Elon Musk runs corporations that make electrical autos and photo voltaic panels, issues which are supposed to cut back air pollution and combat local weather change. However through the years, Musk’s corporations have confronted repeated accusations by regulators together with the Environmental Safety Company (EPA) that they’ve skirted the legislation, from allegations of Tesla mishandling hazardous waste to SpaceX polluting wetlands. Now, with President Donald Trump’s blessing, Musk is taking an ax to the federal company tasked with imposing environmental legislation within the US and regulating corporations — together with his personal.
Inside EPA information obtained by The Verge present repeated enforcement actions towards Tesla over the Clear Air Act and federal hazardous waste legislation between 2015 and February of this yr. The information additionally present a number of enforcement actions EPA has taken towards SpaceX over the Clear Water Act since 2015.
After spending lots of of tens of millions of {dollars} to assist Donald Trump get reelected, Musk spearheaded the launch of the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) to slash federal spending and fireplace staff, together with these from companies which are supposed to make sure corporations, together with his personal, observe the legislation. The EPA was one of many first on the chopping block, focused with mass layoffs and drastic reductions within the scope of its work.
The company’s means to carry polluters accountable is at stake, present and former EPA workers and outdoors specialists inform The Verge. The federal authorities’s environmental watchdog is being saved on a brief leash, and a billionaire businessman with a observe document of alleged abuses has his hand on it.
The company’s means to carry polluters accountable is at stake
“He’s simply driving round like a lone ranger doing no matter he pleases, and Trump is letting him get away with it,” says Mary Nichols, distinguished counsel for the Emmett Institute on Local weather Change and the Setting at UCLA Faculty of Legislation and former chair of the California Air Assets Board. “Clearly, his motivation consists of desirous to eliminate legal guidelines and companies which have precipitated him issues, fined him, or cited him for violating the statutes, however he’s appearing in his personal curiosity.”
Tesla’s hazardous waste
In 2018, investigators with the San Francisco District Lawyer’s Workplace rifling by way of Tesla’s trash found “the unlawful disposal” of “hazardous automotive elements.”
The sorts of waste investigators discovered have been fairly frequent, together with used lubricating oils, brake fluids, lead acid batteries, aerosols, antifreeze, waste solvents, paint, and e-waste. However mishandling them poses potential well being and environmental dangers, which is why their disposal is regulated. Lead and chlorinated solvents are poisonous, oils are flammable, and acids are corrosive, for example.
Different counties discovered comparable “illegal disposals” at extra Tesla services. That included the corporate’s Fremont manufacturing unit, the place welding spatter waste and different particles contaminated with primer and paint have been chucked into the trash unlawfully, in accordance with the lawsuit.
The allegations towards Tesla level to a systemic failure to correctly deal with hazardous waste over a time period on the firm’s California services, specialists instructed The Verge after the corporate settled a lawsuit with San Francisco and 24 different counties filed towards it final yr. The swimsuit alleged that Tesla had “deliberately” and “negligently” disposed of hazardous waste at greater than 100 services throughout the state. Tesla agreed to pay $1.5 million as a part of the settlement, however didn’t admit to any wrongdoing.
In 2019, the EPA settled one other case with Tesla over hazardous waste violations on the identical Fremont facility. An inspection of the power discovered that it didn’t adjust to emissions requirements for gear leaks. The corporate subsequently paid a $31,000 penalty and agreed to buy $55,000 value of emergency response gear for the Fremont Fireplace Division as a part of the settlement. All in all Tesla needed to pay little greater than the price of a Cybertruck.
That case strains up with particulars from screenshots of an inside EPA database obtained by The Verge that present 4 actions taken towards the corporate over hazardous waste legislation in 2019. The database additionally confirmed 4 enforcement actions taken towards Tesla over Clear Air Act violations in 2022.
“Truthfully the largest downside is the willful ignoring of the legislation.”
When The Verge reached out to the EPA for extra particulars, a spokesperson pointed us to case paperwork for a $275,000 settlement the company reached with Tesla that yr after figuring out it had violated the Clear Air Act. On the time, the EPA discovered that the corporate didn’t “develop and/or implement” a plan to reduce hazardous air pollution from supplies utilized in automobile coating operations. The company additionally says Tesla didn’t calculate its emissions on a month-to-month foundation or maintain information required to point out it was in compliance with federal legislation.
