Protecting Trump’s Anti-Environmental Agenda

How EPA chief Zeldin became a cheerleader for "Drill baby drill"

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

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 which 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.”

65 percent EPA cut may be a “low number”

Despite criticism from virtually all quarters about the devastating impacts of budget cuts, Zeldin has stood his ground, adopting the harsh rhetoric of his new boss. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boat loads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin posted on X in a video last month. Zeldin also pledged to do his part to eviscerate the federal workforce by proposing to slash EPA’s budget by 65 percent, which would boot tens of thousands of employees into the streets, including staff who work on some of the most critical environmental health and safety issues across country.

Zeldin said that massive cuts are just a starting point. “I think that the EPA can save even more than 65 percent of our budget year over year,” Zeldin told Spectrum News late last month.

What would a 65-percent EPA budget reduction mean in real terms? Let’s look at the numbers. In fiscal year 2024, EPA’s budget was nearly $9.16 billion, slightly smaller than it was in FY1970, the year it was founded, in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars. A 65-percent budget cut of its FY2024 budget would leave the agency with only $3.2 billion. Without a doubt, it would cripple the agency.

Zeldin supports the assertion that environmental regulations are a hindrance to business. “Providing every American access to clean air, land, and water is a vital goal,” he posted on X, “but we can't ever do it in a way that suffocates our economy.”

In fact, studies show that the benefits of environmental safeguards far outweigh their costs. For example, studies show such major environmental laws as the Clean Air Act provide societal benefits that outweigh costs by 10 to one.

Zeldin’s call for draconian federal budget cuts and regressive environmental policies are nothing new for anyone who has followed his career closely. Judith Enck was EPA’s New York regional administrator when Zeldin served in the House. “If you are a fossil fuel company, a plastics company, a chemical company—you’ve got to be pretty happy with this appointment, but it’s going to be an environmental disaster for the rest of us,” Enck told Rolling Stone. “They want to weaken Clean Air Act regulations by removing the part of the law that requires the EPA to set health-based air quality standards.”

A quick look at Zeldin’s recent past illustrates Enck’s observations. Zeldin was a drill, baby, drill guy long before Trump picked him seemingly out of nowhere. The League of Conservation Voters gave him a paltry 14 percent lifetime voting score in 2022. And during his unsuccessful bid for New York governor in 2022, Zeldin ran on a plan to expand fossil fuel energy by overturning the state’s ban on fracking. He argued that the fracking ban former Gov. Andrew Cuomo put into place in 2014 was harming rural parts of the state.

“When I talk about reversing the state’s ban on the safe extraction of natural gas and approving new pipelines, that’s a lot of jobs, that’s a lot of revenue,” Zeldin told Politico days before the election. But Zeldin’s pro-fossil fuel message was a loser, and the oil and gas industry did not give him much support at the time. That, however, was about to change.

A magnet for fossil fuel support

After he lost the 2022 governor’s race, Zeldin focused on his consulting business, Zeldin Strategies, whose clients paid him well to represent their interests in a variety of conservative causes. According to his financial disclosure statement filed in January of this year, Zeldin made $775,000 in salary plus $1 million to $5 million in dividends from his consulting firm over the past two years. A chunk of that money—more than $120,000—came from writing opinion columns for a range of news outlets, including Fox News, Newsday, and the New York Post. Zeldin reported that the funding for these handsomely paid opinion pieces came from such fossil fuel-friendly PR firms as DCI Group and CSC Advisors. The Republican lobby shop CGCN paid him a whopping $25,000 for just one column in Real Clear Policy criticizing environmental, sustainable and governance (ESG) investing.

But Zeldin landed an even more lucrative connection to the fossil fuel industry via Texas oil and gas fracking magnate Tim Dunn, a major Trump campaign donor. According to Zeldin’s financial disclosure statement that cover his earnings since 2023, he received more than $140,000 from America First Works (AFW), a conservative political advocacy group that played a crucial role in drafting Trump’s executive orders. Zeldin currently sits on the AFW board as an emeritus member. AFW’s sister organization, America First Policy Institute, founded in 2021 by Dunn and other Trump advisors, appointed Zeldin chair of its China Policy Initiative last year.

A huge fossil fuel-industry booster, AFPI opposes government action on climate change and programs promoting clean energy. “The U.S. must resist build-nothing climate alarmists, who undermine our nation’s ability to replicate our economic and environmental success on the world stage,” one of AFPI’s energy essays asserts.

Dance with them that brung ya

Last year, AFPI founder Tim Dunn sold his lucrative Texas oil and gas company CrownRock to Occidental Petroleum for about $12 billion. Observers say that sale will make the Christian-right donor even more powerful in state and national politics.

“Money is power in Texas politics,” University of Houston professor Brandon Rottinghaus told the Texas Tribune. “Dunn’s already shown willingness to spend big to imprint his ideological religious beliefs on the GOP. With more money, he’s likely to pour gas on the fire.”

Getting rid of the EPA’s endangerment finding would definitely provide more gas, since Dunn is no fan of climate regulations. “It would be ideal if we could get rid of this ‘CO2 as a pollutant’ business,” Dunn said at a 2023 AFPI event, adding that a Trump presidency could use executive orders “to curb all this silliness about CO2 emissions.”

Lee Zeldin is no doubt paying attention to people like Tim Dunn. As they say in the Lone Star State, you gotta dance with them that brung ya. It’s clear Zeldin has perfected the Texas Two Step.

Rocky Kistner, Money Trail’s associate editor, previously worked as a reporter and producer at ABC News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, HuffPost, Marketplace and PBS Frontline.