Can the E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?

Last summer, more than a hundred and fifty staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to the agency’s head, Lee Zeldin, outlining their concerns about his leadership. Topping the list was Zeldin’s naked partisanship. The administrator often used his official communications to trash Democrats. This “politicized messaging,” the letter said, was undermining trust in the agency. So, too, were Zeldin’s gutting of the E.P.A.’s research division and his tendency to ignore the findings of its scientists. The missive noted that it reflected the staffers’ personal, rather than professional, opinions, and had been written on their own time. It ended by urging Zeldin to “correct course.”“Should you choose to do so, we stand ready to support your efforts,” it said.The employees who signed the letter did not expect it to have much effect. “I thought, Here’s a letter the staff is going to present to the administrator,” one told me. “He’s going to take a look at it and put it in the wastepaper basket. And we will go on with our work.”That’s not how things played out. Zeldin, or at least his deputies, launched the electronic equivalent of a manhunt. In e-mails that were eventually obtained by