed at “saving the planet,” he told reporters at EPA headquarters in early December.

But scientists and experts say the EPA’s new direction comes at a cost to public health, and would lead to far more pollutants in the environment, including mercury, lead and especially tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs. They also note higher emissions of greenhouse gases will worsen atmospheric warming that is driving more frequent, costly and deadly extreme weather.

Christine Todd Whitman, a longtime Republican who led the EPA under President George W. Bush, said watching Zeldin attack laws protecting air and water has been “just depressing.”

“It’s tragic for our country. I worry about my grandchildren, of which I have seven. I worry about what their future is going to be if they don’t have clean air, if they don’t have clean water to drink,” said Whitman, who joined a centrist third party in recent years.

The history behind EPA

FILE- A storm moves through a salt marsh at sunset Monday, Oct. 6, 2025, in Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel, File)

The EPA was launched under Nixon in 1970 with pollution disrupting American life, some cities suffocating in smog and some rivers turned into wastelands by industrial chemicals. Congress passed laws then that remain foundational for protecting water, air and endangered species.

The agency’s aggressiveness has always seesawed depending on who occupies the White House. Former President Joe Biden’s administration boosted renewable energy and electric vehicles, tightened motor-vehicle emissions and proposed greenhouse gas limits on coal-fired power plants and oil and gas wells. Industry groups called rules overly burdensome and said the power plant rule would force many aging plants to shut down. In response, many businesses shifted resources to meet the more stringent rules that are now being undone.

“While the Biden EPA repeatedly attempted to usurp the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law to impose its ‘Green New Scam,’ the Trump EPA is laser-focused on achieving results for the American people while operating within the limits of the laws passed by Congress,” EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said.

Zeldin’s list of targets is long

FILE – Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin listens during the annual Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference on June 3, 2025, in Anchorage, Alaska. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File)

Zeldin has announced plans to abandon soot pollution rules, loosen rules around harmful refrigerants, limit wetlands protections and weaken gas mileage rules. Meanwhile, he would exempt polluting industries and plants from federal emissions-reductions requirements.

Much of EPA’s new direction aligns with Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation road map that argued the agency should gut staffing, cut regulations and end what it called a war on coal on other fossil fuels.

“A lot of the regulations that were put on during the Biden administration were more harmful and restrictive than in any other period. So that’s why deregulating them looks like EPA is making major changes,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.

But Chris Frey, an EPA official under Biden, said the regulations Zeldin has targeted “offered benefits of avoided premature deaths, of avoided chronic illness … bad things that would not happen because of these rules.”

Matthew Tejada, a former EPA official under both Trump and Biden who now works at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the revamped EPA: “I think it would be hard for them to make it any clearer to polluters in this country that they can go on about their business and not worry about EPA getting in their way.”

Zeldin also has shrunk EPA staffing by about 20% to levels last seen in the mid-1980s.

Justin Chen, president of the EPA’s largest union, called staff cuts “devastating.” He cited the dismantling of research and development offices at labs across the country and the firing of employees who signed a letter of dissent opposing EPA cuts.

Relaxed enforcement and cutting staff

FILE – A bulldozer moves coal April 10, 2025, in Princeton, Ind. (AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel, File)

Many of Zeldin’s changes aren’t in effect yet. It takes time to propose new rules, get public input and finalize rollbacks.

It’s much faster to cut grants and ease up on enforcement, and Trump’s EPA is doing both. The number of new civil environmental actions is roughly one-fifth what it was in the first eight months of the Biden administration, according to the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project.

“You can effectively do a lot of deregulation if you just don’t do enforcement,” said Leif Fredrickson, visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Montana.

Hirsch said the number of legal filings isn’t the best way to judge enforcement because they require work outside of the EPA and can bog staff down with burdensome legal agreements. She said the EPA is “focused on efficiently resolving violations and achieving compliance as quickly as possible” and not making demands beyond what the law requires.

EPA’s cuts have been especially hard on climate change programs and environmental justice, the effort to address chronic pollution that typically is worse in minority and poor communities. Both were Biden priorities. Zeldin dismissed staff and canceled billions in grants for projects that fell under the “diversity, equity and inclusion” umbrella, a Trump administration target.

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He also spiked a $20 billion “green bank” set up under Biden’s landmark climate law to fund qualifying clean energy projects. Zeldin argued the fund was a scheme to funnel money to Democrat-aligned organizations with little oversight — allegations a federal judge rejected.

