Lee Zeldin

Well, one, as you saw with Congresswoman Clark over the course of these last couple of days, talking about how they acknowledge congressional Democrats that this is causing American families to suffer.

And she refers to it as leverage that needs to be used in this negotiation.

So there is an acknowledgment that this does cause suffering as time goes by and, you know, snap payments start to be missed, paychecks start to be missed.

I think more Americans will be feeling it in the days and the weeks to come.

The other thing, too, is that this is a shutdown where the Republicans keep voting to have the government open and it's the Democrats.

Democrats voting no.

I think if it was reversed, some of these outlets like New York Times, it might be above the fold front page every single day that the Democrats are having votes to have the government open and the Republicans would be voting no.

So I think if the shoe was on the other foot, we'd see different media coverage.

For us here at the EPA, we operate off of a lot of carryover funding.

It's not necessarily a fiscal year that ends on September 30th.

We have funding that multiple years.

We had a furlough that kicked in over 4,000 people this past Monday.

As we move forward in coming weeks, that will go up.

If we had a total lapse of funding, that would be about an 89% furlough here at the agency.

And the more you furlough this agency, the more that we are unable to fulfill our statutory obligations and work to implement the people's agenda of ensuring clean air, land, and water for all Americans, which gets to our core mission.

Yeah, that's such a great point, Ben.

We're trying to minimize, mitigate the impact of the shutdown as much as possible.

When I said that we just had this furlough kick in of about 4,000 employees, this isn't something that we enthusiastically did on October 1st.

We prevented it as long as we possibly could, as long as there was funding that was available.

a total lapse of funding as i pointed out would be an 89 reduction in the services that we provide i mean listen we could we could attempt to do that right now but we're trying to mitigate the damage of this shutdown on the american people that's an example of one agency looking to do its part we're hearing the same thing from other agencies