Trump tried to cancel Chesapeake Bay funding. Could he succeed this time?

The last time Donald Trump was president, his administration tried to slash federal funding for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup to zero.

The former president's appointments to top regulatory jobs also drew the ire of environmental advocates: His first head of the Environmental Protection Agency was a close ally of the oil and gas industry who openly denied climate change science. His successor was a former lobbyist for coal companies.

Exactly how Trump, who defeated Vice President Kamala Harris last week to reclaim the White House, plans to direct environmental policy this time around isn't clear. Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman Trump tapped this week as his new EPA director, has a thin record on environmental issues, but observers expect a Trump administration to begin cutting regulatory jobs and rolling back climate rules.

To some bay advocates, the clouds look pretty ominous. Many are girding for the worst, even as they express hope that things may be different this time.

Hilary Harp Falk, president and CEO of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said her organization has been preparing for either outcome in the presidential election and stressed that the group's mission isn't shaken by a change of power in Washington.

"We'll be working with the incoming administration when we can, and we'll fight when we need to," she said.

Still, Falk said the Trump administration's record on the Bay is clear: deregulate and defund. Cutting regulations hasn't just been a strategy for Trump, she added, "it has been a philosophy."

However Trump directs his environmental and energy agencies this time, he's expected to benefit from Republican control in both chambers of Congress, as well as a federal court system now stacked with many of his appointees.

He'll return to power at what Chesapeake Bay proponents have lately described as a "crossroads" in their restoration effort.

Work to clean up the Chesapeake Bay dates back close to four decades, encompassing billions of dollars in public funding, but even its strongest proponents admit that they haven't seen as much progress as they'd hoped. Although the bay recorded its highest environmental grade in more than 20 years this summer — a C+, per the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Studies — the restoration effort is about to miss a much-anticipated deadline to achieve a long list of environmental goals by 2025.

Meanwhile, scientists advising the restoration effort have begun to question a long-held strategy of attacking problems in the Chesapeake's deep waters, where oxygen deprivation has created so-called "dead zones" where wildlife such as fish and crabs can't survive. Instead, some favor focusing on shallower waters along the coastlines and in the vast watershed that feeds the bay's main channel.

Despite the first Trump administration's threats to the Chesapeake restoration effort, the worst didn't materialize.

The former president tried to wipe out funding for the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program — the federally organized initiative that unites states across the bay's watershed and helms research and cleanup — in his first budget, proposing to eliminate its entire $73 million budget. He suggested similar cuts the year after, and the year after that. In all, Trump proposed slashing the program's funds in all four years of his administration.

But each year, Congress blocked Trump's attempts to gut the program. In 2019, lawmakers even approved an increase in funding for the Annapolis-based initiative, a boost Trump ultimately signed into law.

A lot of that was thanks to bipartisan support for the cleanup effort on Capitol Hill, said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who helped lead the congressional push that preserved funding for the bay restoration program during the Trump years.

The Maryland senator said he's built partnerships across the aisle that will help to protect Chesapeake Bay funding, naming West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito as one ally in the effort, and expressed optimism that lawmakers again would be able to guard against backsliding at a key moment in the cleanup.

Of course, Van Hollen added, support for the bay was easier under President Joe Biden's administration, when Congress and the White House generally rowed in the same direction on this issue.

Advocates were able to build on progress in the last four years, Van Hollen said, rather than having to "spend all our time defending the progress we made."

As bay proponents prepare for the 2025 deadline to come and go, they have developed contingencies for the restoration effort in the years ahead. This fall, the Chesapeake Bay Program released its own recommendations for next steps, a blueprint called "A Critical Path Forward for the Chesapeake Bay Program Beyond 2025," set to be discussed at a potentially pivotal meeting next month in Annapolis, where EPA leadership will convene with representatives from Chesapeake watershed states, including Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

In a statement, Maryland Department of the Environment spokesman Jay Apperson said the state will continue to work closely with the EPA under the new administration and noted that many states in the region have been working together to advance common goals for the Bay.

"That will not change," he said.

It wasn't easy the last time Trump was in the power, said Kristin Reilly, director of the Annapolis-based Choose Clean Water Coalition, and advocates had to play a lot of defense, both when it came to funding and to regulations. But they managed to preserve the bay's federal funding stream, and even found occasional wins, Reilly said, such as passage of a bipartisan conservation bill — signed into law by Trump — that included a grant program specifically for improving wildlife habitats in the Chesapeake.

"We are kind of built for these moments," Reilly said.

Others are less confident.

Will Baker, the former head of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation who steered the group through the previous Trump presidency, said this second term could be disastrous for the environment.

Baker lamented what he feels has been a disappointing pivot by some bay advocates in recent years. He wasn't convinced that environmentalists needed to concede failure on the 2025 goals as quickly as they did, and doesn't want to see his peers abandon the longstanding strategy to rebuild the deepest waters of the bay.

When it comes to the new Trump administration, Baker is less concerned about the bay program's funding as he is about Trump's plans for environmental regulations — guardrails that environmentalists see as critical for defending and restoring fragile ecosystems like the Chesapeake. Once ground is lost in the cleanup effort, in could be very difficult to make it up, the retired environmentalist said.

People like Baker don't dedicate their lives to environmental activism if they don't think they can make a difference, and he said he tends to think of himself as an optimist.

"I fear the worst and hope for the best," he said. "But I do fear the worst."