At a White House event unveiling new agricultural initiatives on March 27 that coddled farmers and ranchers, President Trump said: “Environmentalists, I mean, they are terrorists.”   

How shameful he got away with it. In the past, slander and libel were taken seriously. But this Administration has no regard for what is true, just, or right. Hence the upside down comments like the one above.  

The truth is, through practice and policy, the heads of departments in this Administration are environmental terrorists: they’ve launched a vigorous, sweeping attack on environmental regulations, clean energy, and climate science.  

Thankfully, environmental groups like Friends of Animals are fighting for the planet’s future and that of the human and non-human animals who live there. 

According to Bloomberg, in 2025 alone, the Trump administration reversed progress on the environment in at least 180 different ways. To undermine climate regulation, Trump’s administration has withdrawn from climate accords, rolled back crucial protections, and gutted environmental agencies, all while expanding fossil fuel extraction and hindering renewable energy prospects.  

Here are some of this administration’s worst acts of environmental terrorism:  

• On the same day Trump uttered that “Environmentalists are terrorists,” the Administration ordered the shuttering of 57 of the U.S. Forest Service’s research facilities and eliminating a significant but unknown number of forestry scientists, essentially dismantling of the agency and demanding it log more, protect less, and get out of the way. One reporter wrote: “One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests. An area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country. Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.” 

• Also in March, the Administration proposed to quadruple logging on federal lands in 18 Oregon counties, raising timber harvests to levels not seen since before spotted owl protections were put in place. Apparently, the executive orders signed a year ago directing federal agencies to increase timber production on national forests and public lands by 25% were not egregious enough! 

• Earlier this year, Trump’s USDA proposed rules that will enable the senseless torture and killing of MORE chickens, turkeys, and pigs by dialing up speeds in slaughterhouses.  

• A new proposal from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which caters to Big Oil, could result in heavy equipment crushing polar bears in their dens or scaring them out too early, leaving cubs to die of exposure or abandonment by their mothers.  

• Last month, the Department of the Interior proposed opening national preserves in Alaska to bear baiting by sport hunters. National preserves should be natural systems and shouldn’t allow atrocious bear hunting in the first place, much less serve as game farms.  

The administration has also proposed a rule to weaken Clean Water Act protections, a ban on climate-related words, and closure of the environmental justice arm of the EPA. The list of transgressions against the environment goes on and on—sad, but certainly not a shock, when the leader is immoral and destructive. 

Environmentalists come to the rescue 

Under this Administration, it’s difficult, but not impossible to take action. These are some of the most recent ways in which we’ve effectively pushed back against this administration and positively altered outcomes.  

• When the BLM planned to annihilate Wyoming’s wild horses on behalf of the ranchers who serve the meat industry, Friends of Animal’s Wildlife Law Program stepped in and prevented it from happening. In a stunning victory for wild horses, the court found that BLM acted “arbitrary and capricious” in its failure to attempt to manage wild horses in a manner that achieves a thriving ecological balance.  

• We continue to sink environmentally harmful projects like Ocean Era’s fish factory farm. In February, the Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) sided with Friends of Animals in our case challenging a permit for the proposed facility, which would be in one of the most sensitive and damaged areas of federal waters, where harmful algal blooms routinely kill fish, eels, dolphins and sea turtles and represent a threat to human health.  

• Most recently, a federal court struck down Trump’s attacks against the Endangered Species Act (ESA), restoring key values of the bedrock environmental law to the status it held for decades before the first Trump administration attempted to capsize it. Friends of Animals intervened to oppose recent proposals to once again gut the ESA and we remain committed to upholding this bedrock law. 
• Once again, the Administration announced its harebrained scheme to open the entire 1.56 million acres of the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing.  Rest assured we will be taking legal action if necessary to stop the exploitation of this precious ecosystem, which is home to 250 species of animals. Friends of Animals has been pushing back against the effort to drill in the region after the 2017 tax measure opened the Refuge to energy interests. And our efforts to preserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have been ongoing for nearly a quarter century and will continue. In the spring of 2001, FoA delivered a report to members of Congress detailing the ways in which oil drilling would cause irreversible damage to the refuge’s ecosystem and voicing our opposition to any legislation that would permit it. That summer, we took an aerial tour of the refuge, flying over its snow-capped mountains, arctic tundra, foothills, wetlands, boreal forest and fragile coastal plains. We wanted to see for ourselves the over 1.5 million acres of truly pristine wilderness located along the coast of the Arctic Ocean. 

THESE ARE ACTS OF RESPECT AND PROTECTION, NOT TERRORISM. 

Let’s call a spade a spade, though: the current administration has terrorized human and non-human animals like it’s their job. At Friends of Animals, we’re not here for it.