Donald Trump Jr. and Don Imus interview EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who details dismantling $30 billion in grants linked to figures like Stacey Abrams while cutting the workforce from 16,000 to 12,500. They discuss repealing the 2009 Clean Air Act endangerment finding, dismissing Senator Patty Murray's "abortion in the water" query, and mobilizing federal agencies for Los Angeles disaster recovery by pressuring insurance companies. Zeldin contrasts the Biden era's activism with the Trump administration's stewardship, highlighting the Nessie Pipeline restart and new nuclear projects to achieve energy dominance while protecting the economy. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Joins00:04:11
Hey guys, and welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
We're back in studio today and we'll be joined by EPA Administrator, the legend of Zeldin, Lee Zeldin.
Lee has been a longtime friend, an ally, a member of Congress for a long time, just been one of the first guys I ever met in politics, just an incredible guy.
And he's exposing the left's green slush fund scam head on.
And the Trump EPA is going back to basics clean air, clean water, reliable energy.
And not turning the agency into a piggy bank for left wing NGOs as we've seen literally across the entire government these days.
They've ended roughly $30 billion in green slush funds and they're rooting out the fraud.
And of course, the left's response is exactly what you'd expect.
Instead of asking, perhaps, I don't know, how to keep energy affordable or how to clean up the actual pollution, Senator Patty Murray is out there asking Lee Zeldin if he believes there's, quote, abortion.
In the water.
Don't believe me?
Here's just a small sample of the insanity.
Are you actually spending taxpayer dollars looking into medication abortion being in the water?
Unless they're one of the many hundreds of pharmaceuticals on the list of the contaminant candidate list, I'm not aware of the agency doing anything with that.
Do you seriously believe there's abortion in the water like some of the far right activists are suggesting?
I have not.
You just said abortion in the water?
That's what some far right activists are saying that they have an audience in the EPA on that absurd issue.
Yeah, I have not had a conversation with anyone at the agency as far as abortions in water.
And you're not actively pursuing it or don't have groups of.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
Well, I'm referring to a New York Times article that reported that senior officials have directed scientists in the EPA to look at this.
Okay.
Well, again, unless you're referring to a pharmaceutical that is on the list of the hundreds of pharmaceuticals.
That are part of the contaminant candidate list six.
But aside from that, I'm not aware of anything else at the agency other than that.
I'm citing a New York Times article and we're happy to get it to you.
But I just got to say, this is really crazy.
And Lee is so effective that Democrats are even telling him to go drink Weed Killer because they actually have no argument.
He knows who are the puppets, he knows who are the smart people in Congress, he knows who are the morons who just show up looking for a soundbite.
And let's just say he's able to capitalize on that.
Check it out.
The question was You're holding up a cup saying glyphosate.
You know, don't drink it.
Don't inject it.
Maybe you should try doing that.
Joining me now, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
That was a master class in how to handle those moments.
I just have to pause for a second and ask Were you as confused as I was with the cup of glyphosate?
What was she trying to get at there?
Yeah, totally confused.
We were actually talking about a completely different topic, and then all of a sudden she's holding up a.
A paper cup and yelling out glyphosate.
I don't know what the question is.
If you're asking me whether or not you should drink a cup full of glyphosate, no.
Don't inject it.
Don't ingest it.
And, you know, obviously you just saw on the clip her response to that.
Listen, when we go to the Hill, we prepare for weeks at a time.
I mean, I have probably a thousand pages in front of me as you think about every possible topic that could come up.
So we're prepared.
And if you're coming at us wanting to know why the Trump administration, in the largest act of deregulation, rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding, I'm going to cite the law, the best reading of the law, the Supreme Court cases that require me to do that and not get creative in making up my own law.
And you better come prepared knowing the recent landmark cases of the Supreme Court as far as separation of powers and reining in regulatory overreach.
Conflicts of Interest and Grants00:17:45
Yeah, you were.
This is yet another example of how one side is focused on actual solutions while the other side is focused on creating a circus.
Except they seem to be the clowns.
And we're exposing the fraud literally in every corner of every failed left wing state on the Green News scam, on day one, on daycare, on Medicaid, on everything in between.
Check this out.
This is JD Vance on fraud.
So, Dr. Oz, I want to make sure I understand this well.
So, you're saying that we kicked off 800 fraudulent health care providers off of the Medicare system, and not a single one of them called the government and said, hey, you made a mistake.
We've had a handful of calls, we're not sure they're legitimate yet.
But it's less than 20 out of 800, and we're auditing them.
Unbelievable.
So, at least 780 are not even trying to claim that they're not fraudulent.
And again, those are businesses that we were giving hundreds of millions, in some cases, billions of dollars to, not to provide services, but to make a fraudster rich.
It's just completely insane.
Drives home the scale and scope of the problem.
We're going to break it all down today.
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Now, joining me now, the legend of Zeldin, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
Lee, great to have you on again.
Yeah, it's great to be with you, Don.
So, a lot going on.
I mean, you've gone pretty viral in the last couple of weeks, just pushing back on some of this stuff and the insanity.
