Whitehouse Opening Statement at Hearing on EPA’s Proposed Fiscal Year 2026 Budget

Washington, D.C.— Today, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW), delivered the following opening statement at a hearing titled “U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Proposed Fiscal Year 2026 Budget,” at which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin appeared before the Committee.

Ranking Member Whitehouse’s full remarks, as delivered:

We are here this morning to discuss the proposed Fiscal Year 2026 Budget for the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Administrator Zeldin — thank you for being here today.  You pledged during your confirmation process that you would respond substantively to Congressional requests from both sides of the aisle.  You said, and I quote:  “I want every member of this committee to have the ability to contact me, to be able to share directly your concerns and your ideas.  I want to be responsive to all the members of this Committee.” 

Last week, you told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that you thought you had responded to all the Congressional letters you’ve received.  That was not quite accurate.

Since your confirmation, I have sent you 12 letters as Ranking Member, many signed by all the Democrats on the dais.  Until this week, I had received responses to only 2 of those 12 letters and only vague non-response responses at that. 

On Monday of this week, I received another response that purported to answer three separate letters.  As for the remaining seven letters, your seven responses came in yesterday.  All between 4:53pm and 7:01pm—with six of them arriving after close of business. So, thank you Chairman for this hearing, which seems to have provoked some last-minute responsiveness.

Of course, real responses would be challenging.  EPA’s actions have made families worse off, ignored science, and eroded America’s trust in your agency.  And all for the benefit of polluters. The ongoing destruction at EPA violates legal contracts, violates the Constitution, violates the rule of law, and flouts many court orders. Again, all for the benefit of polluters.

Thousands of EPA grantees at this point have received strikingly similar letters informing them that their work “no longer aligns with administration priorities.”  I don’t recall you ever saying that “administration priorities” oppose clean drinking water; child health research; home renovations that reduce household energy bills; flood mitigation projects; safer school buses; or community centers where seniors and families can retreat during heat waves and dangerous storms. Yet, that’s what you tell grantees.

One particularly flagrant action your agency has taken is the freezing and attempting to terminate the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. I know you don’t like it, but GGRF was created and appropriated by Congress to fund community clean energy and disaster resilience activities across the country.  

President Trump claims, falsely, that climate change is a hoax, so GGRF funds became a target.

The President lacks the Constitutional authority to cancel this already authorized and appropriated spending, absent some showing of wrongdoing, so you had to invent wrongdoing.

How so?  Well, enter Trump’s corrupt Justice Department:  Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, and Ed Martin, then-interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Martin had publicly criticized GGRF even before he came to the Department.  He and Bove pushed career staff at the U.S. Attorney’s Office to open a criminal investigation so they could assert that the ongoing investigation justified the freeze.

Their problem? They couldn’t find any evidence of any crime.

The criminal division chief, a veteran career prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, pointed out that launching a criminal investigation without evidence of a crime—what prosecutors would call “predication”—is a violation of prosecutorial ethics and Department of Justice policy.  That warning from the career prosecutors was red flag one.

Your colleague Martin responded by demanding her resignation, forcing her out; red flag two.

With the criminal division chief gone, Martin still couldn’t find one staff prosecutor in his big office to pursue the matter.  Not one. Red flag three.

Martin then proceeded in his own name.  Red flag four.  That extremely rarely happens with politically appointed U.S. attorneys going forward with no career prosecutor on the pleading.

No surprise: when Martin then presented his request to the Federal magistrate judge, the judge denied the petition.  Red flag five. And by the way, for prosecutors, a massive flapping red flag.  Federal prosecutors never want this to happen; they triple-check and backstop every application to ensure that they are ironclad. In my U.S. Attorney’s Office, a federal judge shooting down one of our warrant applications would have set off internal reviews.

That series of disasters didn’t stop this scheme. Somebody started shopping the case to other U.S. Attorney’s Offices, hoping that some other office would try again in a different district.

Shopping a case around U.S. attorney’s offices, after the matter has been shot down in court: red flag six.

It seems no other U.S. attorney’s office has been willing to go before any court with this hot mess, but somehow, a federal prosecutor down in Florida seems to have ordered Washington-based FBI agents to question EPA employees about the grant program. We’ll discover more about that.

Separately, GGRF grantees sued EPA about your freeze, which you defended with the same pretext of fraud, even citing to that sham investigation. 

The federal judge asked EPA for evidence of fraud.  The agency was unable to produce any; the judge noted in her decision in favor of the grantees that EPA could produce—her words—‘‘no evidence to support that claim.’’  So, a second federal judge shoots down the scheme; we are now up to red flag seven, Mr. Zeldin.

Compounding this prosecutorial fiasco, Martin and Administrator Zeldin simultaneously unleashed a barrage of misleading public comments, flooding the information zone with public accusations of fraud that career prosecutors, a magistrate judge, and a federal district judge determined to be unfounded.  Well, unfounded accusations of fraud are what lawyers call ‘‘defamatory per se.’’ 

Baseless accusations of fraud, removing career officials who stood up for the rule of law, proceeding without a single career attorney, getting shot down by a magistrate judge, forum shopping, deploying FBI agents to harass career civil servants, having no evidence when obliged to make the proof in court.  This is what weaponization of government looks like.

And all the while, hundreds of worthy community projects go unfinished. 

Elsewhere, EPA pursues what I like to call the “fog bank” strategy of contumacy.  A federal judge rules a freeze is illegal or unconstitutional or both, and EPA retreats into a fog bank of deception.  EPA’s rationales shift, apparently false claims of “individualized review” are made, grant programs can’t get straight answers.  All this deception and a relentless focus on MAGA forbidden words like “climate” and “equity”—an ongoing heresy hunt.

Enough is enough. 

The Constitution demands faithful execution of the laws and that fundamentally means a willingness to take direction from Congress.  We want, in this Committee, to do big bipartisan things. But that can’t happen as long as this administration continues to ignore Congress’s Article I powers.