WASHINGTON— President Trump waged a multi-pronged war on the environment in the first year of his second term, causing potentially permanent harm to federal agencies’ ability to protect the environment and unprecedented damage to the laws that protect the nation’s air, water and wildlife.

The Trump administration moved aggressively to implement Project 2025, completing more than half of the environmental rollbacks outlined in that far-right strategy blueprint.

In a year, 2,000 staff at Environmental Protection Agency were lost, crippling the agency’s ability to protect the public from poisonous pollution that sickens thousands of people every year. Remaining staff were forced to gut decades-old environmental regulations, weaken the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act to benefit billionaire special interests, and severely hamstring the nation’s ability to combat the climate crisis and other environmental threats under the guise of a fabricated national energy emergency.

“The United States was once the global leader in conservation and now it’s known for environmental destruction. If Trump’s wrecking ball isn’t checked soon, we’ll be a global pariah when it comes to the environment,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Nobody voted to have their water supply poisoned. Nobody voted for more air pollution so the richest corporations can profit even more. The first year of Trump 2.0 was a national nightmare.”

In Trump’s first year, 1,817 staff members were fired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, putting the nation’s most endangered wildlife at grave risk of extinction. Likewise, more than 2,700 staff were lost at the National Park Service and more than 7,000 workers from the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, even as Trump pushed to keep public lands open without staff during the month-long government shutdown.

Trump also announced recently that he is unilaterally withdrawing the United States from the world’s foundational climate treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Like many organizations, the Center is challenging Trump’s attacks in court. The Center has filed more than 60 lawsuits against the second Trump administration, including legal actions pushing back against unlawful firings of career civil servants by the Department of Government Efficiency, the dismantling of endangered species protections, and the unlawful rollbacks of air and water pollution safeguards.

A broadscale legal challenge is necessary to stem Trump’s environmental destruction, which will take many years and even decades to reverse.

To date no Democrat has offered a vision on how to rebuild the nation’s institutions and swiftly enact measures to not only offset the damage from Trump 2.0 but make the bold environmental progress needed to halt the climate and extinction crises.

“As long as Trump continues his ruthless crusade against our natural heritage, we’ll keep fighting,” Kurose said. “But as Trump 2.0 enters its second year, the struggle and opposition to Trump needs to broaden. There has been far too much capitulation and cowardice in Congress from Democrats in 2025. We need leaders to offer a real vision for how to oppose Trump and save our planet from environmental collapse before it’s too late.”