EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says he will slash climate-change regulations and spending

WASHINGTON — U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said Wednesday that he would slash long-standing climate-change regulations and spending, and cancel the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, alarming environmentalists and Democrats.

Zeldin, a former Long Island congressman, said he would withdraw rules on pollution from coal-fired power plants, oil and gas production and climate change, while canceling electric vehicle mandates, to clear the path for energy production.

“We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday. “This is the most consequential day of deregulation in American history.”

Zeldin said the EPA would take 31 actions to advance President Donald Trump’s executive orders to roll back environmental and climate change rules that he blamed for trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and hidden taxes.

Zeldin also ordered the scrapping of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, firing its staff and eliminating all related grant funding, which the former EPA employees’ Environmental Protection Network called “a profound setback for environmental justice efforts nationwide.”

And Zeldin said he supports rewriting the Obama administration EPA’s finding in 2009 that planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, which provides the legal underpinning of many environmental and climate regulations.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the top Democrat on the Senate’s committee on the environment, criticized what he called illegal and ill-advised actions by Zeldin and Trump, issued abruptly and leaving contractors and fund recipients in a bind.

“With this chaos and destruction, Trump is violating legal contracts, trampling on the Constitution, ignoring the rule of law and flouting orders,” Whitehouse said at a spotlight hearing by Democrats on the committee.

Zeldin’s announcement of a purge of environmental regulations came a day after he terminated the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, prompting an emergency hearing Wednesday in a federal lawsuit by Climate United, the biggest recipient of those funds.

“I have taken action to terminate these grants riddled with self-dealing and wasteful spending,” Zeldin said in a post on the EPA website Tuesday evening.

That termination came abruptly, just a few days after Climate United filed a lawsuit Saturday to force the EPA and Citibank to release the money, said Phil Aroneanu, chief strategy and partnerships officer of Climate United.

In 2022, Congress appropriated the $20 billion and nearly a year ago transferred the fund to Citibank to act as a financial agent for eight entities to use for green energy projects and to invest to multiply spending on those projects.

Aroneanu told the hearing that the EPA has not presented Climate United with any claims of mismanagement or misuse of the funds.

Zeldin’s freeze on other EPA funds has left businesses in the lurch, Whitehouse said.

“Companies made investments based on the obligation of this funding. They hired workers. They filled orders. They drew up plans,” Whitehouse said. “In the confusion, with funding so erratic and uncertain, contracts are defaulted on, payroll is not made, jobs are lost, local government budgets are decimated.”

Caley Edgerly, president and CEO of the bus company Sonny Merryman in Evington, Virginia, which sells electric buses, testified that his business ordered 48 electric school buses for five school districts that now cannot pay for them because the EPA froze their grants.

“They were awarded months ago and the train left the station. The vehicle started to be built. Some of them are at my dealership. Some of them are still at the [manufacturer],” Edgerly said. “But it creates great strain, even financially, on our dealership.”