They matched on Tinder shortly after the November presidential election, shared their mutual disappointment about Donald J. Trump’s victory and agreed to meet for a drink.
Sitting at a table at Licht Cafe, a bar on Washington’s U Street corridor, Brent Efron and his date, Brady, talked a bit about home and hobbies. But Brady — or at least that’s the name he used — repeatedly steered the conversation back to Mr. Efron’s job at the Environmental Protection Agency.
“It was a boring date,” Mr. Efron, 29, recalled. “He just wanted to talk about work.”
Brady took a particular interest in the fate of billions of dollars that Congress had ordered the E.P.A. to spend on tackling climate change. Mr. Trump had promised on the campaign trail to repeal climate programs, so the Biden administration was “trying to get the money out as fast as possible,” Mr. Efron told his date.
Mr. Efron, a passionate believer in the E.P.A.’s mission “to protect human health and the environment,” came up with an analogy to describe what was happening: The agency was a cruise ship that had hit an iceberg. It needed to launch its lifeboats — climate and clean energy projects — right away.
“It truly feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge,” he told Brady.
Brady left after about an hour and Mr. Efron said he barely thought about the date again. Until a video of him appeared on the website of Project Veritas, a right-wing group known for using covert recordings to embarrass political opponents. Brady, who had posed as a politically liberal commercial real estate agent and recent transplant to the capital, was actually a Project Veritas operative with a hidden camera.
The conversation — particularly the phrase “gold bars” — has come to haunt Mr. Efron. Conservative media and Republicans immediately trumpeted those words as supposed evidence that the Biden administration had mishandled funds.
Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, repeatedly cited the video as he worked to cancel $20 billion that the Biden administration had granted to finance projects like electric vehicle charging stations in low income communities and installing geothermal systems to heat and cool subsidized housing.
Mr. Zeldin has blasted out media releases with headlines like “Administrator Zeldin Terminates Biden-Harris $20B ‘Gold Bar’ Grants” and “EPA Formally Refers Financial Mismanagement of $20B ‘Gold Bars’ to Inspector General.”
“The entire scheme, in my opinion, is criminal,” Mr. Zeldin said on Fox News in February, adding, “We found the gold bars. We want them back.”
It would not matter that a Justice Department investigation found no evidence of criminal conduct by Biden officials or grant recipients, and that a federal judge ruled that Mr. Zeldin’s team failed to prove allegations of misconduct. The administration’s own lawyers acknowledged internally that the claims are misguided.
The unfortunate truth, for Mr. Efron, was that he had handed the E.P.A.’s critics a powerful political weapon, and he is still paying a personal price. Since the Project Veritas video aired — but especially since Mr. Zeldin posted it to his X account two days in a row in February, receiving almost 3 million views — he has been publicly shamed by Elon Musk, obscenely berated by anonymous callers and hauled into an interview with the F.B.I.
All because of an online date.
On a recent Thursday, Mr. Efron described his ordeal over green tea at Three Fifty Bakery & Coffee Bar in Dupont Circle. It had been months since the video came out, yet he still seemed hurt and bewildered that he could have gotten into such a mess.
“I spend every day thinking about this,” he said, his voice shaking. “I go to bed thinking about it, I wake up thinking about it.”
He said that the excerpt Project Veritas posted made it seem as though he had some authority over the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the program that funded the clean energy projects. But he had nothing to do with grant-making decisions. His job simply involved tracking E.P.A.-funded projects to make sure they conformed to wage requirements and other labor laws.
Mr. Efron also said he was expressing what everyone in Washington knew: that Mr. Trump intended to kill climate programs and the Biden administration was trying to save them.
“It’s been used to justify actions that I view as terrible, in terms of trying to cancel grants and claw back funding, and I want to set the record straight,” Mr. Efron said. “I want people to understand what I meant. I’d like Lee Zeldin to understand what I meant.”
Gold Bars and Lifeboats
Mr. Efron was feeling depressed about the presidential election when Brady swiped right on his Tinder profile, and he was looking forward to meeting someone who shared his politics. His profile didn’t identify him as an E.P.A. employee. But it did say that he worked on climate policy, lived in Washington, and recently earned a master’s degree from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.
In retrospect, Mr. Efron said, anyone could have learned the nature of his midlevel federal job with a simple Google search. But when he matched with Brady, the idea that he could be targeted never crossed his mind.
Their conversation went from Tinder to text and they agreed to meet for a drink at Licht Cafe on Nov. 20. Earlier that evening, Mr. Efron had been out at a happy hour with colleagues where they talked about how proud they were of E.P.A.’s record on addressing climate change and how they worried the Trump administration would reverse any gains.
That was when Mr. Efron first thought of the Titanic analogy. He told his colleagues that the funding for clean energy projects going to states, cities, tribes and nonprofit groups were like gold bars being tossed into lifeboats to protect some of the Biden administration’s work.
“What I meant was, we were giving money to protect rural Washington from wildfire smoke, and fund a health clinic in Georgia and a community farm in Missouri and help tribal communities that are falling into the ocean in Alaska,” he said. “Those were lifeboats.”
Mr. Efron had a drink but Brady did not consume any alcohol. After discussing climate change, Brady asked some questions about Vice President Kamala Harris, but Mr. Efron didn’t have much to say. Brady abruptly declared he had to leave.
Two weeks later, at 3:07 p.m. on Dec. 2, an email landed in Mr. Efron’s inbox. “Project Veritas intends to release a video that contains comments made by you to a Project Veritas journalist,” it read. “Below are some of those quotes. We appreciate any consideration for comment by 8 p.m.”
He knew about Project Veritas. He felt panic, then humiliation.
The E.P.A. press office received an identical email and request for comment. Within minutes, Mr. Efron received a call from his boss. He realized he had been set up.
His boss at the E.P.A. was mostly concerned for Mr. Efron, but sent the video to the agency’s ethics department for review. It cleared Mr. Efron of any wrongdoing or violations.
“Instead, this situation appears to be an unfortunate reminder about the social media bubble we live in now,” Justina Fugh, director of E.P.A.’s ethics office, wrote in an email to Mr. