More than 160 environmental and public health organizations on Tuesday called for Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, to resign or be fired.

“No [EPA] administrator in history – Democratic or Republican – has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission,” the groups wrote in an open letter. “EPA’s foremost purpose is to protect human health and the environment. With Administrator Lee Zeldin at the helm, EPA has abandoned its mission, creating damage that will take decades to address.”

Under Zeldin, the EPA has rolled back or weakened dozens of environmental protections aimed at slowing the climate crisis, protecting clean air and water, and safeguarding Americans’ health.

“He slashed vital funding, gutted agency staff, and has rigged the system to put corporate polluters first, at the expense of our health,” the letter continues.

The Guardian has contacted the EPA for comment.

Organized by the Climate Action Campaign and Moms Clean Air Force green advocacy groups, the letter was signed by 163 local and national organizations including the consumer advocacy non-profit Public Citizen, the Sierra Club and Earthjustice green groups, the GreenRoots and GreenLatinos environmental justice organizations, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, a health advocacy group.

“The public deserves an EPA administrator who will face the challenge of the climate crisis and fossil fuel and toxic pollution head-on with proven policy solutions, not actively serve as an agent of destruction beholden to the whims of oil, gas, and chemical industry executives and an authoritarian, anti-science US president,” said Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy organization that signed the letter.

The missive follows a January petition signed by leaders of the Robert F Kennedy Jr-led Make America Healthy Again movement, which called for Zeldin be fired over his environmental rollbacks. (In the weeks since, Zeldin reportedly attended a Maha-focused holiday party, invited movement supporters for a meeting at the EPA’s headquarters and said the agency would adopt a “Maha agenda”.) Democratic and progressive lawmakers have excoriated his leadership.

Zeldin has also faced sharp criticism from current and former EPA staff, who in June signed the EPA “Declaration of Dissent” that harshly critiqued his treatment of the agency’s scientific programming and workers. Some staff were suspended or fired for signing the latter, though agency officials found their behavior did not violate ethics rules, E&E News reported this month.

Brigit Hirsch, an EPA spokesperson, told the publication that the agency “has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country”.

The Trump administration has defended its unprecedented rollbacks of regulations, arguing it can protect the environment while boosting industry.

Next month, Zeldin will be the opening speaker for a climate-focused conference in Washington DC convened by the Heartland Institute. The rightwing organization has drawn on funding from companies such as ExxonMobil and wealthy US Republican donors, and it rejects the scientific consensus that the climate crisis is urgent and human-caused.