Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin confronted a New York Times reporter during a press conference Monday for claiming that he presented “no evidence” to back up his claims of waste, fraud, and abuse from the previous Biden administration.
“I have a duty to make sure that we don’t light on fire billions of dollars of tax dollars,” Zeldin said. “And I’m not going to stand before any member of the media and get bullied into lighting billions of dollars on fire.”
Zeldin hosted the news conference Monday morning at the EPA headquarters, announcing his forthcoming Earth Day trip to San Diego to investigate the crisis of Mexico pouring five million gallons of wastewater daily into the Tijuana River.
At the end of the conference, Zeldin mentioned the media bias against his claims of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Biden EPA.
The waste and self-dealing
He mentioned a video unearthed by Project Veritas in December 2024 in which a Biden administration political appointee at EPA said that bureaucrats were rushing to get billions of dollars out the door like “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” Zeldin pledged to Congress that he would investigate the matter.
“As we overturn different rocks and we find more evidence of waste and abuse, there are some members of the media who have dug in further into saying that there’s no evidence,” he said. “Every time a new piece of evidence comes out, there’s some in the media saying even with more conviction that there’s no evidence.”
Zeldin mentioned “self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients and reduced oversight” in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion fund administered through CitiBank as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
The EPA under Biden managed the fund and rushed $20 billion to eight nonprofit groups after Trump won the 2024 election.
Zeldin has repeatedly flagged examples of alleged corruption involving the fund.
As the Free Press reported, the reduction fund allocated $6.9 billion to the Climate United fund, a coalition of three nonprofits that joined together in June 2023. Climate United’s CEO, Beth Bafford, served in the Obama administration as a special assistant in the Office of Management and Budget. Climate United’s chief strategy officer, Phil Aroneau, served as a “strategic advisor” to the Department of Energy in the last two years of the Biden administration.
The reduction fund allocated $5 billion to the Coalition for Green Capital, even though its total expenditures in 2023 only rose to $2.42 million. Jahi Wise, who joined Biden’s Climate Policy office in 2021 and oversaw the reduction fund, previously served as a policy director at the coalition. The coalition’s CEO, Richard Kauffman, has donated more than $600,000 to Democrats since 2020. Kauffman previously served as senior adviser to in the Department of Energy under Obama and served as then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “energy czar.” Cecilia Martinez, a member of the coalition’s board, previously served as the senior director of environmental justice at the White House Council on Environmental Quality under Biden.
The fund also allocated $2 billion to Power Forward Communities, an entity comprised of five nonprofits including Rewiring America. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams joined Rewiring America as special counsel in March 2023.
After listing many of these names, Zeldin mentioned that EPA officials amended the account control agreement for the fund on Jan. 13, a week before Trump took office.
“They were amending it to reduce EPA oversight,” he said.
‘No evidence?’
The administrator noted that many news stories have claimed he presented “no evidence” to back up his claims.
While Zeldin had run out of time allotted for the conference, he posed a question for the reporters present. He dared them to justify reporting that there was “no evidence.”
“If anyone can defend, please, just like, how is that zero evidence?” he asked. He noted that The Washington Post and The New York Times have written that there is no evidence.
“And now we are all together. I’m glad that we are,” he said. “It’s April 21st, 2025. Why should any story get written that says no evidence?”
Lisa Friedman, a New York Times reporter focused on climate change, raised her hand and asked, “Where has a judge said that this is a problem?”
“Lisa, if The New York Times is going to write that there is no evidence…”
Friedman responded, “We’ve written that judges have not found.”
Zeldin quoted her words from an April 2 story on the issue.
“Over the last few months, Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has made explosive—you know this because you wrote it—has made explosive accusations against the Biden administration, accusing it of ‘insane’ malfeasance in its handling of $20 billion in climate grants,” he read. “Now, as a legal battle ensues over those funds, many of Mr. Zeldin’s claims remain unsupported, and some are flat-out false.”
“Why wouldn’t you write that there is any evidence?” he asked.
Friedman responded, “Could you point us to where a judge has found that there’s waste?”
Zeldin refused to let her off the hook.
“It’s not that easy for you, Lisa,” he said. “See, because you guys are writing stories. These are your words. These aren’t the judge’s words.”
“If you continue to write these stories that say that there is no evidence, even though I can stand before you right now and just go through the list, how do you square that?” Zeldin asked.
