Whitehouse Calls for Leadership Change at EPA

In 'Time to Wake Up' speech on Senate Floor, Senator Whitehouse detailed EPA Administrator Zeldin's lies to Congress and the American people as he serves fossil fuel polluters

Whitehouse was joined on the Senate floor by Senator Markey

Washington, DC - Last night, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) delivered his 305^th speech urging his colleagues to wake up to the threat of climate change, during which he called for a change in leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Senator Whitehouse presented a review of thousands of pages of sworn court filings, internal EPA emails and other communications, and documents produced under the Freedom of Information Act demonstrating that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin likely lied, including once under oath, before two Congressional Committees in May of 2025 when he made claims about an "individualized review" of Congressionally obligated EPA grants totaling over $1.7 billion.

"All the evidence points plainly in one direction: Zeldin didn't follow the law-he lied about having followed the law. But why? Why lie about that? Here's why. Trump demands two things from his Cabinet: one, fawning flattery; and two, slavish implementation of his political instructions. Zeldin admitting that he messed up the grant cancellation process would batter EPA's chances in litigation. He'd be guilty of failure to execute on Trump's big donors' political agenda. He'd have to face the White House's ire," said Senator Whitehouse in last night's speech. "So Administrator Zeldin became Lyin' Lee, desperate to keep Trump's illegal plans alive to carry out the political purge of clean-energy grants, all to satisfy that Audience of One by rewarding Trump's thuggish fossil fuel kingmakers."

"Today, I am calling on Lee Zeldin to go. It is bad enough that he has weaponized the EPA to do the bidding of the giant fossil fuel and chemical corporations that donated to Trump's campaign," continued Whitehouse last night. "But if he can't be relied upon to tell the simple truth to Congress, to answer simple questions honestly, how can anyone in this body believe him? Or is the new rule that lying is okay if it's done for polluters?"

U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) also called for Zeldin to step down.

"EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has failed in his duty to protect American families from the harms of pollution and climate change. As part of Trump's corrupt bargain with the fossil fuel industry, Zeldin has gutted protections for clean air and water, rolled back oversight of dangerous chemicals, and overturned the endangerment finding, the legal bedrock for federal climate action. As he puts us on the fast track to climate disaster, he is making families sicker, polluting our country, and driving up health care and energy costs-all to benefit Trump's billionaire donors. Zeldin is a disgrace, and it is beyond time for him to go," wrote Leader Schumer.

Whitehouse was joined on the Senate floor by Senator Ed Markey (D-MA).

"When someone's track record is as full of failure as Lee Zeldin's, they should flunk out of the class. He has failed to carry out the basic mission of the agency he was appointed to lead-to protect human health and the environment-and has instead ensured that under his leadership, all the EPA has protected are the polluters. For kids struggling with asthma, for moms worried about toxic chemicals in their food, for young people worried about their future under climate change, and for all Americans who deserve a safe and healthy environment: Lee Zeldin must go," said Senator Markey.

On Tuesday, more than 160 climate, environmental justice, and public health organizations also called for EPA Administrator Zeldin's resignation or removal, citing his systematic dismantling of the agency's core mission to protect public health and the environment. The advocates, led by the Climate Action Campaign and Moms Clean Air Force, released a letter signed by 163 organizations demanding Administrator Zeldin leave or be fired.

Whitehouse, Markey and 31 other Senators previously called out the Trump Administration for unlawfully rescinding Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) grants. Whitehouse previously condemned EPA's illegal termination of the Solar for All program and its illegal attempts to use the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as justification for clawing back already obligated funds. He has also led colleagues in demanding answers from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin about the agency's lawless crusade to terminate GGRF, including a previous freeze on Solar for All funding. The lawmakers have received no substantive responses to those inquiries. Administrator Zeldin gaslit the American public, fabricating claims of fraud in those programs without producing any evidence, and he lacks the legal authority to terminate agreements with GGRF grantees in all three programs absent a clear record of waste, fraud, or abuse-something multiple courts have said he has failed to provide. Litigation against the Trump Administration for freezing and attempting to terminate legally obligated GGRF grants remains ongoing.

