Consumer price growth cooled in March as the White House prepared far-reaching global tariffs, with a key inflation measure falling to its lowest level since March 2021. The consumer price index slowed to an annual rate of 2.4%, less than expected and below the 2.8% notched the month before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday. Inflation rose just 0.1% between February and March, in line with forecasts and below the 0.2% monthly reading seen in February. A 12-month measure of price growth that excludes volatile food and energy prices climbed 2.8%, the smallest annual increase for that so-called core reading since March 2021. The pace of price hikes for airfare, car insurance, used vehicles and recreation all eased in March. Despite the favorable reading, concerns remain widespread that President Donald Trump’s unprecedented and ever-changing tariff agenda — which he abruptly softened Wednesday — will bring rising prices in the coming months. “Today’s softer than expected CPI release feels backward looking given the large changes to trade policy seen in recent days,” Goldman Sachs analysts said Thursday morning. The bank warned that “tariff driven price increases [will] start to feed through to the inflation data” before long. Even before Trump’s sweeping tariff rollout on April 2, many investors were predicting some run-up in consumer costs. U.S. businesses “appear eager to pass on cost increases to consumers,” analysts with BNP Paribas wrote in a note to clients this week. They cited a February Federal Reserve survey that found 80% of respondents would raise prices following higher input costs, with 60% stating the increase would at least equal the amount of the cost hike. “These findings indicate both widespread impact and a strong likelihood that a majority of affected firms will pass cost increases through to consumers,” the analysts wrote. While the pause announced Wednesday means the economic fallout from Trump’s plan may not be as severe as feared, Wall Street firms continue to predict a dramatic slowdown in the economy as a result of the entire episode. In a note to clients following Trump’s tariff pause Wednesday afternoon, Goldman Sachs said it still predicted a 45% chance of a recession, with economic growth in 2025 slowing to 0.5% and 12-month inflation rising to as much as 3.5%. Trump has put his own spin on the situation, writing on his Truth Social platform this week that there was “no inflation” as oil prices and food prices were falling.

U.S. oil prices bounced back to around $62 a barrel on Wednesday afternoon, more than erasing earlier losses after President Trump said he would pause his reciprocal tariffs for most countries for 90 days. The commodity price, an indicator of economic confidence, has swung wildly over the past week, trading as high as $72 a barrel and as low as $55. Oil prices sank into the mid $50s early Wednesday after China said it would match Mr. Trump’s tariffs blow for blow. Wednesday afternoon’s recovery put prices back around the level that many U.S. oil companies require to make money drilling new wells. But prices are still far lower than they were before Mr. Trump ratcheted up tariffs on nearly all countries with which the United States trades goods. For now, many companies are waiting to see where prices settle before adjusting drilling or spending plans. As this week has demonstrated, commodity prices can be very volatile. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT If prices fall further, to around $50 a barrel, U.S. oil production could decline by about 8 percent in a year, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to Mr. Trump, has frequently cited the benefits of $50 a barrel oil, saying it would curb inflation. Earnings are likely to fall as well, the Moody’s ratings agency said Wednesday, forecasting that profits will shrink by 10 percent or more across the global energy industry over the next 12 to 18 months. Moody’s previously expected profits would be flat compared with 2024. The recent price slide has spooked U.S. oil executives, many of whom backed Mr. Trump’s campaign in hopes that he would open new areas for drilling and make it easier to secure permits for pipelines and other infrastructure. “That’s a pretty expensive trade-off,” Dan Pickering, chief investment officer for Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston financial services firm, said on Friday, when oil was trading around $62 a barrel. A broad group of U.S. oil and gas stocks was down about 15 percent in the past week. It has been about four years since oil prices were as low as they have been in the past few days. The decline has yet to make a dent in the cost of gasoline, which averaged $3.24 a gallon on Wednesday, the same as last week, according to the AAA motor club.