In a barrage of pronouncements on Wednesday the Trump administration said it would repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, protections for wetlands, and the legal basis that allows it to regulate the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet.

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But beyond that, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reframed the purpose of the E.P.A. In a two-minute-and-18-second video posted to X, Zeldin boasted about the changes and said his agency’s mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”

Nowhere in the video did he refer to protecting the environment or public health, twin tenets that have guided the agency since its founding in 1970.

The E.P.A. has “no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment,” the first administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus,66br said as he explained its mission to the country weeks after the E.P.A. was created by President Richard M. Nixon. He said the agency would be focused on research, standards and enforcement in five areas: air pollution, water pollution, waste disposal, radiation and pesticides.

The E.P.A.’s proposed changes

Perhaps the most significant of the agency’s regulatory changes is an effort to revise a 2009 legal opinion known as the E.P.A. “endangerment finding,” which concluded that rising greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to public health.

The finding gives the agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating it would make it virtually impossible for the E.P.A. to curb climate pollution from automobiles, factories, power plants or oil and gas wells.

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“She was a vibrant 28-year-old,” Ms. Harris said. “Her name, Amber Nicole Thurman, and I promised her mother I would say her name every time.”

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