Some of your congressional testimony was.
Pretty epic.
But you posted recently that the Trump EPA ended the green slush funds and saved roughly $30 billion for taxpayers.
What exactly did you find when you opened the books here?
Because I imagine this is another one of these areas, like healthcare and elsewhere, where it's probably just scam after scam.
So after the November 24 election, the president's going through this transition period.
I'm going through the confirmation process in December.
There's this video that comes out of this by an EPA official.
You and I had spoken about this in the past.
They were talking about how they were tossing gold bars off the Titanic, rushing to get billions of dollars out the door before President Trump came in because they were scared that once President Trump came in, he was going to stop it.
Well, that part was actually pretty true because as soon as the president does come in, we find the gold bars that they were tossing off of the Titanic, and we did stop it.
We canceled almost $29 billion worth of grants.
And actually, the number now, that number is just over $29 billion.
We did an agency wide reorganization.
So we went from over 16,000 employees to 12,500.
That saved $750 million a year annually.
We canceled expensive media subscriptions.
We closed a Biden EPA museum that I know that every time you came to DC, you're always excited to visit.
So my apologies.
Yeah, I have a feeling that would be a big loser for a long period of time.
Yeah, apparently there was a museum here at the EPA.
No one actually knew about it, or almost, and no one visited.
We did real estate consolidations.
But in total, this is $30 billion to save at an agency where the annual operating budget was only $10 billion a year.
So, a lot of people, when I start off by saying, yeah, we have an annual operating budget of $10 billion, in our first year we saved $30 billion, people would scratch their heads and be like, okay, how's that possible?
It was very possible because in 2024, the agency obligated and spent over $60 billion, a lot more money than they even knew how to spend.
Is there a way to sort of go back and reclaim some of that?
Because I imagine it's all the same thing, right?
It's the same NGO scam.
You know, there's an environmental organization that, you know, saves something that doesn't need to be saved or, you know, just gets in the way of, you know, anything else.
And, you know, the vast majority of those funds are probably kicked back to the Democratic fundraising apparatus to keep it going and just continue and perpetuate the drift.
Yeah.
So this money that we canceled was largely made up of those funds from 2024.
And, you know, of course, once you cancel the grant, the people who are receiving the money, they then sue.
So we're going through some of that litigation right now.
But what we found was that billions of dollars at a time were going through individual nonprofit organizations that were set up as pass through entities made up of former Biden Obama officials and Democratic donors.
They didn't even exist beforehand.
Like the president always talks about the $2 billion that went through that Stacey Abrams.
Connected NGO that received $100 in 23.
$100 operating budget in 23, and then all of a sudden they're getting billions.
It's, I mean, it's insane that it can happen.
It's also insane that there weren't like whistleblowers in the agency itself.
I mean, you got thousands of employees that no one would step up and actually say something until you got in there.
So the inspector general was raising the flag on it.
There were certainly sirens going off inside the inspector general's office.
And what we've learned since we've come in.
Is that we keep overturning new rocks, and under the rock, we'll find some email that some staffer had sent complaining about excessive executive compensation at, for example, that Stacey Abrams Connected NGO and others.
I mean, they were entities that were getting $5, $7 billion.
They were created for the purpose of taking this money.
So they were not qualified, they had no record.
Of having this type of money going through them previously.
And they were created just for the purpose of receiving it.
There was this program called Solar for All, $7 billion.
That program's also been canceled.
Where we found examples of that money going through up to four different pass through entities where each of the pass throughs were collecting at least 15%.
You know, you do the math on just how diluted the dollar gets.
We found examples of environmental justice grants where instead of the dollar getting spent to remediate an environmental issue, the dollar was going to an activist group to train other activist groups to come to DC and advocate for the next dollar to go to them so they could go out and be activists.
You know, like, Really?
I mean, you're securing the dollar.
Yeah, it's Southern Poverty Law Center with an environmental tinge.
The Climate Justice Alliance received $50 million, and they say that climate justice runs through a free Palestine.
You have all these Americans throughout the country who are saying if you're going to spend $50 million to improve the environment, why would the $50 million go to an organization that is so focused on having climate justice through a free Palestine?
Palestine.
That's not where they want their dollars to go.
Yeah.
So, you, I mean, you've referred to this really as it's a green slush fund.
You know, in plain English, what does that mean?
Who can you name the people who are getting these monies?
Obviously, there's the NGOs, but are there, you know, big people that are former Obama or Biden or, you know, both kind of people that are just running this?
I mean, can we show these names and, again, go out there and in detail show the taxpayers what they're actually paying for?
Because I think, you know, again, You know, $30 billion seemed like an insane number, and yet we're probably jaded when we think about the government.
You know, I remember when that used to be a lot of money in the government.
People have probably been desensitized to that, as crazy as that sounds.
You know, can we put out there all of these things and show, you know, again, 15% going off to get to the root cause and how much that is?
Because, you know, 15% of $7 billion is a lot of money, a lot of money.
And if it's going through four stages, You know, there's nothing left for the cause, even if the cause was real and it probably wasn't.
