It is worth printing a lengthy excerpt of Senator Adam Schiff’s withering indictment of Lee Zeldin, the federal Environmental Protection Agency administrator, during last week’s hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
If there is one consistency within the Trump administration, it is that it is filled with strident opponents of their own agencies’ missions, most if not all of them manifestly unqualified for their positions. To cite one example, Linda McMahon, the secretary of education and onetime chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, proposes her department’s eventual elimination. That she repeatedly referred, last month, to A.I. (artificial intelligence) as “A1” (like the steak sauce) may seem funny, but the incompetence demonstrated by one after another of the president’s picks for his cabinet is deadly serious.
This is especially so in the case of the agency founded in 1970 to protect the environment and human health by establishing and enforcing protection standards. It appears that the chief qualification offered by Mr. Zeldin, who represented New York’s First Congressional District for eight long years, is slavish and unwavering devotion to the president. It wasn’t so long ago — hours after a violent insurrection of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — that Mr. Zeldin continued a disgraceful effort to overturn the 2020 election.
It was small consolation to see the dressing-down administered by Senator Schiff, which predictably devolved into Mr. Zeldin attempting to parry the senator’s indictment of his malpractice with the observation that his accuser is “an aspiring fiction writer.”
“You’ve unlawfully terminated grants without justification,” the senator told Mr. Zeldin. “You’ve fired and pushed out some of the best scientists who inform E.P.A.’s decision-making. You refuse to spend money that Congress has appropriated to the E.P.A. by law. And you’ve launched a pro-polluter effort to delete dozens of environmental protections.”
“On top of all this, you’ve launched an effort to overturn California’s Clean Air Act waivers that improve the quality of air breathed by 40 million Californians and by millions more in other states who adopted California’s high standards.” But the “ultimate proof” of Mr. Zeldin’s priorities, the senator said, is the agency’s budget, which he has proposed to cut by 55 percent. “Meaning that, in your view and that of President Trump, more than half of the environmental efforts of the E.P.A., more than half of the efforts to make sure Americans have clean air and clean water, are just a waste.” For Americans, “thanks to your good work, it’ll mean there’s more diesel and more other particulate matter in the air. When they drink a glass of water, they may not be able to see it, but this water that Americans drink is going to have more chemicals like PFAS, forever chemicals, in their water.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council reported this month that the E.P.A. plans to repeal health standards for four of six forever chemicals found in drinking water and to delay implementation of the remaining two.
“Your legacy,” the senator continued, “will be more lung cancer. It’ll be more bladder cancer. It’ll be more head and neck cancer. It’ll be more breast cancer. It’ll be more leukemia and pancreatic cancer. More liver cancer. More skin cancer. More kidney cancer. More testicular cancer. More colorectal cancer. More rare cancers of innumerable varieties. . . . I don’t know that that’s a legacy that anyone should want to have.”
The decimation of the E.P.A. will indeed render these outcomes a near certainty. Even worse, the agency plans to eliminate all limits on greenhouse gases from coal and gas-fired power plants, claiming that they “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or climate change, The New York Times reported on Saturday. The administration’s denial of climate science is a gross dereliction, coming at the worst possible time, with climate scientists united in their assessment that the window in which to avoid irreversible tipping points is now vanishingly small.
It wasn’t very long ago that we were convinced that Lee Zeldin would be remembered chiefly for his steadfast determination to subvert the democratic process in service to a corrupt, incapable, twice-impeached president. In his new role, he is steadily bolstering a reprehensible legacy.