Lee Zeldin

There are people who are congressional Democrats who are not going to be happy with our actions. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.

The death of the Green New Scam is upon us. The people across this country who have seen a Green New Deal that if fully implemented would cost tens of trillions of dollars, and people who cannot afford to be able to heat their home, to purchase a car, small businesses that are struggling to operate, people have been put out of work, and it's gonna end.

The EPA has now canceled over $22 billion worth of contracts. $2 billion going to this NGO that Stacey Abrams was tied to. They received only $100 in 2023. And then the Biden administration gave them $2 billion. The director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, saw his former employer get $5 billion. So $20 billion went to just eight NGOs, and they're all pass-throughs.

What you have is all these extra middlemen, they're taking their cut, and the taxpayer ends up getting screwed.

Our officers that we partner with in digital forensics are definitely seeing a spike in these crimes originating from Nigeria. some of the African countries where this is financially motivated sextortion. They'll post and pretend to be a teenage girl or a teenage boy asking for explicit images.

Once those images are exchanged, then the predator from one of these African nations will go in and threaten them.

More and more of these sex predators are going online, and they're becoming more sophisticated in the ways that they go after young people, minors that they're trying to exploit. What's brand new that we're seeing now is AI, and AI is becoming a very emerging threat for sextortion, where these predators can take an image of a fully clothed child and turn it into child sexual abuse material.

We really believe that every parent has to take this to be one of the most serious threats against their children of our time because predators are everywhere. And we used to teach our kids to watch out for strangers or people in white vans.

Now we have to worry about who is coming into our child's bedroom through their gaming console or through their iPhone or their iPad because these predators lurk online looking for kids that they can extort.

Hey, Georgia. Administrator Zeldin said Wednesday that the EPA would take 31 historic actions to shrink the scope of federal environmental policy and unleash American energy. Here's Zeldin.

Alongside this announcement came an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Zeldin wrote that the Trump administration is driving a dagger through the heart of climate change religion, and he declared it the death of the green news scam.

Not yet. There are still legal challenges to sort through and litigate. But Zeldin's announcement does give us an idea of how he plans to get that money back. It's not just that the money is what Zeldin calls a green slush fund. Here's him explaining that on Fox News.

Essentially, he suspects that the Biden administration bent or broke laws to get that much money paid out that quickly. It's worth noting that these grants are part of the largest green fund that the EPA has ever controlled, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. And these grants that it gave out went to recipients who also had never handled that much money.

It's not hard to see why Trump officials are skeptical about how these grants were paid out.

Right. This is how the Trump operation is moving right now. Outside of the EPA, there is a big shakeup going on at the IRS, where the Department of Government Efficiency has proposed cutting a fifth of the agency's workforce. Of course, this kind of major restructuring is facing roadblocks and legal challenges in the courts.

A Clinton-appointed federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to hire back tens of thousands of probationary employees. The judge called their removals a sham that violated rules around terminating federal employees.

Thanks for having me.

But that doesn't mean that it gets weaker. The number might end up getting lower, not higher.

There is already facilities there that are housing illegal immigrants, and it's the worst of the worst that are kept there. Many times those who are sent there are gang members, you know, people that have created terrorist activities in the United States of America and have been a real danger and threat to our people.

So what we'll be doing is utilizing our resources to expand the capacity there and to make sure that as we continue to do what President Trump has talked about and

in deporting people who are here illegally and are making our streets much more dangerous is that we're gonna utilize Guantanamo Bay to a more expansive purpose and that we will be going and putting resources there to make sure we have the space to getting people out of this country right away that will make sure our face, our country much more safe.

Thanks a lot, Charlie. It's great to be with you.

Our Powering the Great American Comeback initiative focuses on five pillars. Number one is President Trump talks about we need to be focused on pursuing clean air, land and water for all Americans. That's pillar number one. first and foremost. But there are several other pillars that the American public voted for last November that we take close to heart.

One is unleashing energy dominance, permitting reform, making America the AI capital of the world, bringing back American auto jobs. President Trump talks about ushering in a new golden age, a golden era of success, and that's something that we want to do our part. So this past Friday, President Trump at the Oval Office signed an executive order announcing his National Energy Dominance Council.

I was there with Secretary Wright, Secretary Burgum, Secretary Duffy, and others. President Trump doesn't want to spend time just four years trying to get all of these goals accomplished. He wants to get this stuff done in a matter of weeks and months. So with that level of urgency, we're all in to do our part here at EPA.

Hi, this is EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. One of my very top priorities at EPA is to be an excellent steward of your hard-earned tax dollars. There will be zero tolerance of any waste and abuse.