Yeah, and we're not talking about junior staffers either.
You're talking about former cabinet members like the secretary of HUD under President Obama.
You're talking about the former CEO of Fannie and Freddie.
These are senior admin officials from the Biden and Obama administrations that, because of their notoriety for being in such powerful, influential roles, they're recruited, they're brought in.
To be able to reach out to the Biden EPA, use those contacts, leverage those names to be able to secure the money.
But yeah, I'm going to give you the whole list of names.
You can see for yourself.
I mean, we're talking about up to the level of cabinet members.
Yeah.
And like, you know, hey, running Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, it's a big deal.
It's a lot of mortgages.
What the hell does that have to do with environmental protection?
Like, what expertise do any of these people have in that field, if any?
So, and you know what they do is so, is eight prime recipients received $20 billion.
That you know, one of them is the entity that was connected to Stacey Abrams.
There were eight of them.
The there was an agreement with EPA with those eight prime recipients, but then the prime recipients cut the deals with subrecipients.
And as the deals get cut with those subrecipients, the EPA has less and less oversight, they're not directly involved in those arrangements.
And it's all on purpose.
It's to get the money out of the treasury and to these private actors with as little control by the government and as little oversight as possible by the government.
They were amending their account control agreements up to days before President Trump's inauguration.
Let me guess.
They were amending it to make it a lot more loose for them to be able to do whatever they wanted.
I'm just going to go out on a limb here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bold guess.
You happen to be spot on.
Have you thought about it all, perhaps working with JD Vance and what they're doing on the Fraud Task Force?
Because this is probably the exact same thing.
And I imagine it's happening in other levels beyond even the EPA grant.
You know, this is just another fraud place for people to collect money and, you know, blow it for different causes.
Oh, yeah.
No, this has definitely ended up involving multiple three letter agencies, not just EPA.
I hope some of those three letter agencies involve law enforcement because I would think there's also some criminality here if this is happening and that nothing ever gets spent for the actual cause.
Yeah.
And the wildest part of it is you have members of Congress who ended up, this is when Democrats were in control, they ended up signing off on wasting this money.
So, like the EPA and the Treasury under Biden and OMB, the Office of Management and Budget under Biden, these agencies were all deploying money that Congress had blessed.
Now they're wasting it.
They're giving it to unqualified recipients.
There's self dealing.
There's conflicts of interest.
There is that reduced agency oversight.
There are all these problems that we end up seeing, and that is why we end up stopping it.
But what's wild is just how much.
Top cover they have for the action.
It's not like this money was being stolen without the blessing of Congress.
Yeah, the money was almost, Congress seems to be encouraging the theft of this money.
Yeah, and by the way, when, you know, I remember last year when I was in front of the Senate EPW committee and Senator Markey of Massachusetts was asking me about these grants that I was stopping, and he's like, Do you have any evidence of, you know, whatever he was asking about this greenhouse gas reduction fund?
I said, great.
I have this long list in front of me.
How long are you going to let me go through this list before you cut me off?
And then I start answering.
And I was like a few words into the first example of being responsive.
And he cuts me off.
He didn't want me to go on.
We ended up posting it to our website.
And we don't just say it's self dealing conflicts of interest, reduced agency oversight, and unqualified recipients.
We actually provide all of those details, including the EPA employees.
Saying, someone maybe should look at this and stop it.
This money is getting wasted.
We have concerns.
So we put on the website, we sent it to the Office of Inspector General, we sent it to other agencies, including law enforcement capabilities for them to be able to look into.
But those members of Congress who blessed this, and they call it the Inflation Reduction Act, they should have called it the Inflation Expansion Act.
They blessed it in their legislation when they had one party rule.
They don't want us to go through all the specifics of what's wrong with it.
They'd rather just say, hey, you have no evidence of any wrongdoing.
Yeah.
I mean, the left always seems to say, you know, cuts like this are anti environment.
How can you be against the environment?
But we've seen the insanity of their behavior in these hearings.
They're literally telling you to drink weed killer.
And, you know, Senator Murray asked you, do you seriously believe there's abortion?
In the water.
When you're sitting in these hearings and you're listening to this nonsense, and a senator throws something like that out at you, just what's going through your mind at the time?
Because it seems like they have these high level sound bites that don't make any sense, but they're so used to never having any pushback of just logic and reason and fact.
It's almost like in their mind, they're like, oh, I got them this time.
And it's like, then you destroy them.
It's definitely an advantage of having spent eight years as a member of Congress on the other side of the dais and getting a chance to know these people.
There are some very intelligent members of Congress who do their homework, they prepare their questions in advance, it's thoughtful, they wanna be productive with their time.
And I'm cognizant of that as I'm sitting in that chair.
Like, if anybody wants to engage in a productive, substantive conversation, I am ready for it.
And that happens at every one of these hearings.
I'm also well aware that there are people.
You're already laughing.
Oh, yeah.
No, I'd say I'm also pretty well aware that some of these people are freaking morons that aren't prepared, that are.
Yeah, they're reading off of pieces of paper prepared by some staffer.