Pat Parenteau, an environmental law expert and former director of the Environmental Law School at Vermont Law & Graduate School, said the EPA’s shift under Trump left him with little optimism for what he called “the two most awful crises in the 21st century” — biodiversity loss and climate disruption.

“I don’t see any hope for either one,” he said. “I really don’t. And I’ll be long gone, but I think the world is in just for absolute catastrophe.”

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN, AP Science Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The year’s first supermoon and meteor shower will sync up in January skies, but the light from one may dim the other.

The Quadrantid meteor shower peaks Friday night into Saturday morning, according to the American Meteor Society. In dark skies during the peak, skygazers typically see around 25 meteors per hour, but this time they’ll likely glimpse less than 10 per hour due to light from Saturday’s supermoon.

“The biggest enemy of enjoying a meteor shower is the full moon,” said Mike Shanahan, planetarium director at Liberty Science Center in New Jersey.

Meteor showers happen when speedy space rocks collide with Earth’s atmosphere, burning up and leaving fiery tails in their wake — the end of a “shooting star.” A handful of meteors are visible on any given night, but predictable showers appear annually when Earth passes through dense streams of cosmic debris.

Supermoons occur when a full moon is closer to Earth in its orbit. That makes it appear up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter than the faintest moon of the year, according to NASA. That difference can be tough to notice with the naked eye.

Supermoons, like all full moons, are visible in clear skies everywhere that it’s night. The Quadrantids, on the other hand, can be seen mainly from the Northern Hemisphere. Both can be glimpsed without any special equipment.

To spot the Quadrantids, venture out in the early evening away from city lights and watch for fireballs before the moon crashes the party, said Jacque Benitez with the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences. Skygazers can also try looking during early dawn hours on Sunday.

Wait for your eyes to get used to the darkness, and don’t look at your phone. The space rocks will look like fast-moving white dots and appear over the whole sky.

Meteor showers are named for the constellation where the fireballs appear to come from. The Quadrantids — space debris from the asteroid 2003 EH1 — are named for a constellation that’s no longer recognized.

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The next major meteor shower, called the Lyrids, is slotted for April.

Supermoons happen a few times a year and come in groups, taking advantage of the sweet spot in the moon’s elliptical orbit. Saturday night’s event ends a four-month streak that started in October. There won’t be another supermoon until the end of 2026.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI, Associated Press

If history is a guide, Republicans stand a good chance of losing control of the House of Representatives in 2026. They have just a slim majority in the chamber, and the incumbent party usually gives up seats in midterm elections.

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President Donald Trump, whose loss of the House halfway through his first term led to two impeachments, is trying to keep history from repeating — and doing so in ways his opponents say are intended to manipulate next year’s election landscape.

He has rallied his party to remake congressional maps across the country to create more conservative-leaning House seats, an effort that could end up backfiring on him. He’s directed his administration to target Democratic politicians, activists and donors. And, Democrats worry, he’s flexing his muscles to intervene in the midterms like no administration ever has.

Democrats and other critics point to how Trump has sent the military into Democratic cities over the objections of Democratic mayors and governors. They note that he’s pushed the Department of Homeland Security to be so aggressive that at one point its agents handcuffed a Democratic U.S. senator. And some warn that a Republican-controlled Congress could fail to seat winning candidates if Democrats reclaim the House majority, recalling Trump’s efforts to stay in power even after voters rejected him in 2020, leading to the violent attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol.

Regarding potential military deployments, Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told The Associated Press: “What he is going to do is send those troops there, and keep them there all the way through the next election, because guess what? If people are afraid of leaving their house, they’re probably not going to leave their house to go vote on Election Day. That’s how he stays in power.”

Military to the polls, or fearmongering?

Democrats sounded similar alarms just before November’s elections, and yet there were no significant incidents. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a frequent Trump antagonist who also warns about a federal crackdown on voting in 2026, predicted that masked immigration agents would show up at the polls in his state, where voters were considering a ballot measure to counter Trump’s redistricting push.

There were no such incidents in November, and the measure to redraw California’s congressional lines in response to Trump’s efforts elsewhere won in a landslide.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the concerns about the midterms come from Democratic politicians who are “fearmongering to score political points with the radical left flank of the Democrat party that they are courting ahead of their doomed-to-fail presidential campaigns.”

FILE – President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi listen as FBI Director Kash Patel speaks during an event in the Oval Office at the White House, Oct. 15, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell, File)

She described their concerns as “baseless conspiracy theories.”

Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, denied that Trump was planning to use the military to try to suppress votes.

“I say it is categorically false, will not happen. It’s just wrongheaded,” she told Vanity Fair for an interview that was published earlier in December.

DNC litigation director Dan Freeman said he hasn’t seen an indication that Trump will send immigration enforcement agents to polling places during the midterms, but is wary.

He said the DNC filed public records requests in an attempt to learn more about any such plans and is drafting legal pleadings it could file if Trump sends armed federal agents to the polls or otherwise intervenes in the elections.

“We’re not taking their word for it,” Freeman said in an interview.

States, not presidents, run elections

November’s off-year elections may not be the best indicator of what could lie ahead. They were scattered in a handful of states, and Trump showed only modest interest until late in the fall when his Department of Justice announced it was sending federal monitors to California and New Jersey to observe voting in a handful of counties. It was a bureaucratic step that had no impact on voting, even as it triggered alarm from Democrats.

FILE – A worker examines ballots at the L.A. County Ballot Processing Center Nov. 4, 2025, in City of Industry, Calif. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope, File)

Alexandra Chandler, the legal director of Protect Democracy, a group that has clashed with Trump over his role in elections, said she was heartened by the lack of drama during the 2025 voting.

“We have so many positive signs we can look to,” Chandler said, citing not only a quiet election but GOP senators’ resistance to Trump’s demands to eliminate the filibuster and the widespread resistance to Trump’s demand that television host Jimmy Kimmel lose his job because of his criticism of the president. “There are limits” on Trump’s power, she noted.

“We will have elections in 2026,” Chandler said. “People don’t have to worry about that.”

Under the Constitution, a president has limited tools to intervene in elections, which are run by the states. Congress can help set rules for federal elections, but states administer their own election operations and oversee the counting of ballots.

When Trump tried to singlehandedly revise election rules with a sweeping executive order shortly after returning to office, the courts stepped in and stopped him, citing the lack of a constitutional role for the president. Trump later promised another order, possibly targeting mail ballots and voting machines, but it has yet to materialize.

DOJ voter data request ‘should frighten everybody’

Still, there’s plenty of ways a president can cause problems, said Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor.

Trump unsuccessfully pushed Georgia’s top election official to “find” him enough votes to be declared the winner there in 2020 and could try similar tactics in Republican-dominated states in November. Likewise, Hasen said, Trump could spread misinformation to undermine confidence in vote tallies, as he has done routinely ahead of elections.

It’s harder to do that in more lopsided contests, as many in 2025 turned into, Hasen noted.

“Concerns about Trump interfering in 2026 are real; they’re not frivolous,” Hasen said. “They’re also not likely, but these are things people need to be on guard for.”

One administration move that has alarmed election officials is a federal demand from his Department of Justice for detailed voter data from the states. The administration has sued the District of Columbia and at least 21 states, most of them controlled by Democrats, after they refused to turn over all the information the DOJ sought.

“What the DOJ is trying to do is something that should frighten everybody across the political spectrum,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “They’re trying to use the power of the executive to bully states into turning over highly sensitive data — date of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license, the Holy Trinity of identity theft — hand it over to the DOJ for who knows what use.”

‘Voter protection’ vs ‘election integrity’

Voting rights lawyers and election officials have been preparing for months for the midterms, trying to ensure there are ways to counter misinformation and ensure state election systems are easy to explain. Both major parties are expected to stand up significant campaigns around the mechanics of voting: Democrats mounting what they call a “voter protection” effort to monitor for problems while Republicans focus on what they call “election integrity.”

Freeman, the DNC litigation director who previously worked in the DOJ’s voting section, said his hiring this year was part of a larger effort by the DNC to beef up its in-house legal efforts ahead of the midterms. He said the committee has been filling gaps in voting rights law enforcement that the DOJ has typically covered, including informing states that they can’t illegally purge citizens from their voter rolls.

Tina Barton, co-chair of the Committee on Safe and Secure Elections, a coalition of law enforcement and election officials who advise jurisdictions on de-escalation and how to respond to emergencies at polling places, says interest in the group’s trainings has “exploded” in recent weeks.

“There’s a lot at stake, and that’s going to cause a lot of emotions,” Barton said.

Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.