An extremely disturbing video circulated two months ago featuring a Biden EPA political appointee talking about how they were tossing gold bars off the Titanic, rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day. Shockingly, roughly 20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA.

And it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.

There's been so many developments just over the course of the last few days since that video came out. I'll give you an example of one. Just earlier today, I was reading a grant agreement On page one of a grant agreement, it was saying that the grant for $2 billion of funds.

On page six of that grant agreement, it says that the grantee has 90 days to complete a training called, you won't believe this, Charlie, it's called how to develop a budget. So 21 days to get out over $2 billion. 90 days to complete training on how to develop a budget. There is so much to this. I've read now the financial agent agreement, the account control agreements, the legal reviews.

They were amending account control agreements just days before inauguration day. So that video where that Biden EPA political appointee was talking about tossing, throwing gold bars off the Titanic, They actually were, not to what is just a few hundred thousand or a few million. We're talking about tens of billions of dollars, tens of billions of tax dollars.

I've been working with the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, and others. We want to make sure that there's full accountability and oversight established here. There's zero tolerance for waste and abuse in the Trump administration.

So the way that this was designed, once Congress appropriated tens of billions of dollars here to pass through the EPA, eight entities as primary recipients would receive all 20 billion dollars as a pass through. And then once that money was passed through those eight primary recipients, they would go to a bunch of sub-grantees. And in many respects, those sub-grantees were also pass-throughs.

And these were NGOs that were very well-connected and in some respects, extremely newly set up organizations where they have never handled anywhere close to this level of money to the point where you have to work into the grant agreement a training on how to develop a budget. So this is something that shouldn't have been set up from the get-go.

The entire scheme is something that is designed for waste and abuse. And get this, Charlie, once the money passes through those eight primary recipients and moves on to those sub-grantees, EPA isn't even a party to the account control agreement. EPA deliberately had stuff worded into the financial agent agreement and the original account control agreement to tie its hand behind its back.

And the dates of this stuff is wild. The financial agent agreement, September 18th. The account control agreement is November 1st. The legal review on all of this is done on Election Day, November 5th. And as I pointed out earlier, they were still amending these things January 13th, just a few days before the inauguration. Last I'll say is this, if you don't mind.

Up front, the $20 billion was given out. It wasn't like they gave out some tranche of money and then over the course of time, the grantees coming back to the government and the government is signing off based on past performances and accountability and proposals for the future. The government gave out the $20 billion in the onset and said, here you go.

So the total amount of the EPA, the numbers were over 15,000. And one of the things that I asked when I first came in, it was three weeks ago today, I wanted to know what the numbers looked like as far as attendance inside of headquarters over the course of the last year or so. So since January of 2024, the average attendance rate on Mondays and Fridays was about five to 8%.

The most that the EPA headquarters had on any single day, like the record attendance was that there was one day where attendance hit 37%. President Trump came in, he signed an executive order, it's time to come back to work. And I believe that it's important for productivity, for collaboration. It's important for us to do everything in our power to make the American public proud.

We're seeing it right now with EPA doing such a great job in California, completing a phase one hazardous material removal. President Trump gave us 30 days to get it done. We're going to hit that. We have over 1,500 workers on the ground. EPA is in Western North Carolina. We're in East Palestine, Ohio. We're in Maui and Flint.

And now after the flooding that just took place in Kentucky, we just received a FEMA mission assignment to help with that removal, and we are on it. So we have a lot of important work here at EPA. We want to make the American public proud.

Great point. President Trump in that executive order that he signed on Friday, created this National Energy Dominance Council where we had multiple agencies all standing there represented by myself, Secretaries Wright and Burgum and Duffy and other members of the cabinet there to announce this collaboration, this partnership.

President Trump spoke about Constitution Pipeline, which was stopped by New York utilizing an EPA rule which needs to get looked at because this was a really important project. And as President Trump pointed out, can get done at this point in less than a year. So President Trump wants to green light it.

We need to ensure that we are not holding back that level of progress and that we are in touch with American innovation and that we understand that over the course of the last couple of decades, emissions have gone down here in the US, that we provide these forms of energy cleaner than so many other countries all around the world.

And America sits on all of these important resources that we will tap into in a way that is better for the environment than so many other places around the world. So if you care about the environment, We shouldn't be relying on all these countries elsewhere. Let's do it here at home.

And not only will we be doing a better job in protecting the environment, it's important for our national security, it's important for our economy, and we'll be delivering on what the American public demanded last November 5th.

