The man appointed by President Donald Trump to be second in command of the federal agency that protects the public from environmental hazards is a lawyer who has represented companies accused of harming people and the environment through pollution.
David Fotouhy, a partner at the global law firm Gibson Dunn, played a key role in repealing climate regulations and water protections while serving as a lawyer at the Environmental Protection Agency during the first Trump administration.
Most recently, Fotouhi challenged the EPA’s recent ban on asbestos, which causes a deadly cancer called mesothelioma. In a brief filed in October on behalf of a group of auto companies called the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, it argued that for the specific uses that were banned, “EPA has failed to demonstrate that chrysotile asbestos poses an unreasonable risk of injury.”
The EPA banned the carcinogen in March, long after its dangers became widely known. More than 50 other countries have banned the use of the mineral. The agency worked on the ban for decades, and workers died while lobbyists pushed for a delay, as ProPublica 2022 investigation showed.
Less than a day after Trump’s inauguration this week White House Web Page that marked the historic ban disappeared.
Fotouhi’s nomination to serve as EPA deputy administrator still has to be approved by the Senate.
The asbestos rule is just one of several environmental issues at the heart of the EPA’s regulatory mission, in which Fotouhi represents companies accused of pollution. The 39-year-old lawyer, who is expected to play a key role in running the agency, has represented International Paper in lawsuits accusing the firm of contamination with PFAS, or “Forever Chemicals”; a tire company that allegedly released a known chemical kill an endangered salmon (the firm contested the lawsuit and is fighting the lawsuit); and a coalition of Washington state businesses that sued EPA over its water quality standards for older pollutants known as PCBs.
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Environmentalists are calling on Fotouhi to recuse himself from rulings on asbestos and other issues he recently worked on at Gibson Dunn. “Here’s a guy who wrote a very biased and one-sided attack on the EPA’s asbestos regulations. I wouldn’t want him anywhere near the EPA’s decision-making on asbestos regulations,” said Robert Sussman, an attorney who represents the Asbestos Awareness Organization and served as deputy EPA administrator during the Clinton administration.
“I’ve given up on everything about former clients,” Sussman said.
Fotouhi declined to comment for this story.
Law on State Ethics urges lawyers to withdraw for a year from cases on which they provided services in the previous year.
The problem may be a mere formality in an administration that on its first day took steps to reverse environmental and health measures put in place by the previous administration. Hours after his inauguration on Monday, Trump ordered US withdrawal from the Paris climate accordsstopped approving a leases for new offshore wind projects in federal waters and rescinded several executive orders related to climate change.
It is not unusual for political appointees to the EPA to have ties to industry, especially in Republican administrations. Among of people returning to the agency from Trump’s first term are Nancy Beck, a former lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council, an influential industry trade group; Aaron Szabo, a lobbyist who represented the American Petroleum Institute and contributed to the Project 2025 section on EPA; and Lynn Dekleva, who also worked for the American Chemistry Council and DuPont.
In announcing his nomination, Fotouhi na Truth Social earlier this monthTrump wrote that “David will work with our incredible EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, to advance policies for growth, unlock America’s energy dominance, and prioritize clean air, clean water and clean soil for ALL Americans.” His expertise could be important to Zeldin, a former U.S. representative from Long Island whom Trump tapped to lead the agency and who has little experience dealing with environmental issues.
While at EPA in the first Trump administration, Fotouhy served as deputy general counsel and acting general counsel. He played a central role in revising US water regulations that removed federal protections for wetlands and streams. He is later described it as one of his most important works. His Gibson Dunn Online Biography says he was also “instrumental in developing a litigation strategy to defend” the agency’s decision not to impose financial requirements on companies that extract minerals and ore from rock. Environmentalists insisted on the introduction of requirements to protect taxpayers from liability for expensive environmental cleanup.
Fotouhi has also advocated for landfills and ponds that hold coal ash to be considered “clean” even if they don’t meet the agency’s usual standards — a position favorable to the coal industry, according to one waste expert who worked with him during the Trump administration. . “Dave was adamant about this,” said a former colleague, who asked not to be named to avoid public involvement in political discussions. A former colleague described Fotouhi as a brilliant lawyer who knows environmental statutes but is “not afraid to get creative” to find a way to use them to take industry-friendly positions.
A Harvard-educated attorney, Fotouhy led an office of hundreds of lawyers at Gibson Dunn and represented clients and provided legal advice on all major environmental law, according to his biography on the company’s website. He represented International Paper in two lawsuits over PFAS, persistent industrial chemicals that cause cancer and other diseases. The chemicals were at the heart of two lawsuits in which the company was accused of distributing biosolids containing PFAS in Maine. Biological solids, or sludge, have been found to contribute PFAS contamination of food and water throughout the state. (Gibson Dunn represents ProPublica pro bono in the case against the US Navy.)
Nathan Saunders, the plaintiff in one of the lawsuits, learned in 2021 that his well water in Fairfield, Maine, had extremely high levels of chemicals. After learning that PFASs were linked to kidney damage, the discovery made sense to the lifelong Maine resident, whose wife developed kidney failure more than a decade ago.
Fotouhi sought to have his client dismissed from the Saunders case, arguing that there was no information linking the company’s conduct to the water contamination. Saunders’ attorney, Elizabeth Bailey, said the legal strategy is common among companies facing PFAS contamination lawsuits and difficult for plaintiffs to overcome without access to inside company information. “They say, ‘Yes, there is contamination, but you can’t show whose contamination it was, and — oh, by the way, if you can’t pinpoint how our contamination got from our location to your client’s location on At the very beginning of the lawsuit process, we shouldn’t be involved in this case at all,” Bailey said.
Fotouhi also tried to roll back EPA water quality standards for toxic chemicals known as PCBs, which have been linked to cancer. In December 2023, he filed a lawsuit against the agency on behalf of Washington state business groups that argued the standards were unenforceable.
If EPA decides not to continue to fight this case, these standards could be withdrawn. A loss would be devastating to the waterway, according to Kathleen Scott, a water advocate at Spokane Riverkeeper, an advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the river and its watershed. “Without the EPA at the helm fighting to protect them, our river would be vulnerable to higher levels of pollution that would really put our fish and our people at risk of harm,” she said.
Philip Landrigan, a physician who has worked for decades to protect public health from environmental threats, said the potential consequences would be just as dire if the EPA decides to lift the asbestos ban.
“President Trump came into office saying he was going to make life better for working Americans,” Landrigan said. Overturning the decades-old asbestos ban, he said, “would expose working American women and men to a known human carcinogen and abandon that promise.”
Kirsten Berg contributed research.