They don't know what they're reading.
They haven't done their homework.
And when I start pushing back at all, they just completely lose their place on their page.
They don't know what they're talking about.
Some will be smart enough, actually, in that moment to change the topic.
You have other members who will then double down and triple down on stupid.
And you're like, I have to engage.
So, like that clip that, you know, what just happened this week with Senator Murray, I mean, she asked me that first question about the agency.
Taking actions to regulate abortions and water or stop abortions and water.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I mean, if it's like there was this contaminant candidate list.
Just because you say something does not mean there's any merit to it, right?
Yeah, because there's.
So we had this contaminant candidate list that has 374 pharmaceuticals on it.
My point to Senator Murray, unless you're referring to a pharmaceutical on that contaminant candidate list, the hundreds of pharmaceuticals.
I don't know what else you could possibly be referring to.
And, you know, she just keeps going down this line.
And clearly she had no idea what she was speaking about.
So while I am ready to engage in a productive, substantive conversation, I am also ready for any of you to come at me and try to challenge me on the decisions that we're making.
Supreme Court Ruling on EPA00:04:43
So, you know, in Congresswoman DeLauro, you know, that was.
Is that the crazy blue haired person?
That was, that was the, yes, that was the.
Yeah, because that was like two weeks ago.
And I watched that.
I mean, I watched that like three times because it was so funny.
The whole thing about telling me to drink Wee Killer was at the end of a back and forth that starts off with basically trying to ask, why did we repeal the 2009 endangerment finding?
Now, she had her way of asking the question, but that's basically what she was asking.
And I said, we're just following the law.
Section 202 of the Clean Air Act, where does it say anything about fighting global climate change?
We have to follow the best reading of the law pursuant to Loper Bright, and we have to respect.
Which was a Supreme Court ruling, right?
I mean, it's like.
You know, it's not like this was just, you know, conservative Congress pushing something through.
I mean, this is like a Supreme Court ruling.
You got to follow that.
If you don't, you'd be in trouble, probably lose your job, and they can't understand even why and didn't even know anything about the ruling, which is kind of problematic since these people are making, you know, trillion dollar decisions every day.
Yeah, you're asking me about a law that you haven't read.
We then start talking about the biggest landmark Supreme Court case of recent years overturning the Chevron Doctrine.
If you want to show up to a No Kings protest on Saturday, And start railing about how we should have separation of power and checks and balances, and you're concerned about executive overreach.
How do you not know the largest Supreme Court case of recent years on precisely that?
And, you know, that's one of the biggest hypocrisies and ironies when they go to these rallies on a Saturday morning.
For one, we don't have a king.
Secondly, is if you really are concerned about executive overreach, like this is, there are, I mentioned that's one, Loper Bright.
The other one that I referenced, Jessel wasn't aware of this.
I talked about West Virginia versus EPA.
And the major questions doctrine that EPA shouldn't be imposing trillions of dollars of regulation without there being a debate and a vote in Congress.
Like it should be in the law telling the regulatory agency because Congress too often punts because they don't have the will or they don't have the votes to get something done.
They call their friend down the street who runs a federal agency and says, hey, we can't actually get the votes, so why don't you just do it anyway?
Yeah, I mean, that was the problem.
And I've seen it, you know, as a guy that's a developer and stuff like that.
The EPA to stop any kind of progress.
And it wasn't through laws or regulations or following the rules.
It was just like they allowed these governmental agencies to just do things to enact their will by basically prohibiting people from being able to do things the way things had always been done.
Yeah, you could look at a statute as a head of an agency and say, this statute doesn't say that I can't do this.
So therefore, I can.
Like for decades, that actually was just the way things worked.
That was the Chevron deference doctrine in action.
I mean, the 2009 endangerment finding that I repealed, you know, announced it with President Trump at the White House $1.3 trillion of savings, $2,400 more affordable new vehicles, the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.
Rescinding the 2009 endangerment finding and all of the greenhouse gas emission standards that followed on light, medium, and heavy duty vehicles and all off cycle credits, including that almost universally despised start stop feature, the 2009 endangerment finding.
Included in it the administrator saying that she had discretion because the law, the Clean Air Act, didn't say that she couldn't do it.
That was actually okay back then, but it's not okay anymore.
Yeah, it's funny also that you mentioned the No Kings protest, and yet they had all of those, and a week later, the actual King of England showed up to America, and there was no protest.
No one was complaining about that, which was kind of ironic to me.
Not only were there no protests, but they were on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Clapping.
Like, you know, clapping and, you know, saluting and standing in attention like you've never seen for even a president of their own party.
It was like, man, the irony is we're sitting there in the seat.
I mean, I saw one member of Congress was criticizing me because while I was clapping, the members thought that I wasn't clapping enthusiastically enough, like for the king of the country.
For the other.
I mean, damned if you do, damned if you don't, Lee.
Hey, what do you make of, you know, speaking of environmental sort of hypocrisy?
I've been reading a little bit about it.
I haven't gotten, you know, I haven't sort of gone down the rabbit hole entirely on it these days.