This is something that President Trump, he didn't waste any time on, and he wants EPA and the Department of Energy to work together. So at EPA, there are voluntary standards created through something called the WaterSense program, which we have already started working on overhauling.

It could start as voluntary, but when government starts partnering with the private sector and these different companies start adopting these federal Biden-era standards, Then all of a sudden, the implementation with the product that American consumers are out there purchasing ends up being adapted to what the Biden EPA had set out.

So President Trump wants us to look at the standards, which is what we're doing. He wants us to overhaul them, which we are. And there are rules that the Department of Energy are looking to overhaul. Secretary Wright has already gotten his people cranking on all of that. So we're not wasting any time.

President Trump said this is a top priority for him because it's an important priority for you, the American people. And for us, Secretary Wright at DOE and for myself at EPA, we're all in to do our part.

For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.

Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

And Chairman Capito, that last part of your question is key for different agencies to be able to work with each other, collaborating with each other, and also for agencies to be able to collaborate with Congress on any opportunities that Congress sees to pursue permitting reform as well.

As far as EPA jurisdiction goes, we see a role of the EPA, for example, as it relates to environmental impact statements. There are different issues where there will be opportunities for the EPA to follow its obligations under the law. There's a possibility that Congress might choose to make changes to the law on items that are under EPA jurisdiction.

I would look forward to doing my part to make sure that the EPA is not holding up any opportunities to be able to pursue sound applications that otherwise would be and should be approved.

Yes, Chairman Capito, I know how much of a priority this is. You've been outspoken on this issue. It's my commitment to work with you as soon as, if confirmed, as soon as I'm in that position, I'd welcome that opportunity.

Senator Whitehouse, as I've stated earlier, my desire, if confirmed as EPA administrator, is to increase productivity of the EPA. I want to be able to help lead this agency in a way that all of you on both sides of the aisle can be proud of for us to be accountable and transparent. I want maximum collaboration, not just with Congress, but internally within the EPA.

I've been hugely impressed with the level of talent stepping up to serve at EPA. And that is the pressure that I am feeling at this moment, is to bring out the best of EPA to make sure that we are fulfilling our mission of protecting public health.

Senator, I don't need any extra time for reflection on that one. There is no person who has ever provided any level of support to me or anyone else who has any special influence with me. When I was in the Army, I wore around my dog tags, the seven Army values. The acronym is leadership, loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage.

It is important for me to have always been able to approach this position with a clear conscience to make decisions that I can live with for my entire life. There is no dollar, large or small, that can influence the decisions that I make who has access to me, and how I am ruling in my obligations under the law.

Senator, I'm happy to enthusiastically answer that question on any day on the spot, and I would never need any extra amount of time of reflection. Well, good luck standing up to these guys, because they're going to come at you.

I'll take five, I guess. Thank you, sir.

For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.

Oil and gas leases and explore for additional production of oil and gas. The EPA has written one size fits all solutions. We are not the majors and we are stripper well producers. And I just want your commitment to work with the industry, these small producers to find right-sized regulations for the circumstances that they're in.

Senator, I would welcome an opportunity to travel to your state to meet with them, whether it's at your office or elsewhere. I want to know about all of your priorities, including this one. but also to make sure that anyone who could provide any type of insight that can make me better informed to make better decisions, that I welcome any of those opportunities for conversations and collaboration.

I think that's a wonderful offer on your part, and I'm very grateful for it. I sometimes am reluctant to ask every nominee that comes before me, would you please come visit Kansas? And you volunteered. So I'm appreciative of that. And I would tell you, I can't imagine the...

the opportunity that people in that industry would see to have the capability of talking to somebody like you directly in a state like Kansas. So thank you. And we'll get on your schedule, although you have to say once confirmed. So I look forward to that. In a different vein of energy production, I've created with my colleague, Senator Bozeman and others, a sustainable aviation fuel caucus.

Kansas and Wichita in particular is the air capital of the world. We produce many more general aviation aircraft than anybody. We manufacture with thousands of employees working in aviation and aerospace. And I want to bring together the opportunity to bring the agricultural aspects of Kansas together with the aviation aspects and pursue the development of SAF, sustainable aviation fuel.

I wanted to know, I guess the question would be, we need your help in pursuing opportunities. Okay, let's go back. I was told it was really contentious.

I believe that climate change is real, as I told you.

I will foster a collaborative culture within the agency. supporting career staff who have dedicated themselves to this mission. I strongly believe we have a moral responsibility to be good stewards of our environment for generations to come.

Happy to. Thanks for having me.

