Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin is rolling out a massive five-pillar initiative for his first 100 days in the role, he told Breitbart News exclusively in a lengthy interview at EPA headquarters in downtown Washington, DC, late last week. … [emphasis, links added]
“A lot of longtime Democratic voters decided to vote Republican for the first time and to vote for President Trump because their party had abandoned them and they felt disenfranchised,” he said.
“President Trump has pledged to do everything in his power to unleash American prosperity throughout this country and we have an important role to play to make sure the EPA is accomplishing its mission in a manner that doesn’t lose sight of the strong desire by the American public to unleash American prosperity.
“In order to do so, we need to become energy-dominant. We need to bring back American auto jobs. We have to make the United States the AI capital of the world. We need to pursue permitting reform that can allow more investment into the American economy.
“The EPA has to do its part here. Our mission here at the EPA is to protect human health and the environment. That mission absolutely can be accomplished while tapping into American innovation, creating jobs, and being accountable to the public and Congress. We want to hit the ground running.”
Zeldin continued, “Just before you came in here, we had a long meeting about getting agency employees back into the office. … EPA wants to help power that Great American Comeback. President Trump, as the leader of our country and the great American people, has earned that mandate. It’s up to the EPA to ensure we’re doing our part to make sure we deliver on that.”
Zeldin is affectionately known in America First activist circles as “the Legend of Zeldin,” a play on the name of the classic video game The Legend of Zelda.
He earned the nickname when he was a rank-and-file GOP U.S. House member from New York when he was serving on the House Intelligence Committee and tearing up its then-chairman Democrat Adam Schiff’s plot to impeach President Donald Trump in his first term.
While Schiff survived that madness and is now in the U.S. Senate from California, Zeldin is thriving even more. …
Now, Zeldin is back at Trump’s side as the administrator for the nation’s premiere environmental agency, the EPA, helping the president take on one of the most entrenched bureaucracies in a capital city full of them.
Zeldin and his team are exclusively announcing this new initiative — titled “Powering the Great American Comeback” — here on Breitbart News. The initiative has five major pillars.
The first is pushing for “Clean Air, Land, and Water for Every American.”
The second is to “Restore American Energy Dominance,” and the third is “Permitting Reform, Cooperative Federalism, and Cross-Agency Partnership.”
The fourth pillar is to “Make the United States the Artificial Intelligence Capital of the World,” and the fifth is “Protecting and Bringing Back American Auto Jobs.”
Zeldin said it is time for the EPA to return to its core mission of conservation — which he argued is a core conservative principle — and ditch the leftist environmentalist radicalism that has dominated in the past.
“President Trump has been very outspoken about his desire for Americans to be able to access clean air and clean water. We want air, land, and water to be cleaner, safer, healthier,” Zeldin said. …
“In the name of climate change, Democrats during the Biden administration wasted tax dollars in a way that was inexcusable, unjustifiable, and illegitimate. We don’t want to waste a penny. It is important that we are pursuing this agenda of having cleaner air, land, and water without wasting any tax dollars at all.
“There has been talk through the years about how the world was imminently about to end because of climate change, and in the name of that threat there was a push to do some crazy things.”
The timelines of those predictions of “climate change” ending the world have “come and gone,” Zeldin said, and the world is still here.
“That’s what President Trump had spoken about so often,” Zeldin said. “When I heard the president talk about a climate change hoax, he would also talk about how important it is to him that Americans have clean air and clean water.
“What he expressed as a concern was, in the name of climate change, that politicians in Washington, DC, were willing to bankrupt our economy, and that people who were struggling to make ends meet would lose the ability to heat their homes, and that Americans who want to be able to go out and purchase a gas-powered vehicle would have that option denied to them by the government. …”
Zeldin argues that the first pillar — cleaner air, water, and land — is not at odds with the second, which is to boost energy production in the U.S.
“Emissions went down during the [first] Trump presidency,” Zeldin said. “Energy that gets produced here in America taps into innovation and is far cleaner than energy produced overseas.
“Restoring energy dominance is not just an economic goal and not just a national security goal, but I also believe it’s best for the environment because here in America we tap into our domestic energy supply in ways that are much better for the environment than other nations across the world do it. We do it better here.”
Read full post at Breitbart