Pessimistic Climate Predictions Debunked00:10:19
But Al Gore is now warning about the importance of climate change, but this time it's about cooling.
So the guy that literally, I think he started like a $30 billion fund, you know, while, you know, short, right after he enacted all the environmental legislation about global warming.
Made a lot of money pushing BS because I think the average temperature change in the last 50 years was like something like 0.2 degrees.
So I'm not sure if that's a statistically significant number.
Does not seem like it would be to me.
Now he's pushing global cooling.
Is this just another part of the grift?
There's got to be a way that he's found money to be made off of this.
It's the only logical reason for a complete 180.
He was, as you pointed out, the inconvenient truths and making movies and traveling.
He actually started a fund, too, to invest in these green companies after basically being the leader of the legislation to enact this stuff that, again, never made sense to most people, but didn't matter.
It was a global topic for two decades.
Yeah, and he was just in California and he was doing one of these fireside chats and he was.
All of a sudden, now we're talking about global freezing.
Yeah, which is ironic because everyone's basically been saying that if you look at, you know, if you go back to like geological time, you have warming periods, cooling periods, warming periods, cooling periods.
That just sort of happens.
There's the reason we had multiple ice ages and then you had warm periods in between.
And it's sort of how we got here.
Yeah.
And the science has very optimistic predictions of where temperature is going or sea level is going.
Science has very pessimistic predictions.
As to where temperatures are going and sea levels are going, and what has happened to justify policy decisions to get the left's goals to be able to advance their own priorities.
In some cases, they'll adopt the most pessimistic prediction that when you get to 2026, you realize that was just a bad assumption and it didn't pan out.
And then in some cases, they go beyond the most pessimistic prediction.
And they give out a prediction that proves to just be completely bonkers.
Al Gore has done this multiple times.
John Kerry has done this with statements.
AOC said seven years ago that we had 12 years left of the earth before it's no longer in existence.
They have gone beyond the most pessimistic views.
And I'll tell you, they look like fools when that timeline of the prediction of what's going to happen in five years or seven years or 12 years, when you get to that point, you realize that, well, obviously that was never going to happen.
So, yeah, I mean, like we as conservatives, first off, we care deeply about the environment and want to be good stewards of the environment.
You know, I know just how often, how much of your life is spent just, you know, enjoying America, appreciating our environment, and making sure that we're being good conservationalists of our land.
And, you know, but we also get that there's optimistic to pessimistic predictions, and we don't know exactly what the temperature is going to be in 2100.
But what we shouldn't do is because of a position that is either the most pessimistic view or beyond, that we should be causing extreme economic pain today, adopting a belief that in order to protect the environment, we have to destroy entire segments of our economy, that we need to be choking off baseload, reliable, durable baseload power, and talking about intermittent sources as if it's a replacement of baseload power.
And for the Americans who are struggling the most, when you go through a winter like we just went through, for many Americans where it was really cold for an extended period of time, I mean, thank God President Trump's in there.
He's unleashing U.S. energy dominance.
He has a National Energy Dominance Council.
He's keeping power plants online.
He's building new pipelines.
There's new small modular reactors.
The ground has already been broken in.
There's trillions of dollars of new investment coming.
Thank God we're going in that direction as opposed to continuing the trend that we saw under the Biden administration.
Trying to regulate out of existence, clean, beautiful coal, stopping pipelines from being built all across the entire country, and making sure that permits are as long and as expensive as possible to be able to get approvals on.
Is night and day between Biden's speed and Trump's speed.
Well, and they didn't believe any of these things themselves.
Obama was a big peddler of this.
John Kerry, as you mentioned, you know, like both of them have, you know, I think Obama's got like a $20 million house on Martha's Vineyard, which is like at sea level.
Like if we were really worried about the seas going up that many feet, they probably wouldn't invest that much of a sum there.
I live in Florida on the water.
It's supposed to be underwater right now based on John Kerry's or Al Gore's initial projections.
And yet here we are.
Nothing's actually changed in 20 years in terms of water levels.
It's sort of wild.
And Then I read this year, even the Arctic is added ice, an unprecedented amount of added ice to the Arctic.
So it's like, you know, maybe some of these things are a little cyclical.
Well, as you pointed out, yeah, and as you pointed out, over the course of you go back thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, you know, as long as history, data, science goes back, there has been a changing climate in this world.
The hoax that you hear coming from President Trump is that grift.
That we were talking about here throughout the interview.
The way that, in the name of climate change, the name of environmental justice, in the name of climate justice, they are taking that dollar and giving it to their well connected friends.
Conservatives come in, we don't say, hey, let's take that dollar from a left wing NGO and give it to a right wing NGO.
We say, let's give that money to the Treasury and back to the American public.
Like, these are precious tax dollars.
Our country can't afford it.
And if you're going to spend a dollar, To remediate an environmental issue, then spend the dollar on remediating the environmental issue.
The hoax is in the name of climate change to put forth policies that, like in the state of New York, where we're from, they will not extract natural gas.