The EPA is going to continue, no matter what, in doing environmental science. We have these core statutory obligations that we must fulfill. And the environmental science work that we do here, the applied science work that we do here, are very important and one that agency employees take great pride in.

Now, as I talk to individual offices, they have a desire to be able to do more science within their offices. So, by having someone who is a scientist in the Office of Research and Development get moved to the Office of Chemicals or the Office of Water, now some people who might be very simple-minded or just looking for a rhetorical edge in Congress, they might want to say,

that we are getting rid of science by moving a scientist from one office to another, even though they're still doing an environmental science mission. And we're gonna be more thoughtful. We're thinking past all of that rhetoric. We're gonna make sure we're fulfilling all of our statutory obligations.

And I got to tell you, quite frankly, some of our statutory obligations, we inherited some massive backlogs because we need to be doing more science faster. And we have great, talented scientists to help with that. But as far as what kind of moves might get made, we're going through the process of being very deliberate and thoughtful on it. And we have not yet reached any decisions.

You got it. Happy to. Take care.

No, EPA has important core functions. We have the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act. So these historic landmark laws that have been passed over the course of the last few decades with strong bipartisan support have created statutory obligations on the part of the EPA to ensure that Americans have access to clean air, land, and water.

And our priority right now is to pursue our Powering Our Great American Comeback initiative, And we're not slowing down.

I think it's very important to understand that protecting the environment is not a binary choice with growing the economy. And too often regulations have strangulated the economy and going after industries wholesale. Some people talk about moving power from some fossil fuel production of base load power to sources like wind.

And they'll talk about wind as if it's not an intermittent source of energy. They'll talk about wind as if it's a replacement for base load power. And when you look at the current grid, the current supply, the current demand, And you kind of play it out in your own mind as to what it looks like if you shut down all these other industries wholesale.

The people who will suffer the most are the Americans who can least afford it. So what happens as you're going through 2024? There's a high stakes election that's approaching, which came up this past November 5th. And Americans decide what they want their priorities to be.

And the number one issue that Americans were talking about was a strong, intense desire for the federal government to do a better job in helping to grow the economy. What we need to do is to make sure that we are implementing the laws that are on the books, putting rules and regulations in place that are following the law.

So the United States Supreme Court in the decision called Loper Bright said that these agencies like the EPA can't just create our own laws where there is vague language in statute. And where agencies do so, the Supreme Court, as we've seen, will overturn those actions.

So for us, it's very important for us to honor the rule of law, to advance cooperative federalism, to follow our obligations under the law, and to understand, as the Supreme Court outlined in Loperbright, that we should not be as an agency going rogue and strangulating the economy just because we all have a desire to protect the environment.

Listen, what our priority here is clean air, land, and water for all Americans. Cleaner, safer, healthier land, air, and water across this country. It's a priority of President Trump. It's a priority of the American public. It has very strong bipartisan support across this country. And ultimately, the EPA should not be legislating what a modification of the Clean Air Act may look like.

We have laws that are on the books. Our job is to implement those laws.

That's a decision for Congress. The EPA is not lobbying Congress for changes to any laws right now. And when Congress changes a law, they could go in one direction or the other. It's our job to follow the law. But if the law gets changed, we stand by, ready to do our job to implement it.

So this is part of a regulatory process that the agency is going to be going through. This is one of the announcements that you just referenced in looking at a 2009 decision called the endangerment finding.

And the endangerment finding was defined many years later as saying carbon dioxide is a pollutant, carbon dioxide endangers public health. But that's not exactly what the endangerment finding came to as a conclusion. What they said was that carbon dioxide, when mixed with these other five well-mixed gases called the greenhouse gases, that they contribute to climate change, not cause, contribute.

How much? That's not defined. They just say that it's above a de minimis amount and that climate change endangers public health. So we will go through that process. And as we get further along in the process, then we start making conclusions and decisions as to how to go forward on this policy.

Yet this is something that the EPA has not engaged in a reconsideration of at all since 2009. And also, when they were going through the 2009 endangerment finding process, there was not a consideration of the impacts of what they were doing. And there has since been a reduction of emissions since 2009. There's also been advancements in American innovation since then, advancements in science.

And all of these developments since 2009 obviously were not factored in when that decision was made back then.

This is the rulemaking process that I am not going to be able to prejudge. I do have opinions that I've shared publicly, and some I've just reiterated, actually, in my answer to your last question. But as far as what that decision will be of the agency and of the administrator formally, that's something that I'll have to wait until we get further along in the process before I'm allowed to

reach a conclusion and have a judgment and a decision.