After every settlement, the EPA says Tesla corrected issues it discovered. However that wasn’t the tip of alleged violations at its Fremont facility. Tesla obtained greater than 112 notices of violation between 2019 and 2024 from an area regulator, the Bay Space Air District, for emitting smog-forming compounds and poisonous air contaminants “instantly into the ambiance with out correct abatement.” Every of these violations may end in “lots of of kilos of unlawful air air pollution,” in accordance with the Air District. Final yr, its unbiased listening to board ordered Tesla to right ongoing air high quality violations in Fremont, together with hiring a third-party marketing consultant.
“Tesla’s ongoing violations at their Fremont facility pose a danger to public well being and air high quality within the surrounding group,” Philip Tremendous, govt officer of the Air District, mentioned in a June press launch.
Reached for remark for this story, a spokesperson for the Air District mentioned in an electronic mail to The Verge that it’s “working with Tesla to handle the air high quality violations at their Fremont facility and guarantee compliance shifting ahead.” Tesla didn’t reply to requests for remark from The Verge.
Native companies just like the Bay Space Air District typically take motion earlier than the EPA does, and may proceed to step up within the absence of federal motion. But when the EPA is MIA, it may result in patchwork enforcement from state to state. That may nonetheless have an effect on residents in states with robust native legal guidelines since air pollution can waft throughout borders.
Tesla isn’t the one firm in Musk’s intensive portfolio to face scrutiny. Screenshots of the inner EPA database reviewed by The Verge additionally present 4 enforcement actions taken towards SpaceX over the Clear Water Act in 2024, which The Verge was in a position to line up with earlier information stories and case paperwork we subsequently obtained from Texas regulators and the EPA.
“Truthfully the largest downside is the willful ignoring of the legislation,” says Eric Roesch, an environmental engineer who has written about Musk’s corporations through the years on his weblog ESG Hound.
SpaceX is creating the world’s strongest rocket in Texas, meant to deliver individuals to “the Moon, Mars and past.” In 2023, its first take a look at flight led to a spectacular explosion, sending shrapnel into at the very least one automotive parked close by and reportedly spraying extra particles onto seashores which are nesting grounds for endangered birds and sea turtles. CNBC reported final yr that SpaceX skipped a allowing course of in its rush to rebuild the launchpad and set up a water deluge system to blunt the affect of launches.
Information that the Texas Fee on Environmental High quality (TCEQ) offered to The Verge present that it assessed a $3,750 penalty towards SpaceX in 2024 for failing to acquire authorization to discharge industrial wastewater from its Starbase Launch Pad website. It alleges the corporate discharged industrial wastewater with out an ample allow on 4 separate events final yr.
EPA case information present that the company issued an order final March requiring Starbase to “get rid of unpermitted discharges.” SpaceX ultimately agreed to pay a $148,378 civil penalty over Clear Water Act allegations, in accordance with an EPA case submitting from January fifteenth. The doc lists eight unauthorized wastewater discharges between 2022 and 2024, releasing tens of hundreds of gallons of waste into wetlands in every occasion.
“SpaceX desires to play silly and so they’re ready till a regulator factors out the apparent: rocket deluge water is an industrial waste,” Roesch claimed on his weblog, ESG Hound in 2023, after CNBC first reported that SpaceX didn’t have permits for its water deluge system.
SpaceX didn’t reply to requests for remark from The Verge for this story, however wrote on X final yr that the CNBC story was “factually inaccurate.” It mentioned that its deluge system “causes no hurt to the atmosphere.” “All through our ongoing coordination with each TCEQ and the EPA, we have now explicitly requested if operation of the deluge system wanted to cease and we have been knowledgeable that operations may proceed,” the corporate mentioned on X.