They have stopped all sorts of new pipelines, including the Constitution Pipeline, which is needed for natural gas to New England.
They won't allow gas hookups to a new construction.
They've set climate goals that they know they will not meet.
And that's a big piece of debate right now.
And because of the economic pain of their policies, that's why New York and California are leading the country in out migration.
People are leaving these states and going to Florida and the Carolinas and Tennessee and Texas, where their money will go further.
And it's all in the name of climate change that you put forth those policies.
That's what President Trump has been railing on as the hoax behind it.
Yeah, because you got those billions of dollars, and then you have the Paris Climate Accords and all that nonsense.
But like China and India, The biggest polluters in the world by far.
They're like, ah, we'll talk about that in 2030.
So we can't destroy our middle class when, you know, I wish you could say, hey, America's in a bubble.
If we protect our environment, we're going to be good.
Our water's going to be good.
Our air's going to be clean.
Others aren't affected.
If China just keeps rampantly firing up coal power plants and India's dumping all their stuff into the water and all these things are going on in the world, like we share one environment.
So to subsidize this insanity while the bad actors still continue to make it worse, literally at the expense of destroying our middle class, Our advancement, development.
I mean, we can do things clean.
We can do things reasonably well.
We will do that better than any other actor, probably in the world.
But we also can't go so far to try to fix all of the bad actors of the world while they're not going to do anything.
And when it comes time for them to actually step up, you know what they're going to do?
Well, we'll renegotiate.
We'll talk about this in another 10 years, so on and so forth, while we're sitting there spending trillions.
Matt, you just hit so many important points.
One is we tap into our resources so much better for the environment.
Than so many other countries do elsewhere around the world.
And then you're referencing China.
China utilizes more coal, 40% more coal than the rest of the world combined.
And they have, in one year, ramped up more coal production than the rest of the world combined.
And you can have coal and do it well and make it clean, but I bet you they're not doing that.
I am sure that across the board, all forms of energy production, we do better and cleaner for the environment.
With regards to engines, whether you want to go out, by the way, we believe in consumer choice.
You go out, you want to get an electric vehicle, a hybrid, a diesel.
A truck, a gas power, a internal combustion engine, whatever you want should be your choice.
All of those forms of engines have advanced so much over the course of the last 10, 15, 20 years.
And you can protect the environment while also growing the economy.
At the one year mark of President Trump's term in office, we released a list of our top 500 environmental, pro environmental accomplishments, our pro environmental wins of that first year while doing all this other work.
On the deregulatory side and applying common sense and heating economic demands and unleashing energy dominance, we're also protecting the environment.
This agency at EPA, and I've met so many amazing, dedicated career staffers here who love their job, they love the agency, they love serving the American public, and they're doing really good work every single day.
And if you pick up that list of 500 top environmental accomplishments, these are actions that That people, the EPA, like they dedicate their whole lives towards achieving that pace, by the way, is something that we're motivated to keep up going forward.
We are proving that you could protect the environment and grow the economy.
Combating Microplastics with Less Budget00:04:27
This is just the way it should have always been.
It's certainly the way it is now.
It's the way that it always should be going forward.
Yeah, I mean, this is a big one for me because you know, you think about all the stats that you see, and I have you know, five young kids, and you know, male testosterone levels are you know, half of what they used to be, or you know, the average testosterone of an 18 20 year old kid.
Is that of a 70 year old male 50 years ago?
So I know you're doing some important work on microplastics.
These are things just getting into your body, screwing up your hormones, all of these things.
What are some of the major key regulatory actions that you're working on?
Because I think that's such a huge part of sort of the Maha movement side of things, gets a lot of attention in certain niche circles, seems to be a major, major problem that no one even thought about until recently.
But I know you're taking that head on.
What are we doing to minimize that kind of insanity?
Because we're poisoning ourselves without even knowing it.
Yeah, in recent weeks, alongside Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr., we did a joint announcement on microplastics at EPA for the first time ever.
We added microplastics to our contaminant candidate list.
At the same time, HHS announced a big initiative to be pursuing, I think it's $144 million.
Of implementation to research and combat microplastics.
It's been a big focus of Secretary Kennedy for a very long time.
And yeah, it's the first time at EPA ever that microplastics was added to this list with what was called Contaminant Candidate List 6.
We also are doing lead service line replacements across the entire country, a big focus to be able to remove lead in pipes.
There's a big effort in combating PFAS to make sure that we're able to treat it in the water, to be able to treat it in land.
There's a lot that this agency does.
Superfund work, brownfield sites, where you're able to take some blight, do environmental remediation, partner with the private sector, where they might be coming in 100 times the level of the taxpayer dollar.
You know, like the government comes in with $500,000, and you just put this big deal together where, you know, there's $25 million of private sector investment to build.
You know, the America First Center in Las Vegas, where the Vegas Golden Knights minor league team plays.
There's so many, and actually, right near there, Symphony Park in Las Vegas is where President Trump was just recently at during his last trip to Las Vegas.
That was a big brownfield site, like an old Union Pacific location.
So there's so much work that we do here every single day across the board that we're going to just continue to keep up.