You know what's amazing about your great question is that when we made our announcement just over three weeks ago, there were people who were responding to the announcement showing pictures of you know, water quality in 1969 and saying that if you change these rules that, you know, America's land, air, and water are going to go back a half a century.

We're talking about rules that were enacted over the course of the last year or two. So what we announced just over three weeks ago, almost every single regulation that we discussed having a reconsideration of are regulations that are not from the 70s. They're not from the 80s. They're from the last 12 to 24 months.

Well, I just signed off on one for the Delaware River Basin.

And this was a decision for me as the administrator to make, and I could have went one in a couple of different directions. What decision did I make? It was the one to have the stricter standards put on these plants to improve water quality. So that's an example. I'm about to go to South California,

where there's a big issue across boundary with Mexico, in Tijuana, where they are dumping raw sewage. It's a complicated issue. For decades, raw sewage has been coming across the border into Southern California.

Yes. I mean, you have a lot of people who are living just across the border. They have to see it. They have to smell it. They live with it. They don't want to have to live with it. And they've been looking for action for a long time. And I think now is the time. What can you do about it? There's a few different things.

One is there's funding from the USMCA, $300 million as part of that agreement to build a treatment facility, which is right now going through the design phase. There is another pot of money that is doing infrastructure projects on both the US side and the Mexican side. While it is on the Mexican side, this is extraordinarily important for US impacts.

This is something that I've heard from the president and others. There's a lot of concern for and making sure that Mexico stops participating in this activity. So, and by the way, that's just starting to scratch the surface.

Well, this is not an issue that is tied up in a tariff negotiation. This is something that there actually are agreements right now. that we just need Mexico to follow through on their commitments. And that's not something that we are expecting them to go back on. As a matter of fact, what my hope is, is that we can get Mexico to do more. We need Mexico to do more.

It's important for Americans on our side. And by the way, I was talking about going to visit Southern California, which is in Region 9 of the EPA. They did a fantastic job in the wildfire response. After the January wildfires, the president signed an executive order giving EPA 30 days to complete our phase one hazardous material removal of over 13,000 properties.

And we ended up getting it done in under 30 days.

I mean, I will tell you that there's a concern as it relates to forest management, prescribed burns, being prepared with water. I was just also in Maui where they dealt with the consequences of a wildfire that quickly went over Lahaina and some other communities.

As it relates to being prepared for that, being able to mitigate for that next wildfire and the damage that it can cause, there's a lot of topics that are being discussed as far as what actually caused these particular wildfires, not just what gets lit, but how it spreads and what communities can do to be prepared.

Great to be with you, Megan.

Yeah, and that was actually four years ago yesterday that we started that campaign. We started 19 months to the day before the election. We worked hard. It's a big state, but we made the rounds and found that there were a whole lot of independents and Democrats who were prioritizing issues that transcended partisan loyalty, and they wanted to save the state, and we were happy to do it.

And things happen for a reason. It's funny how things work out, and while the silver lining of that campaign was how we were able to keep the House for the two years, the final two years of President Biden's time in office. Here we are now. And obviously, I wouldn't have this opportunity to help fight for a strong, great president and a golden age of America serving in his cabinet.

If I was up in Albany, I'd be watching from there as opposed to being here.

It shows how quickly people can forget. He's out there talking about issues as if he wasn't the governor when so many of these laws were getting passed to protect criminals across the state. And now he's out there advocating for public safety as if he wasn't the governor when they were pushing for cashless bail and these other laws like raise the age and

and qualified immunity, which was gaining legs under his watch, and all these members of the parole board who've been releasing cop killers, and you get this clean slate. He ends up resigning, and then a few years later, he's treated as if none of that ever happened. And the irony is that it's not just that he isn't owning his past record, he's taking the opposite position.

I think it's just important for voters to get informed on their options and to not forget because we've been here once and you know, don't come back to us a year after Andrew Coleman gets elected mayor of New York city and, and act as if, uh, his own record didn't give you a forewarning.

Yeah, and during the final days and weeks of Andrew Cuomo's time as governor, there was this increased impeachment push amongst the ranks of the Democrats who were serving in the state legislature. And they were talking about it as if the only cause of this were the sexual assault, abuse, harassment allegations.

And meanwhile, we can't forget that what actually was taking root at even a bigger level at that time was an investigation that came out of the Federal Department of Justice. You had thousands of families. You mentioned Janice Dean and her family. and what they went through. And there were thousands of families who wanted answers and justice for their deceased loved ones.

