How EPA Chief Zeldin Became a Cheerleader for “Drill Baby Drill”?
MARCH 7, 2025 BY WFKISTNER
Last year, Lee Zeldin was a washed-up former four-term congressman from Long Island who had lost the 2022 New York governor’s race to incumbent Kathy Hochul. A former member of the bipartisan House Climate Caucus, Zeldin ran a somewhat middle-of-the-road race to try to unseat the popular Democratic governor. So, when President Trump tapped Zeldin just after the election for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, some considered him to be a moderate choice. After all, he was in the House Climate Caucus, so how bad could he be?
Just after Trump announced he had picked him, Zeldin proclaimed his intentions in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “We will restore U.S. energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the U.S. the global leader of AI,” he said. “We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”
In January, during his Senate EPA nomination hearings, Zeldin also expressed concern about the threat of climate change, stating the United States must act with “urgency” to address it. But that concern did not last long.
A week after being confirmed as EPA administrator, Zeldin told Breitbart News that predictions of climate change ending the world have “come and gone,” adding that the EPA would push for strong economic policies to make the United States “energy independent” and “aggressively pursue an agenda powering the Great American Comeback.” He made no mention of clean energy.
Later in February, any hope for moderation was further dashed when Zeldin called for eliminating the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” a critical scientific finding that enabled the agency to regulate carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act by determining that planet-warming gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The new administrator also cut popular diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and social justice programs based on Trump’s executive orders.
This was not a surprise to members of Congress who know Zeldin’s record well. “I think, clearly, everybody likes clean air and clean water. My opposition to Lee Zeldin is founded on where he’s likely to be on a different issue: climate change,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said on the Senate floor last month. “In that context, I have nothing against Lee Zeldin personally, but the likelihood of him standing against that fossil fuel bulldozer that is coming at him is essentially zero.”
Just last week, Zeldin called for an investigation into the Biden administration’s handling of billions of dollars of green grants, citing unsubstantiated reports of waste, fraud, and abuse and comparing it to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.” Until that investigation is completed, he froze $20 billion in green grants, which could bankrupt Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grantees, experts say.
The freeze is “going to be very devastating, especially for smaller businesses that really don’t have a lot of funding through which they can [wait] out months of not getting access to the money that was awarded to them,” Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy program, told Utility Dive. “They will go bankrupt because they do not have a lot of cushion here, and they will obviously have to lay off people, and the benefits from the projects themselves for communities will not go forward.”
