Lawyer for polluters set to make EPA return as second-in-command

David Fotouhi, Trump’s pick for No. 2 at EPA, would "bring anti-regulatory skills to a regulatory agency," said one public health expert.

Illustration by Tess Abbot

---

David Fotouhi made his career as a lawyer representing corporate polluters, helping the first Trump administration unravel climate and water protections at the Environmental Protection Agency, and then fighting the agency’s regulations on behalf of industry during the Biden years.  

He is now poised to return to the EPA as its new deputy administrator, the second highest-ranking official at the federal agency tasked with protecting the public from pollution in the environment. 

“If confirmed, I will work every day to earn and keep the public's trust in EPA and its actions,” Fotouhi told senators during a confirmation hearing today, in which he testified to his “belief in the importance of the rule of law” and that “environmental protection and conservation is woven into every fiber of this country.” 

But Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said he feared Fotouhi’s nomination is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the agency and retool it to serve polluters. “It remains difficult for me to understand how someone who’s made a career defending the very industries that destroy our environment has any business now being entrusted to protect it,” Whitehouse said.

As a partner at global law firm Gibson Dunn, Fotouhi made nearly $3.2 million in 2024 representing a range of corporate interests against pollution cases and enforcement actions. His clients included Chevron, Sunoco Pipeline, and Energy Transfer, a major oil and gas company that is currently litigating a high stakes trial against Greenpeace, according to a recent financial disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics.

“However qualified Mr. Fotouhi may be as a lawyer, he is being asked to take a leading role in an agency that is tasked with environmental protection,” Todd Ommen, a law professor and managing attorney at Pace University’s Environmental Litigation Clinic, told ExxonKnews.  “Having a long history of advocating and litigating to minimize or eliminate those very protections seems incompatible with the position itself.”

During his opening statement, Fotouhi, a cancer survivor, acknowledged ongoing environmental threats such as unhealthy air quality, drinking water supplies contaminated by lead and PFAS chemicals, and climate change — which he suggested could be addressed domestically by managing synthetic chemicals through the AIM Act and “expediting carbon sequestration permitting.” 

But as Sharon Lerner at ProPublica recently reported, Fotouhi has opposed or undermined the EPA’s handling of many of those environmental threats. His work has included challenging the EPA’s ban on cancer-causing asbestos, defending corporations in PFAS lawsuits, and advocating for coal ash ponds to be labeled “clean.”

As deputy EPA administrator, Fotouhi would be responsible for managing day-to-day operations and executing the vision of new administrator Lee Zeldin, the former U.S. representative who has listed some of his top priorities for the agency as easier permitting for oil leases, promoting AI, and “energy dominance.” Zeldin has not mentioned addressing the climate crisis as part of that list.

Fotouhi’s “training, experience, and track record show him to be an ideal candidate to lead EPA’s efforts to roll back public health and environmental protections afforded by a number of federal statutes,” said Ted Schettler, a public health expert and science director at the nonprofit Science and Environmental Health Network. “If confirmed, he will bring anti-regulatory skills to a regulatory agency, increasing risks to public and environmental health.”

A “vicious cycle”

Fotouhi served in the EPA under the first Trump administration as deputy general counsel and acting general counsel, where he “played a critical role” in dismantling federal protections for wetlands and streams under the Clean Water Act and helped the agency defend its repeal of the Clean Power Plan, which had set limits on carbon emissions from U.S. power plants.

Former EPA officials, already alarmed by Trump’s targeting of the agency’s staff, spending, and priorities, said Fotouhi would likely play a key role in repealing many of the regulations that Biden administration officials restored after the first Trump presidency.

“It is a really vicious cycle, and the bottom line is it's less protection for public health and more regulatory uncertainty for businesses,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator. 

While Enck said career staff at the EPA “have an obligation to point out when illegal policy changes are happening,” she noted that even during her time at the agency, it was uncommon to challenge the deputy administrator. 

During his confirmation hearing — which was shared with Trump’s nominee to lead the agency’s office of Air and Radiation, oil, gas, and chemical lobbyist and Project 2025 contributor Aaron Szabo — Fotouhi emphasized that he would uphold the rule of law and the statutory authority of Congress.

Yet the Trump administration has already demoted career staff, threatened mass layoffs, and announced its plans to cut 65 percent of the EPA’s spending, which Zeldin has said is “a low number.” Zeldin is also planning to repeal the agency’s 16-year-old Endangerment Finding that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to human health and the environment, sources told the Associated Press.

“There’s no guidebook for staff on how to deal with the unlawful executive overreach of President Trump trying to bypass Congress and the law, and undermine the very mission of the agency,” said Jeremy Symons, a former climate advisor at EPA who is now senior advisor at the Environmental Protection Network, an organization of former EPA staffers. Symons said longtime civil servants at the agency are living in fear of losing their jobs, putting them in a risky position of needing to choose whether to follow the chain of command or the law.

The administration is “putting in place the demolition team that will have the job of driving staff out of the agency and taking EPA out of the game,” said Symons, adding that Trump “wants to take a wrecking ball to the EPA so that the corporate polluters who are close to him are no longer held accountable for their pollution under the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.”  Fossil fuel interests spent $96 million in direct donations to support Trump’s presidential campaign. 

From Big Oil’s law firm to EPA

After departing from the EPA at the end of the Trump administration, Fotouhi spent the Biden years fighting the agency in court. Upon returning to Gibson Dunn, he fought the EPA’s framework for evaluating existing toxic substances on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, sued the agency over its water quality standards for toxic PCB chemicals on behalf of Washington businesses, and opposed its recent ban on asbestos on behalf of an alliance of car companies, for whom he was still listed as an attorney as of February 28. 

Fotouhi’s online Gibson Dunn biography boasts his representation of various industry clients in their defense against enforcement actions under state and federal laws. The firm has an ongoing legacy of concocting controversial legal strategies to defend oil companies from liability and silence their critics, including helming Energy Transfer’s trial accusing Greenpeace of defaming the company and orchestrating the Indigenous-led protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Fotouhi has said he will recuse himself from decisions relating to former clients for one year after departing Gibson Dunn, or until he receives his last payment from the firm, ethics agreements show. 

If his nomination passes the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, it will go to the full Senate for a vote.

“For people who want to breathe cleaner air and not have toxic chemicals in their drinking water, this is a very serious moment in the agency's history,” Enck said. 

---