And I think that was part of the calculation of some of these members of the state legislature who were coming out in favor of trying to get Andrew Cuomo out under the cover of some of these complaints that were being brought forward by women who also didn't want to talk about the deadly nursing home order and cover up.

Right. And of course, as I was going through Albany Law School, there was a tremendous amount of pride. And in the years after I graduated for this famous alum, who I have the pleasure of being able to speak to right now, live on air.

But yeah, and actually just before I was at Albany Law School, I was at the State University of New York at Albany, which I believe that your family might have some roots there as well. Yeah, my dad taught there. Exactly.

Yeah, absolutely. I had an opportunity to come back to Albany for four years when I was in the state Senate, six years in the Army Reserve. But some of the best memories of life were during those years of college and law school doing Army ROTC at that time. And Albany isn't what we remember it. This is the same for a lot of these small cities across all of upstate, as you well know.

Unfortunately, it seems like their heydays are in the past, and a lot of that are the consequences of these decisions that won't tap into economic opportunity, that won't reduce the cost of living So these jobs end up going, these big manufacturing companies that I'm sure you remember aren't there anymore.

And President Trump talks about it a lot because as you're a New Yorker remembering your roots, President Trump has experienced the same thing. And he scratches his head wondering in the southern tier of New York, how can it be that we don't extract natural gas where right across the border in Pennsylvania, Republicans and Democrats together All got the memo.

They're tapping into it and they're prosperous for it. So unfortunately, I think Albany and some of these other cities aren't what we remember it as not that long ago.

And you can feel it being in the room there with these workers. They've been waiting a long time to have people out there like President Trump defending, sticking up for their livelihood, for their family, for their community.

And if you're sitting around a candidate and it's a campaign team, you're looking at the latest poll and you're trying to figure out the right message, strangulating the economy is never a good idea for anyone around that table. And if someone is naive, dumb enough to talk about it, you would expect the rest of them to try to stop them. And in this case, President Trump gets elected.

He campaigned on this issue. So a mandate was earned and he won big, not just the electoral college, but also the popular vote. And President Trump comes in, he declares an emergency, an energy emergency, signs an executive order, creates a National Energy Dominance Council with also Doug Burgum from the Department of Interior, Chris Wright from the Department of Energy, myself and other agencies.

And we're working together to unleash energy dominance and permitting reform making America the AI capital of the world. All of these priorities and working together. Four weeks ago today, EPA announced what amounts to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the country.

One agency, largest deregulatory action ever, trillions of dollars of regulatory relief coming over the course of 2025. For which industries? Give me a couple examples. Yeah, so coal. Yeah, coal is certainly one. It's a big one, but you also have it impacting mobile source energy vehicles.

You have other forms of stationary source energy that Hillary Clinton was talking about in that segment to get rid of. And what's so important to understand what Hillary Clinton was saying was the concept of getting rid of baseload power and replacing it with what is intermittent sources of energy.

When Hillary Clinton says get rid of coal and natural gas and whatnot, she is, and talking about moving towards these other forms, you're talking about something like wind. Now, wind is an intermittent source. You can use it to substitute, I'm sorry, to supplement your baseload power, but it's not a substitute for it.

So these deregulatory actions that we announced are with regards to a number of Biden era regulations from the last year or two of his time in office, That didn't just accidentally result in these companies needing to go out of business. It was intentionally drafted to destroy these coal plants. It is to put them out of business.

Amen. And during the Obama administration, he was putting out regulations out of the Biden EPA that were intentionally trying to get rid of coal. President Trump gets elected. He comes into office. He reverses it. Supreme Court weighs in in West Virginia versus EPA. They say that what the President Obama EPA did was unconstitutional.

President Biden comes in and then he goes back to what Obama was trying to do by design, getting rid of these sources of energy to force America to move towards wind power.

Now, what that does is it harms the economy, the people who can least afford it, Americans who are faced with the decision of whether or not to heat their home, fill up their fridge with groceries, get prescription drugs that they need, instead of saying all of the above, they have to pick and choose. If you want to get an electric vehicle, go get an electric vehicle.

But maybe for your neighbor, they don't want an electric vehicle. They want a gas powered vehicle. One of the other consequences of this energy policy is that it's eliminating choice. In a state like New York, they would ban gas hookups on new construction statewide. We were just talking about how they wouldn't allow the safe extraction of natural gas.

They won't approve all sorts of essential new pipelines to transport these sources of energy. This is all by design. President Trump comes in, and when he talks about a solution for energy, we're talking about national security, the environment, the economy, considering it all. We need to protect the environment. and grow the economy. This isn't a binary choice anymore.

