Excerpt: ‘You’ve wasted your entire five minutes’: EPA chief, Democrats spar at hearing – Lee Zeldin’s exchanges with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and others were some of the most hostile of his four budget hearings in recent weeks.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Wednesday turned acrimonious as the former Republican congressmember and several Democratic senators sparred over the Trump administration’s effort to reshape the agency and his allegations of wrongdoing during the Biden administration.
The exchanges underscored the growing animosity between Zeldin and Democrats as the Trump administration seeks to dramatically slash EPA’s budget and reorganize the agency to rollback dozens of regulations to aid the growth of fossil fuels.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the panel’s ranking member, came out of the gate with questions about EPA’s termination of almost 800 grants. Whitehouse pointed to a senior EPA official’s statement in a lawsuit that he had individually reviewed each terminated grant on a single day. Zeldin, however, said that the review had been conducted by multiple people over a longer period, and their conversation quickly devolved into the two men shouting over each other.
“We’re not going to waste dollars just because you insist on EPA lighting taxpayer dollars on fire,” Zeldin retorted to Whitehouse. “The American taxpayers, they put President Trump in office because of people like you. They have Republicans in charge of the House and Senate because of people like you, because you don’t care about 99 percent of this story.”
Whitehouse replied that he wanted Zeldin to “explain why the Department of Justice lawyers representing EPA in court under a duty of candor, have said that everything you’ve just said isn’t true.”
Whitehouse’s time then expired, and Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) remarked on the animosity between Zeldin and Whitehouse.
“All right, well, we seem to have a little bit of a disagreement,” he said, suggesting the two sides “work on this in the future.”
Zeldin also traded barbs with Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who slammed him for terminating $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants without evidence of waste, fraud or abuse. As he did in prior hearings over the last two weeks, Zeldin offered to read his list of allegations of self-dealing and other structural criticisms of the GGRF program.
“Let’s see how far down the list you let me go before you cut me off,” Zeldin said.
Markey started to ask about what evidence EPA had presented in court.
“You cut me off before the first example of evidence,” Zeldin replied.
Markey tried to ask again about court proceedings, but Zeldin pushed forward with his contentions, including about the “gold bars” claims that the EPA was rushing money out of the agency at the end of the Biden administration, as well as concerns about the ability of Appalachian Community Capital, one of the recipients, to manage its large grant.
The duo continued their sniping as Markey’s five-minute questioning period came to a close.
“You keep using this inflammatory language without any evidence being presented in court in order to defend these public accusations,” Markey said.
“You’ve wasted your entire five minutes,” Zeldin replied. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who at that point was chairing the hearing, had to shout over the pair to regain control.
Also during the hearing, Zeldin mocked Sen. Adam Schiff after the California Democrat made a long statement criticizing him for terminating grants “without justification,” working to overturn California’s clean car waivers and proposing to slash EPA’s budget.
“With that wind up, by the way — I understand that you are an aspiring fiction writer, I see why,” Zeldin told Schiff, apparently referencing Schiff’s hobby of writing screenplays.
