20 posts from Thursday, March 27, 2025

A member of President Trump's cabinet, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin joins me now. Administrator Zeldin, you seem to be leading the way for the deregulation agenda for the Trump administration. How do you think Americans will start feeling the impact of these sweeping moves you've made? The cost of living is going to go down. It's going to be easier to be able to afford a home, to heat your home, to be able to go out and purchase a vehicle of your choice. There are too many Americans who spoke up loud and clearly talking about the strangulation of the economy, the impacts on their lives, where they're choosing between whether or not to fill up their refrigerator with groceries or to be able to heat their home or to get prescription drugs. What we're talking about here is the largest deregulation effort in the history of the country, trillions of dollars of regulatory relief. It's a big bold agenda, but it's a mandate from the American public, one that President Trump earned campaigning on this agenda precisely. Well, the attack on that mandate isn't from President Trump's own cabinet. It is from the judiciary, it seems. Judge Tanya Chutkin has ordered the reinstatement of climate grants that you had suspended. She said there was no evidence of fraud in those grants. What were this $20 billion in climate grants going to? That's one of the problems is that I can't sit before you and answer for where all of this money was going. It was $20 billion through eight pass-through entities. In many cases, it goes to more pass-through entities, and EPA loses oversight along the way. It was designed like this on purpose. This isn't something that was a drafting error. They very deliberately came up with this scheme to lower EPA's oversight. It was going to former Biden and Obama administration officials. There was a lot of self-dealing conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients, NGOs receiving billions of dollars that didn't even exist before they were getting these awards. We heard a lot about the $2 billion going to the NGO that was connected to Stacey Abrams. That NGO only received $100 in 2023, and then they got $2 billion in 2024. It's outrageous. The DOJ and FBI have been investigating. The Office of the Inspector General at EPA have been investigating. The funds have been frozen. While there are these activist judges across the country trying to hamstring President Trump's agenda, we are not going to get bullied into participating into this abuse of the American taxpayer. We will not rest. This money belongs to the American people. It does not belong to Stacey Abrams. It doesn't belong to this judge. It doesn't belong to any of these Democrats in Congress. These are a lot of taxpayer funds that belong to the U.S. taxpayers. Hard-earned money. We're fighting for them. And we assume that by better stewardship of these funds, we'll have a cleaner environment. But the real question is, was any of that criminal, do you expect that the EPA's OIG will be making additional criminal referrals based on the investigations they're conducting? I'm confident that the Inspector General is going to be able to release information of whatever they find. However, I also know that right now the Justice Department and the FBI have been actively investigating this. I know for a fact that they have spoken to EPA employees. And I think it's good for them to help to get to the bottom of it. So while DOJ and FBI does their investigation, and the Office of Inspector General is doing their investigation, and we have uncovered facts on our own, and we continue to uncover more and more, and by the way, members of the media have been doing a good job uncovering additional facts that collectively I think everyone will continue to provide even more facts publicly into each other as these rocks get overturned. It is bad news for people involved in any EPA self-dealing to have a former member of the House Oversight Committee like yourself digging into all of their activities. That might be one of the reasons why President Trump was very, very brilliant to put you in that particular role. But the overall question also is, do you believe the Biden administration was using the EPA as a political slush fund more than a tool to clean up our environment? It was 100 percent. EPA was absolutely being used to push out this green slush fund to their friends. By design, the director of the greenhouse gas reduction fund leaves one of these NGOs, goes to work at the Biden administration to design this whole setup, and then sees his former employer get $5 billion. I mean, we've seen it on the smaller grants as well. One person who is a CEO of a nonprofit was serving on the White House Environmental Justice Council, applied for $20 million, got it, even though they only received just over $2 million over the course of the prior three years. So again, the more you dig into this, the more you realize that this was a green slush fund that was going to left-wing activist groups rather than going directly towards remediating environmental issues. So to the heart of your question, are we providing clean air, land and water? This isn't money that was spent directly towards remediating environmental issues. This was money going through their friends. And in some case, going through multiple middlemen, and each of these middlemen being able to pull their own fees out for their own benefit, and the dilution of that American tax dollar is very obvious to us. It seems to be quite obvious to most Americans who are paying attention, even though for some they want to turn