Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin got into a shouting match over agency grant cancellations during a Senate hearing Wednesday.
Whitehouse was questioning Zeldin over whether the EPA conducted individual reviews of the grants it had canceled amid sweeping funding cuts across the government under President Trump.
The Rhode Island Democrat said the testimony of agency officials and statements made in court by government lawyers contradict the administration’s comments about the thoroughness of the reviews.
Specifically, he pointed to a court document where EPA official Travis Voyles stated, “On February 25, 2025, I conducted an individualized review of EPA grant programs,” as well as Zeldin’s own comments that the administrator himself had conducted a grant review.
Whitehouse also said that “On May 16, DOJ [Justice Department] career lawyers … filed a pleading in federal court that conceded that you had not done individualized, grant-by-grant reviews.”
“The problem with your assertion here today is that it is belied by your own employees’ sworn statements in court and by the decision of the Department of Justice to admit that what you say isn’t true,” Whitehouse told Zeldin.
“No, you’re not grasping the fact that we would have multiple employees looking at these grants. That concept just escapes you,” Zeldin fired back.
After a back-and-forth, Zeldin said, “We’re not going to waste dollars just because you insist on EPA lighting taxpayer dollars on fire.”
“The American taxpayers, they put President Trump in office because of people like you. They have Republicans in charge of the House and Senate because of people like you, because you don’t care about 99 percent of this story,” he continued.
In response, Whitehouse said what he actually wants is for Zeldin to “explain why the Department of Justice lawyers representing EPA in court, under a duty of candor, have said that everything you’ve just said isn’t true.”
Zeldin also entered into a tense exchange with Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) over the agency’s environmental rollbacks and a particular grant.
Schiff opened his remarks by rattling off rollbacks at the Trump EPA and saying “if you’re successful in eliminating half of our efforts to clean our water and our air, your legacy will be more lung cancer, it’ll be more bladder cancer, it’ll be more head and neck cancer, it’ll be more breast cancer, it’ll be more leukemia and pancreatic cancer, more liver cancer, more skin cancer, more kidney cancer, more testicular cancer, more colorectal cancer, more rare cancers of innumerable varieties.”
He also asked about a specific grant related to preventing lead poisoning in children in Santa Ana, Calif.
As he appeared to be looking through a list for that specific grant, Zeldin retorted, “With that wind up, by the way, I understand that you are an aspiring fiction writer. I see why.”
“I understand your view that you can cut half of the agency, and it won’t affect people’s health or their water, their air. That, to me, is a big fiction. Mr. Zeldin,” Schiff replied.
“If your children were drinking water in Santa Ana, Mr. Zeldin, maybe you wouldn’t be so cavalier about whether there was lead in their water,” he continued. “You could give a rat’s ass about how much cancer your agency causes.”
Exposure to lead can cause brain damage in children.
The agency has also indicated that it plans to loosen restrictions on various pollutants, including some that cause cancer.
—Updated at 3:42 p.m. EDT
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