Musk’s enterprise empire is huge, and numerous accusations towards it about its environmental affect are sprawling. Final yr, Musk’s xAi confronted allegations it put in and operated fuel generators at an information middle in Memphis with no correct allow, creating air pollution for surrounding communities. Employees constructing his underground transportation tunnels in Las Vegas reported struggling burns after having to wade by way of chemical-laced waters on the job, in accordance with a 2024 Bloomberg investigation. And a ProPublica investigation in January says Musk’s Boring Firm “skirted constructing, environmental and labor rules” in Las Vegas, together with releasing untreated wastewater into storm drains. None of these corporations responded to inquiries from The Verge for this story.
Musk and Trump have been candid about why they wish to kneecap federal regulators. They’re businessmen and so they wish to get monetary savings.
“When you decontrol, like have smart rules, as a result of a whole lot of the rules are nonsensical and trigger the associated fee to be excessive for no motive,” Musk mentioned whereas talking with Trump throughout an X interview on August twelfth.
Elon Musk shelled out large bucks for Trump’s presidential marketing campaign, giving greater than $250 million. Quickly after, he was main DOGE’s campaign “to chop the federal authorities all the way down to measurement” — culling the federal workforce, together with on the EPA. “A drastic discount in federal rules offers sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions throughout the federal forms,” Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wrote of their plans for DOGE revealed within the Wall Road Journal in November.
The EPA was one of many first companies focused by DOGE. Little greater than per week after Trump’s inauguration, 1,100 probationary workers on the EPA obtained a “discover” by electronic mail telling them the company “has the best to right away terminate you.” A federal decide later ordered the Trump administration to rehire hundreds of laid off federal staff.
“Whenever you lower employees, you’ll get much less work completed. It is so simple as that.”
However extra drastic cuts may very well be on the way in which, and a good slimmer employees would solely make it tougher to take up new circumstances. Trump and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin have floated the concept of slashing the EPA’s funds by 65 %.
Yesterday, a day earlier than Earth Day, EPA employees obtained a discover obtained by The Verge saying that the company is planning one other discount in power. The staffing cuts would take impact on July thirty first, the doc says, and adjust to Trump’s govt orders to finish range and fairness packages and implement his “Division of Authorities Effectivity Workforce Optimization Initiative.”
“Whenever you lower employees, you’ll get much less work completed. It is so simple as that,” says Walter Mugdan, a former deputy regional administrator on the EPA and a volunteer with the Environmental Safety Community created by alumni of the company. “I’d anticipate that due to this fact, there will probably be fewer enforcement actions being initiated and fewer enforcement actions being accomplished.”
Trump and the remainder of his crew, in fact, have their very own deregulatory agenda at play. “Environmental [regulation] is the largest software for stopping progress … it prices way more to do issues environmentally clear,” Trump mentioned in an October twenty fifth interview with Joe Rogan.
Venture 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s return, requires eliminating the EPA’s stand-alone Workplace of Enforcement and Compliance Help and diffusing its work throughout a number of different departments. Breaking apart the crew that leads enforcement circumstances will make it tougher for the EPA to implement rules, Larry Starfield, who served because the principal deputy assistant administrator of EPA’s Workplace of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance from 2011 to 2023, and different specialists, inform The Verge. The Trump administration has already made plans to get rid of the company’s scientific analysis and environmental justice workplaces.
March twelfth marked “the best day of deregulation our nation has seen,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin boasted. That day, the EPA introduced greater than 30 proposals to roll again protections towards mercury, poisonous air pollution, soot, wastewater, chemical compounds, greenhouse fuel emissions, and different kinds of air pollution.
“All the pieces that we’re seeing definitely factors to a political agenda behind enforcement, and that the precedence is to let business and controlled entities free, unleash them from regulation,” says Starfield. “These rules [were] written to guard human well being and to cut back the variety of most cancers circumstances and different issues. It’s fairly scary.”
Who’s left to implement environmental legislation?
On the identical day, EPA management issued a memo proscribing what sorts of enforcement actions the company can take shifting ahead. It explicitly bars its enforcement arm from contemplating environmental justice in its choices. It additionally stipulates that workers get approval from the assistant administrator of the EPA’s Workplace of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance for a lot of actions deemed to “unduly burden or considerably disrupt power manufacturing or energy technology” or that contain guidelines the company is at the moment reshaping.