President Trump, I mean, the first pillar of Power in the Great American Comeback. is to pursue clean air, land, and water for all Americans.
Our core mission is protecting human health and the environment.
We can never lose sight on that core mission of this agency.
We also have to heed the demands of the American public.
When they went to vote November of 24, they had economic concerns that they wanted all of the different agencies of the federal government to heed, to apply common sense, to be pragmatic, and to make sure that while you are accomplishing your core mission, You are doing so in a way that are also accomplishing these important goals to be able to make America great again.
That was the Trump mandate that the American public voted for.
And we are implementing it, by the way, while fulfilling all of our statutory obligations, reducing or eliminating already all sorts of different backlogs we inherited.
We're doing more with less, and we're honored to do so.
And just trying to have an agency that we can just very transparently, radically, Transparent with the American public to let everyone know what we are working on, following gold standard science, to fulfill the president's executive orders, and to do all those statutory obligations following the best reading of the law and to make America proud.
That is our goal every single day when we wake up and come into this office.
Codifying Changes for Transparency00:12:25
Yeah, it's sort of amazing that you can, you know, I know you mentioned sort of just over 100 million to combat the microplastics.
It's like, when you think of it, it's like 0.3% of the $30 billion that you saved.
Imagine we just did a thousand of those programs to actually help us.
Feel better, be healthier, eliminate these problems rather than just funding, you know, again, Democrat shill organizations and NGOs.
I mean, it's just sort of wild.
So I love that you're finding those things.
Yeah, where that money goes, where that tax dollar goes, needs to be spent as efficiently and effectively as possible.
And rather than like sending the money through multiple pastor entities so that your friends can take cuts, again, we're not here saying let's have that money go through.
Right wing NGOs.
I'm not saying that at all.
I've never said that.
I'm not doing that.
I want that money to be protected for the American taxpayer.
I have a zero tolerance policy for any waste and abuse.
I mean, you see what's going on right now as we're approaching America 250 and getting the reflective pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial looking beautiful, maybe better than ever.
And the president wants to do it for like, it's almost nothing.
You're talking about millions of dollars that are, you know, it's coming in a heck of a lot less.
Than the cost if you're following some process of, you know, let's rip out every stone.
Let's give that contract to, you know, this contract to this friend and that contract to another and this contract to another.
And then we're going to completely redo the reflective pool.
It's going to cost $250, $300 million.
You know, the President Trump, you know, for President Trump, who's a builder, he's looking at this thing saying, what is the cheapest possible way that we can get this?
Looking better than it's ever looked before in time for America 250 to make this celebration as awesome as possible.
And when a figure comes in in a few million, they're like, oh no, he wants to spend a few million dollars.
They were going to blow 50X of that and not accomplish anything.
Right.
And not complain.
President Obama, I think the number, if I'm not mistaken, when he did a project on the reflective pool was a lot higher.
And it wasn't turning the reflective pool blue.
The president, he's done a project or two along the way.
He knows how to do this as cheaply as possible.
And that's exactly what's happening.
And by the way, doing this stuff as quickly as possible.
When I came in, when President Trump was sworn into office, he gave EPA 30 days to complete our hazardous material removal after this apocalyptic, worst wildfire I have ever seen or heard of in Los Angeles.
30 days.
That's Trump's speed.
We got it done in 28.
Potomac Interceptor broke.
He gets a call from the D.C. Mayor, Mariel Bowser, asking for an emergency to be declared.
The president puts EPA in charge of the response.
We complete that work, working with the Army Corps, National Park Service, and other partners.
We get the remediation done months ahead of schedule.
I mean, Trump's speed is about speed.
It's us about coming in under budget as well.
And man, it's exciting.
I'm honored to be part of it.
I mean, yeah, that's a big deal.
I think that people don't understand.
What role does the EPA have on things like the wildfires or just responsible forest management in general?
We're seeing some big issues on that right now in Los Angeles.
I know you got involved.
Again, it's not something you'd be like, oh, that's EPA, even though clearly it was an environmental disaster beyond a financial disaster, beyond a humanitarian disaster.
I mean, it's a big deal.
So the president comes in and he mobilizes his agencies to do.
Like federal government things, like EPA to do the hazardous material removal, and the Army Corps to do the debris removal, and the Small Business Administration came in, and half their disaster loans in 25 went to the LA rebuild.
But then here's the other side of President Trump.
At the one year anniversary, he sees that there isn't enough rebuilding that is happening.
Like the federal government did all of the federal government things in record time, but now he wants to know what else can we do?
So the president ends up, he sends me out to Los Angeles.
I went out there with Administrator Lesler.
EPA started doing it, it's like constituent services.
We started calling individuals who lost their homes to just help them get their homes rebuilt, to get their permits through.
You've seen thousands of new permits approved since President Trump ordered EPA to take the lead and had me go out there and do what you would say are non traditional things.
For a federal agency to do, President Trump tweeted, he posted on Truth Social about insurance companies.
Some of the insurance companies were dragging their feet.