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield climbed back above the 4% level on Monday, even as President Donald Trump’s tariffs sparked fears of an economic slowdown. The yield on the 10-year Treasury gained around 18 basis points at 4.166%. The 2-year Treasury yield advanced 8 points at 3.753%. One basis point equals 0.01%. Yields and prices move in opposite directions. The 10-year Treasury yield’s move higher comes even as traders raised their expectations for lower Federal Reserve rates on expectations for a weaker economy. Fed funds futures pricing is now indicating around a 50% chance that the central bank will lower rates by a quarter-percentage point at its May meeting and now sees the central bank cutting rates at least five times in 2025. “Given the situation, I’m not sure international investors look at the U.S. as the safe haven as they have before, which is going to cause Treasury prices to fall and yields to go up,” said Clark Bellin, chief investment officer at Bellwether Wealth. Trump, along with his cabinet officials, have repeatedly highlighted their desires to bring down Treasury yields, which they said would reduce the cost of borrowing. Even on Monday, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that “interest rates are down” when yields were sharply lower early morning and called for the Fed to cut rates. Investors are reeling from the effects of the Trump tariffs unveiled last week, which hit more than 180 countries and set a baseline tariff of 10% across the board. Major trading partners of the U.S. took some of the steepest tariffs, with China facing a total tariff rate of 54%. The tariffs have stoked fears of a global trade war, as countries respond with their own tariffs on the U.S. China retaliated Friday by slapping 34% tariffs on U.S. goods, and the European Union has vowed to impose countermeasures if negotiations fail. Trump continued to downplay the effects of tariffs, saying on Sunday evening, “I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

To hear Trump administration officials and many energy executives tell it, the United States is on the precipice of a new golden age for natural gas that will be driven in large part by the voracious power needs of data centers. But turning natural gas into electricity requires giant metal turbines that are increasingly difficult to secure. Companies that haven’t already reserved this equipment, which can weigh as much as a large airplane and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, are facing waits of three or four years, about twice as long as just a year earlier. The cost of building gas power plants has also soared — so much so that in some parts of the country, solar panels and batteries are likely to be cheaper, energy executives and consultants said. By some estimates, it now costs two or three times as much to build a gas-fired power plant as it did a few years ago. The challenge of securing enough gas turbines is one of the clearest examples of how booming investment in artificial intelligence is reshaping the electric power industry, overwhelming suppliers and upending longstanding notions of what makes sense financially. It’s also a reminder of the gap that often exists between the plans and goals of politicians and executives and the reality on the ground. U.S. gas demand is clearly rising, all the more so because of the data centers needed to train and use chatbots and other forms of A.I. But there are limits to how much more gas the country can use — limits that elected officials and energy tycoons cannot easily wish away. GE Vernova, the biggest manufacturer of large gas turbines in the world, is among those betting that the recent flurry of interest in gas power will last. The company, formed last year in the breakup of General Electric, is spending more than $160 million to overhaul its gas turbine plant on the edge of Greenville, S.C. By the end of next year, the 1.5-million-square-foot factory is expected to churn out about 35 percent more gas turbines. The building is a whirring, beeping expanse of partly automated assembly lines interspersed with metal turbine components. “More electrons are going to be created from gas,” Scott Strazik, chief executive of GE Vernova, said in a recent interview. “Appetite is very real.” About this time last year, interest in natural gas to power data centers picked up, catching much of the energy industry off guard. Tech giants like Microsoft and Google pledged years ago to lower their emissions. But as it has become clearer how much and how quickly their energy needs will grow, companies have turned to gas. When burned, natural gas produces carbon dioxide, the leading cause of climate change. But gas plants can be built faster than nuclear power plants and operate all day, unlike wind and solar energy. As sales of turbines climbed, so did wait times and prices. It takes about four months for GE Vernova to assemble the turbines used in power plants. But that clock starts only after the company has received all the components, like the dense metal fins that catch hot air inside the turbine, causing a rotor to spin. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT These days, the backlog is so severe as to be reminiscent of the snarled supply chains of the pandemic, which constrained production of cars, medical devices and much more. Between those delays and the time it takes to build a power plant, a company starting from scratch today would probably not have a new gas plant running before 2030. Other critical electrical equipment like transformers is also harder to get. By comparison, a large solar project that includes batteries to store energy for use in the evening could reasonably be completed in three years, said Jesse Noffsinger, a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said the Trump administration was encouraging power equipment suppliers to increase U.S. manufacturing capacity. In an interview, he also floated the possibility of invoking the Defense Production Act, which authorizes the president to extend loans and take other steps to encourage companies to produce critical equipment. President Trump used the law, enacted in 1950, to boost production of things like ventilators during the pandemic. Mr. Wright, who previously led an oil and gas company, said he expected natural gas to soon meet about half the country’s electricity needs, up from 43 percent last year. As for wind and solar, “they’re going to continue to play some role,” Mr. Wright said. “But are they going to be backbones of an electricity grid? Never.” Mr. Wright is much more optimistic than other energy experts were about gas. Consulting firms like McKinsey and Rystad Energy expect gas power’s share of the U.S. electricity market to remain relatively steady as renewables grow more quickly. It is hard to compare the cost of gas power with that of solar panels or wind turbines and batteries. That is because it is not always sunny or windy, meaning other power sources are sometimes needed to complement renewables. Gas costs also add up over time and can spike during crises, as they did after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. By contrast, solar and wind farms cost relatively little to operate once they are built. Generally speaking, building a gas power plant can now be about as expensive as installing solar panels paired with batteries, according to Rystad, when including tax credits that apply to renewable energy and storage. One big factor is that gas turbines now cost about 50 percent more than they did just 10 months ago, according to the investment bank Jefferies. “We’re in this weird no man’s land where it’s very profitable to run a plant and it’s clear we’re going to need more electricity,” Mr. Noffsinger of McKinsey said of gas plants. But in some markets, he added, it is unclear whether building new ones will make financial sense. Lawmakers in Texas, which gets about 30 percent of its electricity from renewable energy, have sought to ensure gas plants get built anyway. The state’s Senate recently passed a bill aimed at ensuring that half of any new generation capacity comes from sources other than wind, solar and batteries. The House has not yet taken up the bill. “My biggest concern is: How big? How long?” Bill Newsom, chief executive of another gas turbine manufacturer, Mitsubishi Power Americas, said of the current flurry of interest in gas. “I lose sleep over it every night.” This year, 93 percent of the electricity capacity added to U.S. grids will be renewable energy and battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration. Gas will account for just 7 percent. S&P Global Commodity Insights recently estimated that by 2040, the United States would need to add at least nine times as much renewable energy and batteries as gas generation capacity to meet new electricity demand. That is partly because many customers prefer renewable energy, and various bottlenecks are slowing the construction of gas-fired power plants. But forecasts vary widely, even over just the next few years. Complicating matters is that utilities have often overstated power needs. From 2012 to 2023, utility planners overestimated electricity demand by 23 percent, on average, in their 10-year forecasts, according to RMI, a nonprofit research organization that aims to reduce emissions. Joseph Dominguez, who runs the country’s largest nuclear power plant operator, is among those who question how big the gas power boom will ultimately be. His company, Constellation Energy, struck a $16.4 billion deal in January to buy Calpine, which owns many gas power plants. “But that’s a very different thing than saying that I would invest to replicate that fleet today,” Mr. Dominguez said. He pulled up a chart on his tablet showing how much scientists expect global temperatures to rise in the coming decades. Last year was the hottest on record. “This world portends to be quite ugly for its inhabitants and will drive political outcomes that are radically different than those which we’re discussing today,” Mr. Dominguez said.

