Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin revealed how federal dollars spent on “environmental justice” often perpetuate a wasteful yet lucrative cycle of environmental activism. [some emphasis, links added]
Zeldin explained on The Alex Marlow Show how his agency has stopped the scamming by slashing wasteful spending, creating savings far beyond the EPA’s annual budget.
“It’s the principle that there needs to be a zero tolerance policy for any waste and abuse,” Zeldin told host Alex Marlow. “It’s also the principle of being able to do more with less, and we proved over the course of our first 15 months here that we can achieve extraordinary savings here at the agency.”
EPA’s annual operating budget at the time of Zeldin’s arrival was “about $10 billion,” yet he said, “Over the first year that I was in this position, we saved $30 billion.”
“In 2024, this agency obligated and spent over $60 billion, and we were able to cancel grants and contracts. We did real estate consolidation [and] staff efficiencies with an agency-wide reorganization,” he explained. “We closed an EPA museum that nobody knew about or almost no one even visited.”
Zeldin pointed to an exchange with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in a congressional hearing regarding wasteful solar grants that the self-proclaimed climate change champion supported.
“We had examples where the grant was going through up to four different pass-throughs, where each pass-through entity was getting at least 15% to administer their part of the pass-through,” Zeldin said. “I mean, a lot of this is just inexcusable.”
“The money that gets appropriated in the name of environmental justice to remediate an environmental issue, but then the dollar goes to an activist group to train other activist groups to come to D.C. and advocate for the next dollar to go to them to go out and be activists, like, wait, I thought we were spending this dollar to remediate an environmental issue,” he explained further.
“So yeah, it’s about doing more with less, and we have found extraordinary ways to save the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.”
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