Ranking Member Whitehouse and Leader Schumer previously led the entire caucus in opposing the EPA's proposed rollback of the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding. The endangerment finding repeal was finalized on February 12, 2026, in what Whitehouse and Schumer called a "shameful abdication" of the agency's duty to protect the American people, and one that will "harm Americans' health, homes, and economic well-being."

The text of Whitehouse's speech, as-prepared for delivery, is below and video of the floor speech is available here.

Mr. President, I rise for the 305th time with my increasingly weathered, yet ever more relevant "Time to Wake Up" chart to warn this chamber about a corrupt danger to our country. A danger powered by fossil fuel industry money, orchestrated by myriad dark money front groups, and now executed at the highest levels of a corrupted Executive Branch.

In previous speeches, I described the Four Phases of Climate Denial.

1. Phase One: bury the evidence.
2. Phase Two: lie about the evidence.
3. Phase Three: flood our politics with dark money to protect fossil fuels' pollute-for-free business model.
4. And now Phase Four, the most dangerous phase yet: weaponize the government itself to attack clean energy, protect polluters, and steamroll lawful process.

Today's story is about a lie. We are now so deep in Phase Four that heads of executive agencies feel entitled to lie to Congress if it helps carry out President Trump's fossil-fuel-captured agenda.

Notice what distinguishes Phase Four from the earlier phases. Phase One involved buried evidence in secret. Phase Two involved lies filtered through think-tank reports with plausible deniability for the fossil fuel interests behind the front groups. Phase Three flooded politics with dark money through anonymous front groups. All hidden.

But Phase Four-using the government itself to execute the polluters' agenda against the law, against Congress, and against the courts-must be defended out loud, under oath, before judges, and before this body. In Phase Four, the lying becomes official. Brazen. On the record.

There once was a time when lying to Congress mattered. When swearing an oath to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" meant exactly that. When, if someone lied to Congress, even members of the liar's own party would hold them to account.

Unfortunately, those days are gone. But truth should still matter. So today, I present to you the story of Lyin' Lee Zeldin. I'll show you what happened when EPA Administrator Zeldin came before two Congressional Committees in May of last year. Our review of thousands of pages of sworn court filings, internal EPA emails and other communications, and documents produced under the Freedom of Information Act proves it.

Let me walk you through the saga.

At the beginning of his term, Trump-following the Project 2025 blueprint-instructed agencies to cut off funding that his fossil fuel donors disfavored. Remember, Candidate Trump promised Big Oil a massive return on their investment if they'd donate $1 billion dollars to get him elected. The companies indeed donated massively, hundreds of millions, and Trump dutifully provided the payback, in innumerable policies benefitting fossil fuel and kneecapping its clean energy competitors. The heavy hand of government was put to work for fossil fuel.

As soon as Zeldin arrived at EPA, he diligently obeyed President Trump by freezing and then terminating as many as 781 grants with awards totaling over $1.7 billion. These grants were Congressionally appropriated, and obligated to grantees, to fund projects in clean energy, coastal resilience, lead pipe removal, and improving air quality for children. EPA's own Inspector General recently found, after reviewing one of the grant programs that had awarded $1.5 billion in cancelled funds, that EPA had done so in a fair, transparent, and legally compliant way. There was simply no excuse to claw back this money.

You will not be shocked to learn that it is illegal for the executive branch to unilaterally roll back appropriated and obligated congressional grants, so it prompted a swath of lawsuits against the EPA.

From Washington, DC, to Rhode Island, from Maryland to South Carolina, from Biden judge to Trump judge alike, federal courts reached the same conclusion: the grant freezes and terminations were likely illegal, and the grant money should go to the recipients.

One federal court ruled that EPA had to conduct individualized, grant-by-grant reviews, and could only cancel grants based on specific findings related to the unique characteristics of each grant. It's a simple rule, grounded in separation of powers: the Executive Branch cannot veto Congressionally appropriated funds outside the veto process, particularly not based on political resentments.

That's the law: to cancel a grant, EPA must review the grant itself, its terms and conditions and obligations, and have a specific reason.

Note here the difference between individually reviewing grants, versus reviewing grant programs, under which may fall dozens, even hundreds, of individual grants-the review has to be grant by grant.

