WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the Environmental Protection Agency clashed with Democratic senators Wednesday, accusing one of being an “aspiring fiction writer” and saying another does not "care about wasting money.'' Democrats countered that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s tenure will likely mean more Americans contracting lung cancer and other illnesses.
The heated exchanges, at a Senate hearing to discuss President Donald Trump's proposal to slash the agency's budget in half, showed the sharp partisan differences over Zeldin's deregulatory approach. Zeldin, a former Republican congressman, has said his tenure will turbocharge the American economy while ensuring clean air and water. Democrats say he is endangering the lives of millions of Americans and abandoning the agency’s dual mission to protect the environment and human health.
Zeldin, who took office in January, has proposed a flood of changes that would sharply reduce the agency's workforce, terminate billions of dollars in grants approved by the Biden administration and roll back dozens of environmental rules including landmark regulations on climate change and pollution from coal-fired power plants.
Sharp words, back and forth
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told Zeldin that a plan to cut EPA spending by 55% means that, to Zeldin and Trump, “more than half of the environmental efforts of the EPA ... to make sure Americans have clean air and clean water are just a waste.” If approved by Congress, the budget cuts “will mean there’s more diesel and more other particulate matter in the air" and that “water that Americans drink is going to have more chemicals,” Schiff said.
“Your legacy will be more lung cancer," he told Zeldin. "It’ll be more bladder cancer. It’ll be more leukemia and pancreatic cancer ... more rare cancers of innumerable varieties.''
Replied Zeldin: “I understand that you are an aspiring fiction writer. I see why.”
Schiff said the real fiction was Zeldin's apparent belief that he can cut the EPA's budget in half “and it won't affect people's health, or their water or their air." Schiff said the Republican administrator was “totally beholden to the oil industry,” adding: "You could give a rat's ass about how much cancer your agency causes."
Zeldin engaged in a similar rhetorical match with Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Whitehouse said Zeldin and others at EPA have made “baseless accusations of fraud” about grants awarded under Democratic President Joe Biden, removed “career officials who stood up for the rule of law” and deployed FBI agents "to harass career civil servants.''
Questions over whether Zeldin reviewed canceled grants
Whitehouse also challenged Zeldin's contention that he had personally reviewed 781 Biden-era grants totaling nearly $2 billion that the Trump administration later canceled. The grants were intended to address chronic pollution in minority communities and jump-start clean energy programs across the country, but Zeldin said they were plagued by conflicts of interest and unqualified recipients.
“You don't care about wasting money, but the Trump administration does, Senator," Zeldin said.
When Whitehouse pressed to see Zeldin's schedule to prove he personally reviewed the grants before canceling them, Zeldin said he's worked on the issue “almost every single day” since taking office.
"We are cracking down on every waste, every aspect of abuse,'' Zeldin said, adding that Whitehouse seemed unable to grasp that more than one person could review EPA's grant program.
"I am insisting on the facts,'' Whitehouse said.
American taxpayers “put President Trump in office because of people like you,” Zeldin replied. “They have Republicans in charge of the House and Senate because of people like you. You don't want me to go through the list of all the evidence of waste and abuse."
Whitehouse replied that Zeldin should explain why Justice Department lawyers, speaking under oath on behalf of the agency, have “said that everything you just said is not true. That's what I want.”
A lawyer for the EPA told a federal appeals court this week that the agency was “not accusing anybody of fraud” in a separate dispute over its termination of $20 billion in grants under a so-called green bank program to finance clean energy and climate-friendly projects nationwide.
Matthew Daly, The Associated Press