Oil is trading at its lowest level in nearly four years. Costs are rising. And Wall Street is growing more worried by the day that President Trump’s trade policies will tip the United States into a recession. The reaction in the oil patch? Silence, mostly. Oil and gas executives, eager to stay in Mr. Trump’s good graces, have offered little public criticism of the president or the tariffs he has rolled out over the past few months. In private, however, they have decried the uncertainty he has sown, including in a recent anonymized survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. If U.S. oil prices fall much lower than $60 a barrel, around where they were trading on Monday, companies could be forced to slow drilling, slash spending and most likely lay off workers, hurting states like Texas. Oil executives donated millions of dollars to help elect Mr. Trump, who has championed the industry. But if the past few days are any indicator, having a friendly ear in the White House goes only so far. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Everybody’s afraid,” said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer for Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston financial services firm. Executives in other industries like finance and technology who have been closely aligned with Mr. Trump have gone further in urging the president to soften his trade policy. Mr. Trump has said he wanted to reset trading relationships that he has long described as unfair to the United States. Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, said in a statement that the administration’s policies “benefit American consumers while also reducing regulatory burdens on energy producers, making it less costly to operate in the United States.” Soon after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the oil industry did urge him to reconsider tariffs on Canadian and Mexican oil. Mr. Trump largely reversed course and also exempted energy from the tariffs he announced last week. Even so, oil prices have plunged, as have energy company stocks. By the end of the trading day on Monday, shares in Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the largest U.S. oil companies, had fallen around 13 and 16 percent since Wednesday, when Mr. Trump announced his latest tariffs. Neither company made its chief executive available for an interview. Smaller firms were faring even worse. Shares of Liberty Energy, the Denver fracking company that the energy secretary, Chris Wright, previously led, were down about 35 percent. Compounding the effects of Mr. Trump’s trade policy, the cartel known as OPEC Plus decided last week that it would pump even more oil, beginning in May. That set off concern that supply would outstrip demand, which could weaken if the global economy slows. “You’re at a point now where probably in every C-suite in our sector, it’s got their attention,” Tom Jorden, chief executive of Coterra Energy, one of the biggest U.S. oil and gas producers, said on Friday, when oil fetched around $62 a barrel. Asked his opinion on the tariffs that sent global markets spiraling, Mr. Jorden demurred. “I don’t have one,” he said. “I understand that the president is choosing to do difficult things first.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Others urged patience. “We elected him knowing this was coming, right?” said Michael Oestmann, president of a smaller oil and gas company, Tall City Exploration IV, in West Texas. Mr. Oestmann said he hoped the market would quickly bounce back. “You have to let it play out and see how it goes for a few weeks here at least,” he said. Privately, executives have expressed more trepidation. Anonymous responses to a March survey of oil and gas companies by the Dallas Fed were littered with complaints about uncertainty and rising costs for materials like steel, which is subject to a 25 percent tariff. “I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career,” one respondent wrote. Another called for stability: “The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry. Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn’t have a clear goal.” When oil executives have pushed back, it has often been in response to the idea floated by Peter Navarro, a White House aide, that the administration would like oil prices as low as $50 a barrel. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “When you get down to that $50 oil that you talked about, then you’re below the point that you’re going to drill, baby, drill,” Harold Hamm, one of Mr. Trump’s biggest oil industry backers, told Bloomberg last month. It will be some time before the recent oil-price slide shows up as lower prices at the pump. A gallon of regular gasoline averaged about $3.26 on Monday, up slightly from last week, according to the AAA motor club. Natural-gas prices have proved more resilient to the market upheaval, insulating some companies. Still, some expressed concern that more countries would follow China’s lead in retaliating with steep tariffs on U.S. exports, including liquefied natural gas. If China’s latest round of tariffs takes effect as planned this week, U.S. gas will face taxes of nearly 50 percent. “If natural gas gets caught in the center of this tariff war, trade war, it will have a direct negative impact,” said Matt Kurzejewski, the chief executive of Costy’s Energy Services, a Pennsylvania-based gas services company. For now, though, Mr. Kurzejewski described himself as “cautiously optimistic” about Mr. Trump’s policies.

