On Tuesday, Scripps News spoke with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin about speeding up environmental permitting, investments in American businesses and the EPA's mandate to reduce waste, fraud and abuse.
"I said that if confirmed, I would make it a high priority to ensure that we were getting to the bottom of where tens of billions of dollars were going before we got there," Zeldin said, referencing evidence that the EPA under President Joe Biden was improperly distributing funds.
"And now the Biden EPA — they were recorded talking about how they were 'tossing gold bars off the Titanic.' I was asked to find what they were talking about, to try to recover those tax dollars."
Zeldin says he thinks the American public wants the EPA to balance environmental and economic concerns at the agency.
"We want to fulfill all of our statutory obligations at the same time, on the policy front, trillions of dollars of regulations have gone out in a way that in many cases, we're purposefully targeting aspects of the economy to strangulate them out of existence. And that's not what the American public voted for last November. They want us to be cognizant of their economic pain. They want us to apply common sense. They want us to both protect the environment and grow the economy..."
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Scripps News asked about reducing environmental permitting times for businesses, an important focus for the nation's top environmental regulator so far this year and one that will heavily impact the energy sector.
"At EPA, we are going to be an agency that is a member of the National Energy Dominance Council with a lot of equities in the approval process, to be efficient, to try to be timely, as timely as humanly possible, to be able to do our job and to be able to get to 'yes,' whenever and however possible," Zeldin said. "I think too often you have bureaucrats in different agencies, maybe at different levels of government, where they try to gum up the works."
"The goal, obviously, that we're communicating to all these people who will invest in America is that we want to help make that investment in America. We want to make it easier. We want to build confidence in making that investment, to add more certainty and for it to cost less and take less time," Zeldin said.
