During Donald Trump’s first term as president, we witnessed his administration’s efforts to curtail domestic environmental regulations and the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. But few people realize how much worse and deeper the damage to environmentalist causes is likely to occur if he wins a second term.

The Trump administration was very friendly to oil and gas business interests and unleashed a regulated rollback of longstanding restrictions on fossil fuel extraction and consumption. In addition scrubs all references to climate change from the White House and Environmental Protection Agency websites, it lifted an Obama-era ban on new oil and gas drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in other places. Trump also revoked safety regulations enacted after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. (Both of these efforts were later stopped or slowed in the courts.)

The first Trump administration also halted regulations limiting air and water pollution. His EPA lifted the ban on different pesticides, even when the agency’s own research showed their harmfulness. Narrowing of air quality regulations between 2016 and 2018 resulted in an increase of 5.5% in fine particulate air pollution, reversing the 25% decline that had taken place under Obama.

As bad as all this was for the environment, in a second Trump term the changes won’t just be related to politics. Trump loyalists will target wholesale institutional destruction of environmental regulatory capacity, not just cutting off Biden-era funding for green infrastructure.

In other words, the goal will not be to simply change a policy here or there, but to fundamentally weaken the ability of environmental regulators to perform their designated duties to such an extent that if a later administration wanted to impose stricter standards, officials would find it impossible to do it. The recent Supreme Court decision that overturned Chevron USA vs. Natural Resources Defense Council, which invalidated the legal deference to regulatory decisions of authorities, will only make this easier.

A series of tabletop scenario simulations run in May and June by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy research center based at New York University, made clear that a second Trump administration is likely to aim for root-and-branch destruction of agency power in a variety of respects. The first step will be to revive “Schedule F,” an October 2020 executive order that removed protections for officials perceived to be disloyal to the president, and use it to reclassify tens of thousands of such workers as political appointees. Then the administration will fire them and replace them with anti-regulator or industry cronies. The agencies’ legal offices and inspectors general, whose role is to prevent the execution of illegal orders and root out corruption, are likely to be among the first targets. The result will be the systematic removal of expertise, institutional memory and guardrails against abuse within these agencies.

In addition to going after employees of environmental agencies, the Trump administration will also try discontinue the research which provides evidence in support of environmental regulation, such as monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which, in addition to providing weather forecasts, is one of the main climate change research units within the federal government. If Trump can’t convince Congress to defund certain agencies, he can order them moved to far corners of the country to force their employees to quit. Destroying the agencies will ensure that if Trump is ever replaced by a more environmentally friendly president, the new administration will be unable to reimpose sensible environmental regulation because the administrative capacity to do so will no longer exist.

The courts, now crammed with Trump appointees, are unlikely to protect against such efforts as they did during his first term, when judges were still mainly appointed by Obama and Clinton. Litigation is expected to be very limited in its ability to do more than slow down a second Trump administration, which is likely to be far more focused and strategic than the first. (As one person in the Brennan Center simulations put it: “This time they’ll know where the doorknobs are.”)

Finally, a second Trump administration will most likely withdraw from international efforts critical to biodiversity conservation, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, ocean plastic reduction, and space debris prevention. Even Trump’s ambition to erect trade barriers to protect American industrialists from foreign competition is likely to be destructive, as it will slow the global deployment of new technologies that can address environmental problems, such as solar panels and electric vehicles, if they happen to be produced in China or elsewhere abroad.

To Trump’s “America First” supporters, that might sound like a feature rather than a bug. But four years of institutional vandalism would end American leadership on the world stage. The credibility built up since World War I would disappear when the world’s biggest economy ignores the world’s biggest problems.

Nils Gilman is vice president of the Berggruen Institute.