In response to the court order, EPA made a huge production of documents. After sifting through the "thousands of documents" EPA offered up, the court found that "[n]ot one document showed any individualized review." No grant-by-grant analysis. Nothing that met the legal "individualized review" requirement.

Instead, the Court found illegal targeting based on general terms like "climate," "Greenhouse Gas Emissions," and "Environmental Justice." Entire grant programs were cancelled en masse. Internal emails said, "cancel them all." It was the opposite of what the law required.

In short: the court, after extensive review, found that EPA did not follow the law.

Administrator Zeldin then made an astonishing move.

That same day, May 20, 2025, that the court rejected EPA's claims as "hard to believe," Zeldin walked into a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing and repeated the same discredited story he had try to sell the court, with an added new twist. He claimed that he personally conducted the individualized review of "every single grant" before cancelling them.

The court, based on evidence, hadn't bought EPA's story; but Zeldin figured a Republican-controlled Congress just might.

The very next day, Zeldin came before our Environment and Public Works Committee here in the Senate and-under oath-told me the same false story: that he had personally reviewed every grant, this time adding that his deputy also individually reviewed "every single grant."

The problem with all of this? The evidence shows the opposite is true. Remember what the court found, after reviewing thousands of pages EPA had produced: "Not one document showed any individualized review."

But wait, there's more. That deputy that Zeldin claimed had also reviewed every single grant individually? He filed a sworn declaration to that same court averring only that he had conducted a review of grant programs-not of individual grants. Let that sink in: under oath in court, the deputy in charge of coordinating the grant review would only swear his name to a declaration about a review of programs, not of individual grants.

Other circumstantial evidence against Zeldin is also strong. Detailed EPA calendars obtained via FOIA requests demonstrate that the Administrator held 5 meetings with EPA staff related to grants, totaling 2 hours and 45 minutes. The calendars show no entries for other personal time to review grants. 2 hours and 45 minutes to review 781 grants individually? That's about 13 seconds per grant. The math ain't mathing, as they say.

And look at what eventually happened within the five grant programs at issue. Every single grant in every single program was cancelled, except one: a government-to-government grant, the only one to a single State.

Another tell here is Zeldin's behavior: the yelling, accusing, and fist-banging at the EPW hearing. It's Trump Administration SOP to yell, shout, and accuse when they can't answer questions. We've seen this play run over and over.

All the evidence points plainly in one direction: Zeldin didn't follow the law-he lied about following it.

But why? Why lie about this? Here's why. Trump demands two things from his Cabinet: one, fawning flattery; and two, slavish implementation of political instructions.

Zeldin admitting that he messed up the grant cancellation process would batter EPA's chances in litigation. He'd be guilty of failure to execute on Trump's political agenda. He'd have to face Trump's ire.

So Administrator Zeldin became Lyin' Lee, desperate to keep Trump's illegal plan alive to carry out a political purge of clean-energy grants, all to satisfy that Audience of One by rewarding Trump's thuggish fossil fuel kingmakers.

This kind of gangster and gong show absurdity-this kind of brazenness-shows what happens when fossil fuel interests own the Executive Branch.

Follow the money. This is Phase Four. This is what it looks like when government is captured by polluters and put to their service. This was not an inadvertent misstatement. This was a calculated stratagem by Zeldin to lie and try to shout his way out of the pickle he was in.

Let's be clear about the real costs here. Lying to a court is bad. Lying to Congress is bad. Lying to frustrate judicial review is bad. Lying to thwart Congress' constitutional power of the purse is bad. All of that is bad.

But don't forget, real people trying to earn a living were on the other end of those grants that Zeldin lied about. Those grants funded tangible projects that would cut people's energy costs, protect people from natural disasters, and create real jobs for people. Real stuff.