All of the above also means choosing both protecting the environment and protecting the economy, protecting opportunity with a golden age for all of America. This is the path, I believe strongly, not the one that seeks to suffocate the economy, cutting out all these sources of energy with no substitute.

The last thing I would say is that some of these Democrats are now talking about how they agree with President Trump. that we should make America the AI capital world. Well, how the heck do you think that's possible if you keep getting rid of all of these baseload power?

Right, and at these different agencies, we're implementing President Trump's guidance to us that he doesn't want any more permits for any of these windmills. Now, there have been a lot of windmills over the course of not just months and years, but even decades that have gone up around America.

And I think that there's somewhat of a difference in the way that some Democratic governors talk about this versus others. We've spent a lot of time talking about how this is not a substitute for baseload power. Some Democratic governors agree with that and they say that out loud.

Well, they need to get the memo to the rest of the people out there who are articulating this as if it's a substitute because it's not. As far as some of those windmills that are already up or they're much further along with approvals already secured, that's not something that I received any guidance from President Trump that's different from what he's already put out.

We stand by, ready to implement his agenda. That's our job, is to implement the Trump mandate. And that's why there haven't been any new approvals since he put that EO out.

I've canceled now $22 billion worth of grants. And to give you an idea of how that compares to the agency's budget, our operating budget is about $10 billion a year. Yet somehow through congressional Democrats and their Inflation Reduction Act and some of their other appropriations through Congress, over $60 billion was obligated and spent through EPA in 2024.

And that number is going to go down by over 65% in 2025. So $22 billion worth of grants. Now, you'll hear terms from Democrats like environmental justice or climate change And they'll define it in a way that there might be Republicans and independents that would agree with.

You say environmental justice, a great argument to be made in support of it is that there are communities that have been left behind and they need funding and support, attention in order to deal with it. It's long overdue. OK, a lot of us can agree with a definition like that. Here's the problem. In the name of environmental justice, they will get a dollar appropriated.

And instead of spending that dollar to actually remediate that environmental concern, they will spend the money to some left wing activist group to tell us that we need to spend a dollar remediating an environmental issue. So we have been canceling all of these grants. I'll give you one example. $50 million went to the Climate Justice Alliance.

They say that climate justice runs through a free Palestine. I come into office, I cancel that grant. Yes, Climate Justice Alliance, said that through $50 million, we're not even talking about spending $100,000, which that would be too much. They say that climate justice runs through a free Palestine.

I say that if you're gonna spend $50 million in the name of environmental justice, the $50 million should be spent remediating environmental issues in communities, again, not sending it to left-wing organizations. I'll tell you, one of the other issues that we've seen in the bigger picture is with $20 billion, through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund created in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Democrats parked $20 billion at an outside bank to give to eight pass-through NGOs. Many of them were brand new. The $2 billion NGO that is connected to Stacey Abrams, President Trump talks about a lot. They only received $100 in 2023. They got $2 billion in 2024.

Self-dealing, conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients, and less EPA oversight than what we need for the taxpayer with all sorts of different facts and evidence to back it up. And yet congressional Democrats in the media, others in the media want to make believe like there are no problems with any of that. We canceled that $20 billion.

Her organization received $500 million of the $2 billion. What qualifies this NGO to receive $2 billion? It didn't exist before this Inflation Reduction Act. They only received $100, and then they get $2 billion? Now, when the grant agreement was drafted by EPA, they put a provision on page seven that says that they had 90 days to complete training called how to develop a budget.

This isn't some standard requirement that went to every contract all of the time. This was a decision by the EPA. that this organization needed to complete a training called how to develop a budget. If they need to still complete that training to learn how to develop a budget, how do you give them $2 billion? On top of it, it gets even worse.

On page one of the grant agreement, it says that they have 21 days to start spending the $2 billion. So let me get this right. You have 21 days to start spending $2 billion but then you're given an additional 69 days to complete your how to develop a budget training. It's wild. So EPA knew that this was something that we should have a problem with, that these folks had qualification challenges.

The EPA said they couldn't spend the money themselves, so they had to park it at this outside bank. And the problem is once the $2 billion goes through the NGO, EPA isn't even a party to the account control agreements after that. EPA loses all sorts of oversight where I can't sit before you and answer all sorts of basic questions about what happens to the money.

Stacey Abrams just wants us to take her word for it. But I don't know what in her qualification says that we should just be sending over $2 billion to her and her friends to let them spend as they wish with reduced oversight. One other example was $5 billion. went to another organization that was the former employer of the director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for the Biden EPA.

