Lee Zeldin

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

trying to accomplish the same.

We want to mitigate impacts as much as we can and hope that congressional Democrats decide to vote yes on what is a clean CR.

This is not something that is filled with a partisan wish list of conservatives.

This is just a funding bill to keep the government open.

Yes, sir.

We choose to both protect the environment and grow the economy.

It's not a binary choice.

There was this belief that in order to protect the environment, you had to strangulate entire sectors of the economy.

We, this year at the Trump EPA, reject that notion.

We are going through an amount of deregulation that when finalized in one year would be more deregulation than entire federal governments have done in the past across all federal agencies, across entire presidencies.

That's just that one agency here at the EPA.

One proposal alone, a proposed rescission of the 2009 Obama endangerment finding, if finalized, would be the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.

We are not just imposing our will on the American public and saying this is what we believe to be right.