The Trump administration official leading efforts to loosen methane pollution rules was the anonymous author of the industry’s main arguments against those same rules just four years ago, when he was an oil and gas lobbyist.
Aaron Szabo, deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is listed in PDF metadata as the author of a January 2022 comment letter opposing proposed controls on methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The letter was submitted to the EPA by the American Exploration and Production Council, which represents some of the industry’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, including ConocoPhillips, Diversified Energy and Hilcorp. Szabo’s name does not appear in the document itself, but it can be found in the information embedded by the software used to create the PDF file.
Szabo was registered as a lobbyist for one of AXPC’s lesser-known members, Ovintiv, when he wrote the arguments against the restrictions, which were later finalized under the Biden administration. He also lobbied for other clients in the oil and chemical industries. While he made no secret of that work when he was confirmed last year to head the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, he described it in terms that avoided any mention of efforts to influence climate policy: “I learned how regulated entities comply with the federal government’s thousands of regulations and policies. I also saw firsthand that the people who work in these companies want to make sure the environment is properly protected.”
In his current role overseeing federal climate rules at the EPA, Szabo has solicited comments and even specific regulatory language from oil industry groups that stand to benefit from watered-down methane rules, according to internal emails, calendar entries and recordings of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, pointed to Szabo’s past lobbying as evidence that the EPA had effectively been captured by the oil and gas industry. “Now he can do Big Oil’s dirty work from inside the EPA,” Whitehouse told ProPublica in an email.
As part of its plan to “unleash American energy,” the Trump administration has led an unprecedented campaign against regulations on fossil fuels, the leading cause of global warming. One of his most significant actions was to repeal the “hazard finding” that classified greenhouse gases as pollutants – the basis of the EPA’s power to limit emissions. However, rather than scrap the methane rules altogether, Szabo’s office is working to revise them, emails and documents show. It has already postponed many of the compliance deadlines until next year.
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a climate superpollutant, responsible for a third of the increase in global temperatures since pre-industrial times, according to the United Nations Environment Program. When it escapes into the atmosphere without being burned for energy, it can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, research shows. The oil and gas sector is the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States, in part due to leaks from poorly maintained equipment. If it is not profitable to collect the gas for sale, companies sometimes intentionally release it in a process called venting.
To reduce methane releases, President Joe Biden’s EPA has imposed much stricter controls on oil and gas operations, including requiring increased monitoring of leaks and equipment upgrades. The new rules would have reduced the industry’s methane emissions by nearly 80 percent, according to agency estimates. And given that the gas breaks down relatively quickly, this would have been one of the quickest ways to reduce global warming.
Industrial groups have retreated. In the January 2022 letter that Szabo helped write, AXPC used the word “heavy” 10 times to describe the new requirements and pushed for more “flexibility” to allow for less expensive leak detection methods and less frequent monitoring, among other requests.
The group also questioned the expected benefits of the rules on climate and health, highlighting what it called “the importance of communicating significant uncertainties within estimates.” AXPC Executive Director Anne Bradbury added in a later statement that the rules risked “undercutting U.S. production in the short and long term, leading to increased energy costs and reduced energy security.”
AXPC failed to convince the Biden administration to change its approach. But he renewed his efforts after President Donald Trump returned to office and ordered federal agencies to “suspend, review, or remove” any “excessive burdens” on domestic energy production.
Szabo, after two years as a fellow at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, joined the administration on day one as an adviser to EPA chief Lee Zeldin. He immediately signaled that he was considering weakening the regulations he had opposed as a lobbyist. His team met with AXPC representatives as early as Feb. 6, 2025, less than three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, to discuss his petition to “reconsider” methane rules, according to emails and calendar entries obtained through public records requests and shared with ProPublica by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry. His team met with them at least two more times, and Szabo himself was on the mandatory attendee list for a meeting with Bradbury last July.
AXPC did not respond to emails from ProPublica seeking comment.
According to recordings of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica, other oil industry representatives described their meetings with Szabo and his team as being very favorable to their interests. “Mr. Szabo assured us that the EPA is focused on these [methane] rules and do everything that can be done to limit the damage they will cause,” the management of a large professional group wrote to its members in an internal newsletter last year.
Lee Fuller of the Independent Petroleum Association of America also spoke enthusiastically about meeting Szabo’s office during a conference call with industry representatives last year.
“It was one of the most fascinating meetings we’ve ever had, just because they were suddenly willing to talk to us,” he said. “And they’re also suddenly willing to talk about things that we’ve been trying to get them to do for years, and they’ve never even let that come up on the radar screen.”
The IPAA declined to answer specific questions from ProPublica, but linked to a September 2025 letter in which the group publicly asked the EPA for exceptions to the methane rules.
Szabo’s office even invited oil industry groups to propose specific language for the revised rules. “We received a call several weeks ago about pneumatics on temporary equipment,” Mike O’Connor of the American Petroleum Institute wrote to an EPA official, referring to the devices that are a major source of methane emissions. “EPA had informally requested comments on this topic and on any suggested regulatory text. We are providing the attached draft document as an informal contribution to EPA’s investigation.” The project provided for a certain number of exemptions.
The shift in priorities under Szabo can also be seen in communications from the EPA itself. In a June 2025 email reviewed by ProPublica, an agency official asked O’Connor to meet and discuss alternative leak detection methods. Echoing language used in the AXPC commentary that Szabo helped draft, the official spoke of “additional flexibility that we would like to seek.”
“I think their agenda was, from what I could see, to do what the industry wanted,” a former EPA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe confidential discussions, said of Szabo and other Trump appointees at the agency.
“Since when has it been a bad thing for public officials to ask the public what they think?” the EPA said in an emailed statement, referring to Szabo’s interactions with oil industry representatives. Szabo “has fulfilled all of his ethical obligations to the letter. He met with EPA’s career ethics staff when he started at EPA to ensure that he is aware of and complies with federal ethics requirements.”
Szabo’s affinities are hardly a secret. He is named in the EPA chapter of Project 2025, the deregulatory plan of the second Trump administration. As part of the EPA nomination process, he also submitted ethics statements listing the oil, gas and chemical companies he had lobbied for.
Yet during his confirmation hearing on March 5 last year, he repeatedly declined to provide more details about his role in Project 2025, saying only that he provided “general advice and thoughts” on the Clean Air Act.