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Home » President Trump Makes an Announcement with the Administrator of the EPA (Transcript) 

President Trump Makes an Announcement with the Administrator of the EPA (Transcript) 

Editor’s Notes: In this historic announcement, President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unveil what they describe as the single largest deregulatory action in American history: the official termination of the 2009 Obama-era “endangerment finding”. This significant move aims to eliminate over $1.3 trillion in regulatory costs, which the administration claims will lower the average price of a new vehicle by nearly $3,000. By repealing greenhouse gas emission standards and ending mandates like the controversial “start-stop” engine feature, the administration seeks to revitalize the U.S. auto industry and restore consumer choice. The briefing also touches on future plans to deregulate agricultural equipment and highlights broader economic goals for the “great American comeback”. (February 12, 2026)  

TRANSCRIPT:

President Trump Announces Historic Deregulatory Action

PRESIDENT TRUMP: This is a big one, if you’re into environment. This is about as big as it gets, they tell me. And it’s an honor to be here with a terrific person who’s worked so hard on this, and some other terrific people. Thank you very much.

And I’m pleased to be joined today by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who you all know, and to announce the single largest deregulatory action in American history. That’s a big statement in American history. And I think we can add the words “by far.”

Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers. Prices went up incredibly for a worse product.

This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically. You’re going to get a better car. You’re going to get a car that starts easier, a car that works better for a lot less money.

The Endangerment Finding and Its Impact

In 2009, Barack Hussein Obama, his EPA designated fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and other things that actually make factories rock and roll, and other things drive very nicely as a threat to health and human welfare, known as the endangerment finding. This determination had no basis, in fact, had none whatsoever, and it had no basis in law.

On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world. And you see it with the blackouts all over, where they don’t use it, where they went to the wind, intermittent wind, which is weak and ineffective and very, very costly, most costly energy there is. And people are dying because there was no air conditioning or there was no heating, lots of other things, bad things happened.

And yet this radical rule became the legal foundation for the Green New Scam, one of the greatest scams in history, probably as great, maybe even greater than Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, etc., which the Obama and Biden administration used to destroy countless jobs. The jobs have been just decimated, although they’re all coming back because of tariffs. They’re all coming back into our country at levels we’ve never seen before.

But it raised prices and caused immense harm to the U.S. auto industry. We thought irreparable, but we’ve got them back. We’re coming back now. I was in Detroit, as you know, with Ford. And they had one of the earliest plants from the early 1900s. And it was going to be closed down. And then when I won, they said, “Let’s keep it open for a little while. Let’s see what happens.” And they just announced, as you know, they’re going 24 hours around the clock with that same plant that was going to be closed because of what we’ve done.

Effects on American Consumers

For example, under the endangerment finding, they forced the hated start-stop feature onto American consumers, which unnecessarily shuts off a car’s engine when you stop at a red light. In other words, the engine goes off. That’s great.

The endangerment finding was also used to impose the massive and really very expensive electric vehicle mandate — expensive in the sense that nobody wanted it. And it was going to be forced to buy an electric car in a very short period of time, even though you can’t power the car because we would have to spend $5 trillion on power stations. That’s all dead, gone, over.

These crippling restrictions were a major factor in driving up car prices to unprecedented levels. And the car that you were getting was not nearly as good. In four years under the Biden administration, the price of a new and used car rose more than 22 percent, all to facilitate the Green New Scam without achieving any meaningful impact on the environment, but making the car worse.

That is why, effective immediately, we are repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding and terminating all additional green emission standards imposed unnecessarily on vehicle models and engines between 2012 and 2027 and beyond.

This action will save American consumers trillions of dollars and will lower the average cost of a new vehicle by close to $3,000. Think of that. During my campaign, I promised to cut 10 old regulations for every new regulation. And we’ve exceeded that. We’ve instead done it, 10 regulations, we were able to cut 129. So now we cut 129. So think of that. I promised to cut 10 old regulations for every new one, but we did more than 10. We did 129. It’s something. Nobody can even believe it. So we did a lot of regulation cutting in the first administration, a record. Nobody even close to it now. We’re actually exceeding it in this administration. The biggest one yet that we’ve done is happening right now.

So perhaps no industry has benefited more from our historic deregulation campaign than the U.S. auto industry. We canceled the EPA’s absurd, just totally absurd, tailpipe emission standards, which was a disaster for automobile manufacturing, and revoked Biden’s emissions waiver that would have allowed California to regulate automobiles for the entire nation. And they’re crazy out in California.