The Keystone pipeline system, which carries crude oil from Canada to the United States, was shut down on Tuesday because of a leak that spilled an estimated 3,500 barrels of oil in southeastern North Dakota, government and company officials said. The pipeline ruptured north of Fort Ransom, N.D., said Bill Suess, manager of the spill investigation program at the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality, a state agency. The cause of the spill in that city, about 78 miles southwest of Fargo, was not known, he said, and the authorities had also not said when the pipeline could be back in operation. Mr. Suess said a pipeline employee who was working on a pump station heard a “mechanical bang,” then reported the spill at 7:44 a.m. The pipeline was shut down in about two minutes, he said. “As of right now, the spill is confined to an agricultural field south of the pump station,” Mr. Suess said. He said a nearby stream had been isolated as a precaution, but it had not been affected. The pipeline system stretches 2,687 miles. In 2024, it carried about 626,000 barrels of crude oil per day, according to South Bow, the infrastructure company that operates the pipeline. It was previously operated by TC Energy, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline project, which planned on expanding the pipeline system but was opposed by environmentalists and Indigenous groups. The Keystone XL project was terminated by the company in 2021. South Bow was spun off from TC Energy in October 2024. Solomiya Lyaskovska, a spokeswoman for South Bow, said it had sent people and equipment to the rupture site. Ms. Lyaskovska said in an email that the shutdown came “after control center leak detection systems detected a pressure drop in the system.” “The affected segment has been isolated, and operations and containment resources have been mobilized to site,” she said. “Our primary focus right now is the safety of on-site personnel and mitigating risk to the environment.” The company said in an update on Tuesday night that an estimated 3,500 barrels of oil had spilled and that the release had been contained. In December 2022, more than 500,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from the pipeline in Washington County, Kan. The pipeline’s operator at the time, TC Energy, said in February 2023 that the spill was caused by “bending stress” on the pipe and a “weld flaw.” In October 2019, the pipeline leaked about 383,000 gallons of crude oil in Edinburg, N.D., about 155 miles north of Fort Ransom. State environmental regulators said that the spill covered an estimated half-acre of wetland.

Microsoft terminated the employment of two software engineers who protested at company events on Friday over the Israeli military’s use of the company’s artificial intelligence products, according to documents viewed by CNBC. Ibtihal Aboussad, a software engineer in the company’s AI division who is based in Canada, was fired on Monday over “just cause, wilful misconduct, disobedience or wilful neglect of duty,” according to one of the documents. Another Microsoft software engineer, Vaniya Agrawal, had said she would resign from the company on Friday, April 11. But Microsoft terminated her role on Monday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. The company wrote that it “has decided to make your resignation immediately effective today.” Both employees chose Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event to publicly voice their criticism. What Microsoft had hoped would be a celebratory period has turned into a brutal few days for the company, which is being hit, along with the rest of the market, by President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs. It’s a topic that CEO Satya Nadella and his two predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, were forced to uncomfortably confront on Friday in an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. “As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, about the tariffs. Meanwhile, the celebration itself captured headlines more for the protesters’ shared message than for Microsoft’s half-century of accomplishments. Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment.

At the core of President Donald Trump’s decision to impose sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners is a fixation on closing, if not reversing, America’s trade deficit with nearly all of them. But most economists say Trump appears to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what having a trade deficit with another country actually means — a fact that is at the heart of the stunning market meltdown over the past several days. A trade deficit simply means a country is importing more goods and services from a given country than it is exporting to them. Maintaining a deficit usually says little about the state of a country’s economy. The U.S. trade deficit instead simply reflects the fact that the U.S. is a consumption-based economy. Even with the deficit, the U.S. has maintained strong domestic growth. Whether it is sourcing goods that the U.S. no longer produces, or which can be produced more cheaply elsewhere, large American import levels reflect strong demand for goods — and the U.S. economy as a whole generally benefits from this arrangement, said Vance Ginn, an economist and adviser in Trump’s first term. “Trade helps us to be better off,” Ginn told NBC News. As the Congressional Research Service reported in 2018, Trump’s fixation on reversing the deficit “contrasts with the views of most economists.”

U.S. oil prices fell sharply, briefly dipping below $60 a barrel on Sunday — their lowest level in almost four years — as the economic fallout from President Trump’s latest round of tariffs reverberated around the world. The price of crude oil is down more than 15 percent since last Wednesday, just before Mr. Trump revealed his plans to impose stiff new tariffs on imports from most countries. That prices have fallen so far so quickly reflects deepening concern that high tariffs could slow economic growth and perhaps even cause recessions in the United States and the countries it trades with. The cost of U.S. benchmark crude continued to fall on Monday, down more than 2 percent. Cheaper oil is generally good for consumers and businesses that use gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. In fact, Mr. Trump and his aides have pushed for lower energy prices to curb inflation. But if prices remain around these levels or fall further, U.S. oil and gas companies are likely to slow drilling, cut spending and lay off workers. That would be especially painful to oil-rich states like Texas and New Mexico. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Another big reason that oil prices have weakened is that the OPEC cartel and its allies announced last week that they would accelerate plans to increase production. That will increase supply of oil at a time when many analysts expect demand to weaken. U.S. energy companies are also getting squeezed by higher costs for essential materials like steel tubing, which is subject to a 25 percent tariff Mr. Trump announced in February. Smaller oil companies — a key constituency for Mr. Trump — are likely to be among the first to slow down, as they tend to be more nimble and have fewer financial resources. Natural gas prices have been more resilient, providing some cushion for producers. Last week, the share price of an exchange-traded fund composed of U.S. oil and gas stocks fell by 20 percent in the two days after Mr. Trump’s tariff announcement.