Most things in this world have their good points and their not-so-good points, and this is certainly true of “The Copenhagen Test,” a science-fiction spy story about a man whose brain has been hacked. Without his knowing it, everything he sees and hears is uploaded to an unknown party, in an unknown place, as if he were a living pair of smart glasses. Created by Thomas Brandon and premiering Dec. 27 on Peacock, its conceit is dramatically clever, if, of course, impossible. What do you watch when you learn that what you’re watching is being watched?

In a preamble, we meet our hero, Andrew Hale (Simu Liu, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”), a first-generation Chinese American Green Beret, rescuing hostages in Belarus. A voice in his headset instructs him that there is enough room for one on a departing helicopter and that he must prioritize an American citizen. Instead he picks a foreign child. This, we will learn, is the less-preferred choice.

Three years later, Hale is working for the Orphanage, a shadowy American intelligence agency that spies on all the less-shadowy American intelligence agencies — watching the watchers. (So much watching!) Its proud boast is that, since its inception in the Bush I administration, it has never been compromised. (Until someone started looking through Hale’s eyes, that is.) There is a secret entrance to their giant complex, accessed by locking eyes with a statue in a library — it’s thematically appropriate, but also very “Get Smart!” That is a compliment, obviously.

The lower floor is where the analysts toil; entry to the upper floor, where the action is, is by the sort of fancy key that might have been used to open an executive washroom in 1895. (The decor is better there, too, with something of the air of an 1895 executive washroom.) Hale, who has been been listening to and translating Korean and Chinese chatter, dreams of moving upstairs, which will come with the discovery that his head is not entirely his own.

Meanwhile, he has been suffering migraines, seizures and panic attacks. Ex-fiancée Rachel (Hannah Cruz), a doctor, has been giving him pills under the table. Other characters of continuing interest include Michelle (Melissa Barrera), a bartender who will spy on Hale from the vantage point of a girlfriend, sort of; Parker (Sinclair Daniel), a newly promoted “predictive analyst” with a gift for reading people and situations; Victor (Saul Rubinek), an ex-spook who runs a high-end restaurant and has known Hale forever; Cobb (Mark O’Brien), a rivalrous colleague whose Ivy League persona has been drawn in contrast to Hale’s; and Cobb’s uncle, Schiff (Adam Godley), who also has spy knowledge. Peter Moira (Brian d’Arcy James) runs the shop, and St. George (Kathleen Chalfant) floats above Moira.

As parties unknown look through Hale’s eyes, the Orphanage is watching Hale with the usual access to the world’s security cameras. (That bit of movie spycraft always strikes me as far-fetched; however, a conversation in the privacy of my kitchen will somehow translate into ads on my social feeds, so, who knows?) “The Copenhagen Test” isn’t selling a surveillance state metaphor, in any case; this is just one of those “Who Can You Trust?” stories, one that keeps flipping characters to keep the show going, somewhat past the point of profitability.

Like most eight-hour dramas, it’s too long — “Slow Horses,” the best of this breed, sticks to six — and over the course of the show, things grow muddied with MacGuffins and subplots. While it’s easy enough to enjoy what’s happening in the moment, it can be easy to lose the plot and harder to tell just who’s on what side, or even how many sides there are. (It doesn’t help that nearly everyone is ready to kill Hale.) I can’t go into details without crossing the dreaded spoiler line, but even accepting the impossible tech, much of “The Copenhagen Test” makes little practical sense, including the eponymous test. (Why “Copenhagen?” Det ved jeg ikke. Danish for “I don’t know.”) I spent so much time untwisting knots and keeping threads straight that, though I continued to root in a detached way for Hale, I ceased to care entirely about the fate of the Orphanage and the supposedly free world.

The show is well cast. While the characters on paper are pretty much types, each actor projects the essence of the part, adding enough extra personality to suggest a real person. (And they’re all nice to look at.) When not keeling over from pain, or engaged in a shootout or hand-to-hand combat, Liu is an even-keeled, quiet sort of protagonist — rather in the Keanu Reeves vein — and as a Chinese Canadian actor, still a novelty among American television action heroes. He does have a kind of chemistry with Barrera, who has screen chemistry all on her own, though it’s somewhat limited by the demands of the plot.

The ending, including a diminished-chord twist, is pretty pat, if happier than one might imagine given the ruckus that’s gone before. Neat bows are tied — though at least one has been left loose in hopes, according to my own predictive analysis, of a second season. And though releasing a series in the last week of the year doesn’t exactly betoken confidence, I can predict with some confidence that there might be one.

‘The Copenhagen Test’

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Peacock

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