Washington (AP) – The head of the environmental protection authority collided on Wednesday with democratic senators and accused an “emerging fiction writer” and said that another “does not care about waste money.
At a hearing in the Senate, the heated stock exchanges showed to discuss President Donald Trump’s proposal to reduce the budget of the agency in half, the piercing partisan differences compared to Zeldin’s deregulation approach. Zeldin, a former Republican congress member, said that his tenure will invoice the Turbo American economy and at the same time ensure neat air and water. Democrats say that he endangers the life of millions of Americans and gives up the duplicate mission of the agency to protect the environment and human health.
Zeldin, who took office in January, has proposed a flood of changes that strongly reduce the workforce of the agency, who ended the billions of dollars approved by the administration of bidies in the amount of billions of US dollars, including the landmark regulations for climate change and pollution of coal power plants.
Sharp words, back and forth
Senator Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Zeldin said that a plan to reduce EPA expenses by 55% means that Zeldin and Trump “” more than half of the EPA environmental effort … to ensure that Americans have neat air and neat water. ” If the congress is approved, the budget cuts “there are more diesel and more other particles in the air” and “water that the Americans drink will have more chemicals,” said Schiff.
“Your inheritance will be more lung cancer,” he said to Zeldin. “It will be more bladder cancer. It will be more leukemia and pancreatic cancer … Rare cancer of countless varieties. ”
Replied Zeldin: “I understand that you are an emerging fiction author. I understand why.”
Schiff said the real fiction was Zeldin’s obvious conviction that he can shorten the EPA budget in half, “and it has no effect on people’s health, water or air”. Schiff said that the Republican administrator was “completely committed to the oil industry” and added: “You could give the ass of a rat about how much cancer causes your agency.”
Zeldin was involved in a similar rhetorical game with the Senator of Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse, the top democrat in the Senate Committee for Environmental and Public Works.
Whitehouse said that Zeldin and others at the EPA had raised “reasonless defaults” about grants granted as part of the democratic President Joe Biden, “career officers who were committed to the rule of law” and FBI agents “in order to harass careers.
Questions about whether Zeldin has checked canceled grants
Whitehouse also questioned Zeldin’s claim that he personally checked 781 grants of almost $ 2 billion that the Trump administration later canceled. The grants should tackle chronic pollution in minority communities and start programs for neat energy across the country, but Zeldin said they were plagued by conflicts of interest and non -qualified recipients.
“They don’t care to waste money, but the Trump government, Senator,” said Zeldin.
When Whitehouse pushed to see Zeldin’s schedule to prove that he personally checked the grants before he canceled them, Zeldin said that he had worked on the problem since taking office “almost every day”.
“We make every waste, every aspect of abuse,” said Zeldin, adding that Whitehouse did not seem able to check that more than one person could check the EPA grant program.
“I insist on the facts,” said Whitehouse.
American taxpayers “brought President Trump into office for people like them,” replied Zeldin. “You have the Republicans who are responsible for the house and the Senate because of people like you. You don’t want me to leave through the list of all evidence of waste and abuse.”
Whitehouse replied that Zeldin should explain why lawyers from the Ministry of Justice who spoke under oath in the name of the agency “said that everything they said is not true. That is what I want.”
This week, an EPA lawyer informed a federal court of appeal that the agency “Nobody of Fraud” in a separate dispute over its termination of $ 20 billion in grants as part of a so-called Green Bank program to finance neat energy and climate-amiable projects nationwide.