a blind eye to all of it and make believe that there's no evidence of anything, despite the facts, despite the truth. The people who should be most offended by the answer you just gave are actual environmentalists. It sounds like the environment was just used as a veneer for political payback money. I know you care about the environment. I know President Trump does. Administrator Zeldin, what are the metrics that you'll be following to track whether our environment is getting cleaner or dirtier? Well, for one, we need to fulfill our core statutory obligations. President Trump talks about clean air, land and water for all Americans. There's important work with response to wildfires, hurricanes, other natural disasters, helping with hazardous material removal. President Trump, after Los Angeles, gave EPA 30 days to complete our hazardous material removal in the phase one of that cleanup. We did in less than 30 days. It wouldn't have happened if not for President Trump setting that bold goal on us. We have superfund sites that need to be cleaned up. We will continue that effort working with members of Congress, working with community leaders all across this entire country, fulfilling those core statutory obligations. But I would say this, if we're going to spend $50 million on remediating an environmental issue, I'm going to advocate for that money to go directly towards dealing with that environmental issue, not $50 million going to the Climate Justice Alliance, where they say climate justice runs through a free Palestine. I'm not spending $50 million on that, and that's why I canceled that grant as well. EPA has now canceled over $22 billion worth of grants. Our annual operating budget is only around $10 billion. I've been in this job now for less than two months. We've already canceled over twice that amount, over $22 billion. And by the way, shout out to Doge and Elon Musk. That partnership has been fantastic. We have a zero tolerance policy for any waste and abuse. And I say that proudly. It's something that we're totally committed to. You mentioned in a lot of your initial remarks when you got this job that you were going to invigorate a cooperative federalism with the states, where the power wouldn't be centralized in Washington, D.C., but diffused. Talk a little bit about your vision for cooperative federalism as a means for environmental protection. Yet the states are very much able to control their own destiny on so many issues related to air, land, and water. And instead of having a one-size-fits-all regulatory scheme out of Washington, cooperative federalism means that we should be working with those states, those governors, those departments of environmental quality, conservation, whatever it's called, from one state to the next, and ensure that they are empowered to be in control of their own destiny. So states submit state implementation plans under the Biden administration. Not only was there a massive backlog of approving state implementation plans, but they were rejecting state implementation plans all across the entire country to implement federal implementation plans. And I don't want to have a federal implementation plan that is rejecting a whole bunch of different states wanting to be in charge of their own environment. I want to empower them, work with them, embrace that partnership. President Trump has it as a key pillar of his agenda for the EPA. We're proud of it. And we're going to make sure that we're aggressively pursuing it. One of the first things I did once I came in was sign off on state primacy to West Virginia for their class 6 wells. We just had Texas submit a similar application. On all sorts of different issues, states are going to come to EPA. Our message to them is that we're open for business once again, and we want to work with them. It will be a remarkable thing to achieve, this dual track of combing through every dollar spent and at the same time having these cooperative relationships with states when all of that is fully realized. Bring us to four years from now, at the end of President Trump's second term, how much of the EPA by percentage do you think will still be left when compared to the bloated, wasteful, and misdirected EPA that you inherited from the Biden administration? You'll be very happy with this answer, Matt, because I know where your heart is and where your advocacy has been. In 2024, EPA obligated and spent over $60 billion in total with all the money that went through it. We'll be down over 65% just in the first year, just here in 2025. We're going to pursue efficiencies wherever we can. We spent some time talking grants. We'll look at contracts, real estate footprint, travel, and more, and we will find efficiencies. I don't want to have one more or one less employee than we need to power the great American comeback and fulfill our statutory obligations. I don't want $1 more than what we need to be able to do our job. The results, when we talk about the deregulatory work that we're involved in that we just announced in a very big way, this isn't something that I want to take four years to get done. This is something that we want to get done as much as possible in the first year of the Trump presidency in 2025 because the American public is demanding immediate action. We want to get it done right away. He's a man in a hurry. It just sounds, my friend, like you're enjoying this job even more than you enjoyed being a member of the United States Congress. We wish you well. Godspeed, and thanks for coming on the program to share your perspective and all the good work you're doing.

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