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Trump Makes an Announcement with EPA Administrator Zeldin: The Endangerment Finding Terminated, Feb. 12, 2026

February 12, 2026 · The White House · 0:34:12

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump, joined by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, announced at the White House on February 12, 2026 that the EPA had completed the process “officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding” — the 2009 Obama-era determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. “This is about as big as it gets,” he said. “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.”

His figures and claims, as he stated them: the action “will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory cost and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically”; the finding “had no basis in law”; it had forced the “hated start stop feature” onto drivers and underpinned the electric-vehicle mandate, which he declared “all dead, gone, over.” He pointed to a Ford plant from the early 1900s that had been set to close and was instead, he said, going 24 hours around the clock.

In questions he turned to the January jobs report, crediting the shrinking federal workforce: former federal employees, he said, had mostly found private-sector jobs “for two and three times more money,” and the construction numbers were rising “because they’re building plants all over the United States.”

Why it matters

The endangerment finding was the legal foundation of federal greenhouse-gas regulation since 2009; terminating it is the administration’s largest single deregulatory act and the centerpiece of the energy-and-deregulation week the Press Secretary previewed on February 10. It is recorded on the Energy & Permitting hub.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: a completed regulatory action — termination of the endangerment finding, with the $1.3 trillion savings figure as stated by the President. The scoreboard entry itself remains review-gated.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Makes an Announcement with the Administrator of the EPA,” The White House, February 12, 2026 (official upload, embedded above). All figures and characterizations as stated by the President at the event.