The typically calm confines of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee were the site of several clashes Wednesday between Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and Democrats on the panel adjudicating his annual budget request.
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., rattled off a list of cancers he claimed Zeldin’s actions at the agency could cause, remarking the New York Republican must be proud of how many regulations he’s slashed in such a short time.
“Your legacy will be more lung cancer — it’ll be more bladder cancer, more head and neck cancer. There’ll be more breast cancer, more leukemia and pancreatic cancer, more liver cancer, more skin cancer, more kidney cancer, more testicular cancer, or colorectal cancer — more rare cancers of innumerable varieties. That will be your legacy. … My kids are gonna be breathing that air just like yours,” he said.
“If your children were drinking the water in Santa Ana, Mr. Zeldin… maybe you would give a damn,” he said after holding up a glass of water and claiming the EPA’s move toward streamlining its grants and expenditures will lead to a panoply of bad outcomes.
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“You need the money for a tax cut for rich people because you’re totally beholden to the oil industry,” Schiff fumed, accusing Zeldin of unlawful termination of congressionally appropriated grants.
“You could give a rat’s a– about how much cancer your agency causes,” Schiff said, raising his voice as Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., banged the gavel to note his time was up.
Earlier in the hearing, Zeldin clashed with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., over grant reviews and claimed the administrator couldn’t “get [his] story straight.”
Whitehouse appeared to make the claim that the EPA was not individually reviewing each of the grants it was canceling and cited court testimony from Zeldin official Travis Voyles that he had conducted an “individualized review” as of February.
“You guys are gonna have to start getting your story straight because there are three completely different statements, and they cannot all be true. It cannot be that Voyles personally himself conducted—”
“He did,” Zeldin cut in.
“… the review of 781 grants—” Whitehouse continued.
“He did; I did,” Zeldin cut in again.
“… and that [Deputy Administrator Daniel] Coogan saw to it that it was individually done,” Whitehouse said as the two men talked over each other.
After some more back-and-forth, Zeldin told Whitehouse that it must be a “crazy concept” for him to consider that more than one person could review the hundreds of grants in question and for more than one per calendar day.
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Zeldin said he and his EPA colleagues have been “busting their a–” to identify waste and abuse and that Whitehouse was only interested in scoring political points.
“I’m using the facts as your employees stated them,” Whitehouse claimed.
“We’re on it every single day, because we have a zero-tolerance policy towards wasting dollars,” Zeldin shot back.
“You don’t care about wasting money,” he went on, adding that he had promised committee member Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., at a prior hearing that he would make reviewing grants in this way a priority of his tenure. “I have to come back here in front of Sen. Ricketts today, and even though you don’t care about wasting tax dollars, Sen. Ricketts does.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V., chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works for comment, but did not hear back by press time.