Here's some of the real stuff the illegal grant cancellations held up:

• In North Carolina, residents were relying on a nearly $20 million grant to replace residential water service lines to get dangerous lead out of their drinking water. Other lead clean-up projects were cancelled in Indiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
• Kipnuk, Alaska, lost a nearly $20 million grant to stabilize its riverbank. The consequences were real and immediate. In October 2025, the remnants of Typhoon Halong swept through, flooding the river, leveling the town, killing one person and displacing over 1,500 people. Tribal members must decide whether to permanently abandon their ancestral village. A climate specialist at the University of Alaska noted the pattern-three devastating ex-typhoon storms hitting Western Alaska in four years the grant was addressing. Zeldin's canceled grant did not just fail to prevent a flood. It may have contributed to the permanent erasure of a Native community's home; just last week, Kipnuk Tribal members voted to relocate altogether.
• The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe was planning to use nearly $20 million to create a Tribal Resilience Hub that would have provided essential services during emergencies. Anybody who has had to evacuate in an emergency knows how important that is. Gone.
• Texas A&M University would have received $14 million to install wastewater treatment systems throughout 17 counties in Alabama without adequate plumbing capacity, whose residents suffer from preventable conditions like hookworm-but that was too woke for Lyin' Lee.
• A $500,000 grant for the Childhood Lead Action Project-a project launched in 2018 to reduce lead exposure in children-also gone.

The list goes on, but the mass cancellations share the same characteristic: Zeldin and his merry band of DOGE-boys killed off grant programs based on ideas and phrases they wanted to cancel: "environmental justice," "DEI," and "climate change"-not based on any "individualized review" he pretends to have done.

That's the lie under oath, the lie that is sanctionable. But it's not the Big Lie. The Big Lie is that, on February 12, 2026, Zeldin signed a final rule repealing EPA's 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding-the bedrock scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. He boasted it was "the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history."

What he did not say is this: EPA's own scientists disagreed. The National Academies of Science had just reaffirmed the Endangerment Finding, saying it "was accurate, has stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence." So EPA, rather than challenge the science-which it could not do honestly-argued that the Clean Air Act does not authorize EPA to regulate greenhouse gases at all, an argument the Supreme Court rejected in 2007 in Massachusetts v. EPA.

The science has not changed. The law has not changed. The fossil fuel industry's complete infiltration of our government is what changed. Lying to Congress about grant reviews is serious, but lying about science? That's big.

Even bigger, and even more consequential for the American people, is the Enormous Lie, which Zeldin, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and DOE Secretary Chris Wright spout constantly. The Enormous Lie is that clean energy is more expensive than dirty, polluting fossil fuel energy. The fact of the matter is that it is not.

The easiest way to prove that is to look at what's called the "generation stack" of the electric grid. As we all turn on lights and air conditioners and electric appliances, and demand grows on the grid, power plants get called up to provide the power to meet the demand. For obvious reasons, the grid operators call up the lowest cost power first.

Here's what that looks like for two of our electric grids. ERCOT covers Texas, and PJM runs westward from the mid-Atlantic to the Midwest. This is the order in which in real life they actually call up their power plants, least expensive first. In real life, based on real prices bid into the grid, here's how they stack up: solar, wind, and other renewables come first.

So it's obvious that Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright are lying.

Here's a time series, comparing costs on the Texas grid at various levels of demand in 2018, with the same for 2024, after 17.6 GW of new clean energy joined the grid. It's a before-and-after for a big clean energy deployment. Look at the cost at 68 GW of demand: with all that new clean energy, costs dropped by two-thirds. Power costs down when clean energy up; more evidence that Zeldin, Burgum and Wright are lying.

Australia is loading up on clean energy, to the point where their grid now proposes to offer three hours of scheduled free electricity every day, from Australia's abundant clean power. Clean power so cheap it makes electricity free.

One last data point: the court filings of the U.S. state attorneys general, industry, and grid operators fighting the illegal Trump "stop work" orders against wind construction off Rhode Island and Connecticut. Here's what our states asserted about Revolution Wind in court documents, where lying is sanctionable:

• I quote here, "Once operational, Revolution Wind alone will provide hundreds of millions of dollars each year in energy bill savings to New England."
• ISO, the New England power grid operator, wrote that, had offshore wind been online, it would have saved regional production costs by $80 to $85 million over a roughly two-week cold snap in 2017-2018, resulting in $11 to $13 per megawatt hour reduction in what the grid charged ratepayers.

Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright were free to offer evidence to the contrary, to file affidavits asserting the cost savings of fossil fuel. It was a great opportunity for them to make the case. They chose not to, in the forum where their lies would have been subject to court sanction. The Trump Administration attack on clean energy may reward Trump's big polluter donors, but people are already facing affordability problems will see costs get worse.

When the Big Oil cartel hikes prices, families pay the cost. When volatile natural gas prices spike, families pay the cost. When cheaper clean power is blocked from the grid, families pay the cost. In this Trump scam, money goes from customers' pockets straight to Trump's big fossil fuel donors.

Banning clean energy hurts homeowners and renters. As climate disasters surge, insurance markets falter. The Economist has warned of a potential $25 trillion collapse in global real estate value. Fed Chair Powell testified that entire regions of the U.S. may soon become uninsurable. The chief economist of mortgage giant Freddie Mac predicted a cascade: climate risk makes regions uninsurable, which makes properties there un-mortgageable, which crashes property values, which all collapses into economic recession. Cancelling clean-energy investments in favor of polluting fuels accelerates that dangerous trajectory.

Clean energy is where the jobs are-over 400,000 had been created since 2020 with a faster growth rate than the rest of the energy sector. Fossil-fueled sabotage of this sector means fewer of those jobs in America, more in China, and a shrinking economic future for American workers.

And yes, attacking clean energy means more emissions, more disasters, more billion-dollar storms, more hits to communities like Kipnuk. NOAA shows that Americans suffered over $100 billion per year in disaster costs in each of the past five years. That cost gets worse.

The harm cascades: from the family struggling with a soaring property insurance bill, to the worker whose clean-energy job never materializes, to the taxpayer footing the bill for ever-more costly disasters. These are the real consequences of government by falsehood. When truth is denied, when science is ignored, when courts are defied, the public bears the cost. And that cost grows every day that the polluters' evil machinery is left to run unchecked.

Zeldin lying about his review of grant programs is obviously a lesser matter than the wholesale lies designed to mislead the public to prop up failing fossil fuel. But the lies to Congress were under oath, and that should matter. There is no exception to the duty to tell us the truth for lies that benefit Trump's big fossil fuel donors.

For years, fossil fuel interests believed they could pollute for free, deceive the public, and buy elections with dark money, all without consequence.

They have bought and paid for this Administration and now run the federal government from the inside. The brazenness of executive branch officials on the polluter payroll is there for everyone to see.

Zeldin's own EPA colleagues are saying so too. Over 1,200 EPA employees-career scientists, lawyers, and enforcement staff-have signed a public letter to Zeldin laying out their concerns: that he has spread misinformation through official EPA channels, promoted a culture of fear among his own staff, and redirected the agency's mission from protecting public health to serving polluters. Separately, a watchdog organization sued EPA in federal court after the agency failed to produce any documentation backing up Zeldin's claims-made in front of the President in a Cabinet meeting-that EPA employees were absent or were "ghost workers." Zeldin doesn't just lie to Congress. He lies about his own people.

Accountability is coming. The courts are waking up. The public is waking up. Even some in the business community are waking up.

And President Trump is losing steam-losing cases, losing credibility, losing the illusion of invincibility that has cowed so many into silence.

It is long past time for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to rediscover their oaths of office, to stand up for the constitution and Congress as an institution, and to defend their constituents from Trump and his gangster government.

One place to start is with a simple rule for witnesses: You. Do. Not. Lie.

So for that reason, today, I am calling on Lee Zeldin to go. It is bad enough that he has weaponized the EPA to do the bidding of the giant fossil fuel and chemical corporations that donated to Trump's campaign. But if he can't be relied upon to tell the truth to Congress, to answer simple questions honestly, how can anyone in this body believe him? Or is the new rule that lying is okay if it's done for polluters?

Late last year, Mom's Clean Air Force and their 1.6 million members called on Zeldin to resign. Earlier this week, a coalition of over 160 environmental NGOs demanded that Zeldin resign or be fired. Even Moms Across America and many others in the Make America Healthy Again movement are fed up with Zeldin flip flopping on toxics regulations and failing to respect the core mission of EPA-to keep Americans healthy and safe. People across America, on both the left and the right, are waking up to the danger of Lyin' Lee Zeldin. It's time for us to do the same.

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