Sen. Whitehouse and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Yell at Each Other for Five Minutes

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wound up shouting at each other for about five minutes today. Both Whitehouse and Zeldin shared clips of this exchange on their social media accounts so it seems both of them think they got the better part of the exchange.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Wednesday turned acrimonious as the former Republican congressmember and several Democratic senators sparred over the Trump administration’s effort to reshape the agency and his allegations of wrongdoing during the Biden administration…

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the panel’s ranking member, came out of the gate with questions about EPA’s termination of almost 800 grants. Whitehouse pointed to a senior EPA official’s statement in a lawsuit that he had individually reviewed each terminated grant on a single day. Zeldin, however, said that the review had been conducted by multiple people over a longer period, and their conversation quickly devolved into the two men shouting over each other.

“We’re not going to waste dollars just because you insist on EPA lighting taxpayer dollars on fire,” Zeldin retorted to Whitehouse. “The American taxpayers, they put President Trump in office because of people like you. They have Republicans in charge of the House and Senate because of people like you, because you don’t care about 99 percent of this story.”

Here’s the full shouting match.

Today’s blowup is just the latest in an ongoing battle Sen. Whitehouse and Democrats have been waging against Administrator Zeldin after he ended grants authorized by the absolutely misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. A federal judge blocked cancelation of the contracts back in March.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan found that the EPA had likely violated the law by issuing identical termination letters to Climate United Fund, Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities, which said their grants were terminated, effective immediately. 

The grants, part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program authorized under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, were awarded to fund efforts for clean energy projects across the country. Climate United received $6.97 billion, Coalition for Green Capital $5 billion and Power Forward $2 billion. 

Chutkan, a Barack Obama appointee, issued a temporary restraining order to ensure that the funds, held by Citibank, remain in the groups’ respective bank accounts and prevent the EPA from returning the money to the Treasury Department.

Whitehouse and other Dems then sent a letter demanding Zeldin reverse course.

Today, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), and Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), a member of the Committee, led all Democratic Committee members in demanding Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin reverse his illegal termination of congressionally authorized grants aimed at eliminating childhood lead poisoning, reducing toxic air pollution, and mitigating health risks from heat and wildfires, among other essential purposes.  Along with the letter, the Committee released never-before-seen, internal EPA documents that list 400 grants targeted for termination and expose that the agency knowingly and willfully violated contractual obligations and court orders.

On Monday of this week, an appeals court looked at the case. Politico described the judges as skeptical of the EPA’s position.

During over two hours of oral arguments, the three judges questioned the timing and authority of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s termination of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, which were intended to support climate and affordable housing projects using funds from Democrats’ climate law.

“The facts here are not great for the government,” said Judge Nina Pillard, an Obama appointee, pointing to EPA’s abrupt termination of the grants in March, on the eve of an initial hearing in a recipient’s lawsuit and while the agency was still in the midst of its own fact-finding probe…

The legal fight will decide the future of one of the Biden administration’s signature climate achievements, and one that Democrats in the Inflation Reduction Act structured to be obligated before Trump could return to power. The Trump administration has plowed ahead with canceling these and around 800 other smaller grants nonetheless.

There is a possibility the Republican Congress could settle this by repealing the authorization but as you may have seen, efforts to push bills through Congress are not going very well at the moment.

House Republicans included a repeal of the GGRF authority in their reconciliation bill that passed out of committee last week, but it has not yet cleared the House or gone before the Senate.

Ultimately, this is yet another battle that will be settle in court (unless Congress intervenes) so today’s shouting match won’t matter much either way.