If you wish to choose a battle, ensure that your facet of the road is clear first. For Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator appeared to have amnesia when he determined to start out a tiff with Rep. Adam Schiff Wednesday on the Senate funds listening to.
“I understand you’re an aspiring fiction writer. I see why,” Zeldin stated, seemingly calling Schiff’s accusations on the listening to false.
With out lacking a beat, Schiff stated again, “I understand your view that you can cut half of the agency and it won’t affect people’s health or their water or their air. That to me is a big fiction, Mr. Zeldin.”
“If your children were drinking water in Santa Ana, Mr. Zeldin, maybe you wouldn’t be so cavalier about if there was lead in their water. Maybe you would give a damn instead of coming in here and suggesting that any grant that takes lead out of the water must be ‘waste fraud or abuse’ because you need the money for a tax cut for rich people.”
Schiff’s reference to Santa Ana, California, is just not by likelihood. The lower-income Southern California metropolis and its kids have been disproportionately impacted by excessive ranges of lead each within the water and soil. Nonetheless, as an alternative of bolstering the grants in place designed to assist communities like Santa Ana, Zeldin has been busy freezing over 700 grants within the identify of funds chopping to appease his boss.
Day by day Kos was unable to independently confirm if Santa Ana had packages particularly focused by Zeldin’s huge day of reckoning, however loads of different cities who’ve confronted water insecurity felt the cuts. As beforehand reported, the previous New York consultant proudly introduced on Monday he was pulling the EPA out of Flint, Michigan, as nicely.
Regardless of harmful lead ranges which can be trigger for concern, Zeldin’s extreme grant chopping additionally focused Flint’s Water System Advisory Council. The council, now left with no funding in any respect, advocated for the extraordinarily susceptible group’s say in how their water is handled and obtained.
Zeldin’s EPA did announce Tuesday that they have been awarding $30.7 million in grant funding to assist “small and rural communities” throughout the U.S. “provide training and technical assistance” to “improve water quality.” Nonetheless, in comparison with the $3 billion Zeldin froze in local weather regulation grants, this looks as if a small bandage.
Even Schiff may scent the intentions of Zeldin from throughout the room, accusing the GOPer of being “beholden to the oil industry.”
After all, Zeldin hasn’t tried to cover this both. In a earlier listening to, he stated that his purpose was to bolster the automotive business and to make the U.S. the “AI capital of the world.”
For a person employed to guard the environmental pursuits of the nation, it looks as if an odd assertion to make. And Zeldin has been following by way of with simply that.
Quickly after taking his function, he arrange an electronic mail system for companies to have the ability to merely ship of their requests to bypass rules. And whereas this offers companies extra energy to overstep their bounds, Zeldin made main cuts to his employees, making it tougher for the EPA to even catch these wrongdoings.
And to by some means make it simpler on the automotive business—or simply himself—he introduced he can be getting rid of the pesky stop-start engine function meant to save lots of fuel (and the setting).
All in all, Zeldin’s actions communicate for themselves—and Schiff knew that too.
“You could give a rat’s ass about how much cancer your agency causes,” Schiff stated.