They were underpaying after dragging their people through the mud and requiring all sorts of payment, proof of stuff, but then they weren't paying their full policy.
The president names names on Truth Social to get the results.
He then has a meeting a couple weeks ago with local leadership from California.
They come in talking about mortgage forbearance and banks that could be doing more.
The president goes to Truth Social.
He starts naming names on Truth Social to get involved in the banking piece.
Now, there are plenty of administrations and presidents in the past who would say, Okay, we're not going to get involved in the local log jams of the local permits.
We're not getting involved in state regulatory issues regarding their insurance and banking industry.
This president's like, it's Admiral Farragut, damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.
Not only can we break through all of these federal log jams, which he did on day one when he came in, but a year in, he's like, well, screw that.
I want to break through all the non federal log jams now, too.
I mean, yeah, so speaking of that, maybe what is the biggest.
Philosophical difference between the Biden EPA and the Trump EPA?
Is it as simple as just activism versus stewardship?
The simplest thing is we inherited an agency where decisions were being made under the belief that in order to protect the environment, you have to strangle out of existence entire sectors of the economy.
President Trump and the Trump EPA believe that you could protect the environment and grow the economy.
We can and must and we do choose both.
The biggest difference, we saw.
Regulation after regulation after regulation after regulation trying to eliminate reliable, durable coal from, by the way, states where it's the primary source.
They were just making them disappear and just telling those coal miners that they should learn to code.
Well, we're reversing that because it didn't make any sense on so many different levels.
And these are acronyms that a lot of the public might not be familiar with Clean Power Plan 2.0, the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxic Standards.
Coal combustion residual, steam electric ELG.
Like your audience is busy living their lives, doing their jobs.
They care about their family.
They're not paying attention to acronyms and different rules and regulations.
But what they are aware of, if you're from North Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, you care about being able to have power.
You want to be able to have your home warm in those winter months.
And when President Trump unleashed energy dominance and put us on this task, The policies end up making a big difference because of him.
I mean, the first meeting they had with President Trump, and I had Secretary Burgum with me, and there was Secretary Wright and others, he was talking about Nessie Pipeline being built to deliver natural gas from Pennsylvania to up to 2.3 million New Yorkers in downstate New York.
This project had been stalled for almost a decade.
The president not only got it going again, he got the federal permits done, ground has been broken.
The pipeline will be done by the end of 2027.
I mean, there's so many stories like this.
The retrofits and new builds on nuclear that have started since the president had come in.
Yeah, so it's, but if you were to try to figure out like what's the big picture ideological difference, is that we came in saying, all right, we are going to protect the environment and grow the economy.
We choose both.
Yeah, I mean, I love that.
So maybe your last question, because I know you have a lot of stuff you got to do and a lot of crazy people you have to deal with, but.
For Americans who want clean air, clean water, but are ultimately sick of being lectured about climate change by radicals while their bills go up every day, what should they know about what you're doing at the EPA and what can they possibly do to actually help and push some of this through?
Because we got to codify these things so it doesn't just go back to the old way if and when the political winds ever change.
Right.
Well, the discussion that we had on Loper Bright earlier was significant because when we're following the best reading of the law, And this is the first administration that has come in since the Loper Bright decision.
The pendulum can't just swing back and they could go back to the rules that they did of the past because there is just one best meaning, best reading of the law.
Codifying our changes, as you just pointed out, is a big deal.
Who you elect to be in charge of Congress could make a big difference because when I say best reading of the law, well, the law could change.
Yeah.
You can have a pendulum swing where it's not just a new administrator of EPA, but it could be a totally new alignment of who's in charge of the House and the Senate.
So, that piece, getting involved in the decision of who your representatives are, that is key.
I would also say, just for getting caught up to speed on what we've been working on, go look for that press release from January, the one year anniversary of President Trump's term in office, our list of our top 500 environmental accomplishments.
Read it, learn it, love it.
Promote it and let's keep working on getting more of that done.
While also, I would say the other piece is you fight for everything that you want fixed now because these opportunities I mean, it feels like a once in a lifetime moment where you have a president, he went through four years in office, four years to reflect on it, survived multiple assassination attempts, won all the battleground states, won the popular vote.
He is someone who is so locked in on not just for him, but his entire team.
Making the most of every single moment of every single day to get as much done as possible.
If there is anyone out there across America, you care about anything that you want to see an agency or this administration get done, ask us to do it.
I mean, I go to these groups where I say, I don't want to know what the top thing is on your list for me to do.
I don't want to know the top three things on your list.
If your list has 64 different asks for EPA, give me your entire list.
Because I want to do all of it.
The biggest regret that you should have, and the biggest regret that I would have, is to get to the end of this term and it turns out that there are things that we could have done, but you just didn't ask for it.
This is an administration extraordinarily focused and motivated to get everything done possible every single day we're here in this office.
Well, I love it, man.
Lee Zeldin, EPA Administrator, thank you so much for doing this.
As always, keep up the great work.
I know it's not easy, but you've been doing awesome.
Truly the legend of Zelen.
Thank you very much, man.
Thanks, Don.
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