SAVANNAH, GEORGIA—Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin says he will not be bullied into allowing the waste and abuse of the previous administration to continue, even as the legacy media continues to insist he has no evidence of it.
“We will not be bullied and intimidated into wasting taxpayer dollars,” Zeldin told The Daily Signal in an interview at the Job Creators Network’s Freedom Fighters Summit on Friday.
The EPA administrator repeated his frustration with the legacy media, which has claimed that he lacks evidence of waste from the previous administration.
At a press conference last month, he cited coverage from The New York Times stating that Zeldin had “made explosive accusations against the Biden administration, accusing it of ‘insane’ malfeasance in its handling of $20 billion in climate grants.” The Times report went on to claim that “many of Mr. Zeldin’s claims remain unsupported, and some are flat-out false.”
The EPA head says his office has uncovered more and more evidence of waste and abuse, yet the legacy media continues to dig in to discount it.
“As we’ve gotten further along with providing more specific evidence, they only start digging in even further into the narrative that there is no evidence,” he told The Daily Signal. “And it’s just, it’s irresponsible.”
Zeldin mentioned that senators tasked him with investigating waste and abuse after Project Veritas published a video in which a Biden administration political appointee at EPA said that bureaucrats were rushing to get billions of dollars out the door like they were “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”
“When I hear that—the gold bars are tax dollars off the Titanic—that means that they know that they’re wasting it,” he said. Zeldin also noted that the appointee mentioned that bureaucrats “are trying to get themselves jobs at the recipient NGOs [nongovernmental organizations].”
While Republicans in Congress asked Zeldin to research this, Democrats took the opposite approach, he said.
“The minority right now in Congress doesn’t want me to ask any questions,” he noted. “The minority in Congress just wants me to adopt the position that it is impossible that even a dollar could be wasted or abused, that they were going to put out tens of billions of dollars, and there’s just nothing to see here.”
Zeldin mentioned the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion fund administered through Citibank as part of then-President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
“It was going through eight pass-through entities, and many of those NGOs were brand new,” the EPA head said. He mentioned Power Forward Communities, an entity comprised of five nonprofits, including Rewiring America, which received $2 billion in 2024. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams joined Rewiring America as special counsel in March 2023.
“They only received a hundred dollars in 2023. They get $2 billion in 2024,” he noted.
Zeldin also pointed out “examples of self-dealing and conflicts of interest” where former Biden and Obama administration officials, along with Democrat donors, work with the nongovernmental organizations that received federal funding.
The Free Press has extensively reported many of these conflicts of interest, some of which involve former Biden officials like Cecilia Martinez, Biden’s senior director of environmental justice at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a figure in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”
Zeldin accused the Biden EPA of awarding unqualified recipients money and reducing oversight, noting that EPA only had agreements with the pass-through nongovernmental organizations, not with the groups that ultimately received the money from them. He said he sent a letter asking specific questions of the pass-through groups, and has yet to receive adequate responses.
When pressed on the issue, the New York Times reporter who wrote the story insisted that a judge handling a legal case regarding the alleged fraud had yet to conclusively rule that the Biden administration grants had violated the law.
“This idea that we’re just going to ignore all the evidence … is just the height of irresponsibility, and I refuse to waste tax dollars,” Zeldin said. “It doesn’t matter what any member of Congress or any member of the media tries to shout from the rooftops to try to intimidate us.”
“It’s really a shame that there are some in the media that want to carry the water for these entities in this system,” he added. He emphasized that the EPA under his leadership has canceled the grants and consigned them to “the dustbin of history.”
Zeldin also emphasized that he is cutting out climate alarmist groups that act as middlemen between taxpayers and the projects that concretely improve the quality of air and water.
He mentioned the term “environmental justice,” noting that left-leaning activists will claim that a pollution or environmental issue has disproportionately impacted a specific minority community.
Yet when the activists make a concrete ask for money, they request money from Congress to the tune of “tens of billions of dollars” and they don’t intend to spend it “on remediating that environmental issue.”
“Instead, what they do is they spend that dollar on a left-wing organization to tell us, ‘Hey Congress, hey, EPA, we should be spending the next dollar on directly remediating that environmental issue,’” Zeldin explained.
“We refuse to be funding left-wing organizations to tell us where we should be spending money,” he declared.
Zeldin contrasted his vision with the approach of climate activists who appear to think protecting the environment is a zero-sum game.
The EPA laid out a list of 100 actions on specific environmental issues that it took in the first 100 days of the new administration.
“There are some who are out there saying that we have to strangle the economy in order to protect the environment,” he said. “We reject that notion. It’s not a binary choice.”
“We believe that we can protect the environment and grow the economy,” Zeldin declared. “We’re committed towards choosing both, and we do so unapologetically.”
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