Two chemical industry groups are asking President Trump for a complete exemption to free their factories from new limits on hazardous air pollution. Under a new rule finalized by the Biden administration last year, chemical plants would soon be required to monitor and reduce emissions of toxic pollutants, like ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing ingredient used in antifreeze and plastics. Now the two groups, the American Chemistry Council and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, which represent the nation’s major chemical companies, are seeking a temporary presidential waiver for all polluters to the rule. The new requirements burden their member corporations with “significantly costly requirements on an unworkable timeline,” the groups wrote in a letter dated March 31 that was obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental advocacy group. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In the letter addressed to Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the groups said that the cost to companies of meeting even parts of the new rule would exceed $50 billion, significantly more than the agency’s estimate of $1.8 billion. The request came after the E.P.A. told companies last month that they could apply for waivers to major clean-air rules by emailing the agency. The E.P.A. pointed to a section of the Clean Air Act that enables the president to temporarily exempt industrial facilities from new rules if the technology required to meet those rules isn’t available, and if it’s in the interest of national security. Under Mr. Trump, the E.P.A. has moved to roll back many of the same rules. That could mean that companies granted a temporary exemption now would ultimately never have to comply with the new rules. Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that she would “not get ahead of the president, but we can confirm President Trump’s commitment to unleashing American energy, protecting our national security interests and ensuring environmental stewardship.” The Biden-era rule had been part of that administration’s effort to address the disproportionate effect of environmental hazards facing communities near chemical plants. These are often low-income, predominantly Black or Latino neighborhoods with elevated rates of asthma, cancer and other health problems. It updates several regulations governing emissions from chemical plants, some of which have not been tightened in nearly 20 years, and applies to more than 200 chemical facilities across Texas and Louisiana, as well as the Ohio River Valley and West Virginia — all home to major chemical hubs. The rule had for the first time considered the cumulative effects of multiple chemical plants on communities in such hubs, rather than simply the effect of a single source of pollution. Companies would be required to rigorously tighten controls and processes to limit chemical emissions. They would also be required to monitor smokestacks and vents at the manufacturing facilities, while also checking whether chemicals are present at the property line of a plant. That kind of fence-line monitoring is similar to those required of petroleum refineries. But the chemical industry had raised various concerns about the new restrictions, particularly on ethylene oxide, saying it was used in a variety of products like batteries for electric vehicles. It also is essential to sterilizing medical equipment, according to the Food and Drug Administration. In a statement on Saturday, Chet Thompson, chief executive of American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, called the Biden-era rule “unlawful, unreasonable and technologically unachievable,” adding that it put “critical U.S. manufacturing operations at risk.” Vickie Patton, general counsel of Environmental Defense Fund, said the Trump administration had “opened a back door for companies to avoid complying with reasonable limits on the most toxic forms of air pollution.” American families, she said, “must worry about their loved ones breathing dirtier air, their kids missing school days and suffering a lifetime of illness due to toxic pollution, and more cancer in their families.” The latest move is part of an effort by the Trump administration to steer the E.P.A. away from its original role of environmental protection and regulation. Mr. Zeldin has described the agency’s new mission as lowering the cost of purchasing cars, heating homes and running businesses, as well as encouraging American energy dominance. Last month, the administration dropped a federal lawsuit against a chemical manufacturer accused of releasing high levels of chloroprene, a likely carcinogen, from a plant in Louisiana. The E.P.A. has said it plans to slash jobs, eliminate its scientific research arm and ensure that enforcement actions don’t interfere with energy production. It also aims to reduce the agency’s overall budget by 65 percent. The Trump administration has also placed former lobbyists and lawyers for the oil, gas and chemical industries in senior positions at the agency.