The self-dealing and conflicts of interest included Democratic donors, former Biden and Obama officials. And as you pointed out here at the top of the segment, playing that clip of a Biden EPA official, it was in their words that they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic. Gold bars are tax dollars. Off the Titanic meant they knew they were wasting it.

Yeah, it's kind of all of the above. It's a green slush fund to their friends, getting out the door as part of their agenda before President Trump gets sworn into office. And that's why I am so upset and concerned and frustrated and motivated to do something about the abuse of these terms, climate change and environmental justice.

Don't tell me that you're advocating for some community that needs to have clean air, land, and water, and in order to get there, you need to remediate environmental concern and then spend a dollar not on fixing that, but instead give it to your friends.

There are people who are talking about climate change in a way that is trying to justify what is tens of billions of dollars or into the trillions of dollars if you wanna talk about the Green New Deal. And they don't care about the fact that the people who can least afford it are the ones who get harmed the most.

They're not respecting choice and the ability of the American consumer to decide what kind of a vehicle to have, how they want to heat their home, or to be even able to afford to be able to pay the bills for this stuff. So this is about getting back to common sense.

And I don't want, I don't think that the wool should be pulled over the eyes of Americans, Americans across the spectrum, conservatives, moderates, liberals, Republicans, Democrats, independents. We all want a clean environment. We all want clean air, land and water.

Stop trying to turn it into a wedge issue where you have to choose to either go with whatever Bernie Sanders is proposing or you're an outcast who wants to, you know, change the air back to the way it was, you know, a half a century ago.

Yeah, that's amazing news to hear about that reaction. I think that it's an important message to the rest of the world. And I think that we've already learned this lesson the first time President Trump was in office. He wanted to renegotiate NAFTA. And he was told that that was impossible. You weren't going to be able to get it done. And we ended up with the USMCA, which was better.

He was engaged in tough negotiations with China. And he was told that that was impossible. There's no way that you're gonna be able to break this impasse that's been around for a long time. And we were making tremendous progress. And then of course, COVID hit and that impacted the trade between our countries. President Trump is not looking at this stuff one move at a time.

When it comes to trade, he's really thought through it and he's talked about it for decades. So for President Trump, I think it's something that he's earned more trust and faith as it relates to trade. We're dealing with these deficits, these trade imbalances, and I believe that our American economy is gonna grow stronger for it. The message to these other countries,

is to work with us, to do your part on your end, and it will be the best for everyone. A rising tide lifts all boats, and that certainly applies to trade and the economy.

It was actually entirely about shooting first coming from his report. And he should have done his homework. And quite frankly, if he's the expert, he should know because this is a big regulation and it's called Quad OBC. And he doesn't even know that we're talking O's. He's talking about them as if they're zeros. We're citing existing text. And this is what we're going back and looking at.

So for him, he decided that this was going to be an easy fact check because he didn't know what he was talking about. And there was a whole lot of arrogance here. It's important for people to do their homework.

We have been attacked with this deregulatory announcement and in a way where people will post pictures, videos of land, water from the 60s or 70s, and they'll claim that this is what we're gonna go back to. We're talking about regulation, from the last year or two.

If the Biden EPA puts a new regulation in in 2023 and 2024, and we're talking about going back and revisiting it, if you wanna be accurate, post pictures and video from a year or two ago. You can't go back to showing us water quality from the 70s and say that's what's gonna happen if we change some regulation from 2024.

The biggest surprise is how much we can do at once. You know, I was coming in here. I knew that there was a lot of work that we were going to have to tackle. We have a four year term to get it done. And you wonder how much can you get done in the first 100 days in the first year?

And everything that we're talking about here, whether it's canceling $22 billion worth of grants, it's the deregulatory actions that were discussed. There's a whole lot of different actions that we are undertaking to better protect the environment that we're proud of. The hazardous material removal response in Los Angeles after the wildfires is a perfect example of that.

The Superfund cleanups that we're involved in across the country. the good work to protect human health and the environment and power the great American comeback, we're not picking and choosing what to tackle first. We want to fix everything, and we want to do it right now. It's been a surprise just how much we're able to do it once, and I'm all for it. I'm here for it.

I'm happy to be and honored to be part of it, part of this cabinet, which I think President Trump did a great job filling with talent. And here at EPA, we have all the talent we need to make America proud.

I've been told the endangerment finding is considered the Holy Grail of the climate change religion. For me, the US Constitution and the laws of this nation will be strictly interpreted and followed. No exceptions.