“It’s a bottleneck, and it’s going to decelerate and chill enforcement,” Starfield says. It provides to different measures DOGE has applied that make it tougher for federal companies to do their work, like a $1 spending restrict on bank cards that would have an effect on EPA employees when they should purchase gear and pay for lab samples. In March, the EPA reportedly issued extra steerage to employees requiring DOGE to log off on any actions costing greater than $50,000.
“The truth is, it is a subtle plan in keeping with Venture 2025 to decelerate and hamper enforcement, particularly in communities that want the assistance probably the most,” Starfield says.
In a transfer that shocked environmental advocates, the US Division of Justice (DOJ) below Trump dropped a high-profile enforcement case on behalf of the EPA towards a Louisiana rubber plant whose emissions of chloroprene, a chemical thought of to be a possible carcinogen in people, reached lots of of scholars in close by faculties.
Profession EPA workers warn that corporations may see the dismissal as a go to pollute. “I’m anxious concerning the message this sends to business. Already, I’m listening to about corporations pushing again, referencing the weak place they understand EPA to be in,” an EPA worker who was granted anonymity to talk freely out of concern of repercussions, tells The Verge. “I’m anxious about what occurs if we try and implement environmental rules towards an organization with executives who’re mates with Zeldin, or Musk, or Trump.”
Throughout Trump’s first time period in workplace, the typical annual variety of EPA inspections of polluters and common variety of civil circumstances EPA referred to the DOJ dropped by roughly a 3rd in comparison with the second time period of the Obama administration, in accordance with an evaluation of company information by the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Venture (EIP). The just lately dropped lawsuit is a sign that the pattern is more likely to proceed below Trump’s return, says EIP govt director Jen Duggan.
“When EPA, below the Trump administration, dropped that case after years of litigating it, that’s alarming, and it ought to put all of us communities throughout the nation on discover that the Trump administration is just not severe about imposing environmental legislation,” Duggan says.
The DOJ declined to offer remark for this story. However in one other signal of the Trump administration’s priorities, the DOJ has additionally reassigned environmental attorneys to work on immigration as a substitute.
Whereas this isn’t all Musk’s doing — it doesn’t harm to be the president’s right-hand man. “I believe federal enforcement officers, to the extent there nonetheless are any, could put going after the president’s greatest pal very low on their priorities checklist,” says Michael Gerrard, an environmental lawyer and school director of the Sabin Middle for Local weather Change Legislation at Columbia College.
The EPA tells The Verge its core mission of defending human well being and the atmosphere hasn’t modified, it simply tacked on one other purpose of powering “the Nice American Comeback.”
“We’re dedicated to enhancing our means to ship clear air, water, and land for all People. Whereas no choices have been made but, we’re actively listening to workers in any respect ranges to collect concepts on how one can higher fulfill company statutory obligations, improve effectivity, and make sure the EPA is as up-to-date and efficient as ever,” Molly Vaseliou, EPA Affiliate Administrator for Public Affairs, mentioned in an electronic mail to The Verge.
“How do you spell corruption? E-L-O-N.”
Elon Musk, in the meantime, has been in a position to escape scrutiny as an unofficial official throughout the Trump administration by way of DOGE — by no means having been elected or confirmed by the Senate to carry workplace like typical appointees.
“He’s appearing as if he has authority, however he doesn’t, actually, have a paycheck, a title, an workplace, or a place that was ever created by Congress. So it will possibly’t be a battle of curiosity,” says Nichols, the environmental lawyer and former chair of the California Air Assets Board.
“How do you spell corruption? E-L-O-N,” EPA staff and their supporters chanted throughout protests towards staffing and funds cuts on the company on March twenty fifth in New York, a part of a “Nationwide Day of Motion” with demonstrations fanning out throughout eight cities. Different staff held indicators with the phrases “this man is just not our boss” emblazoned in crimson over a sketch of Musk’s face.
One other EPA worker who was granted anonymity due to the chance of retaliation tells The Verge, starkly, “We’re simply actually involved our enforcement workplaces are going to be neutered and we’re not going to have the ability to do that core mission of the company.”
Are you a present or former worker on the EPA? Attain out securely with tricks to Justine Calma through Sign at bqe210.91.
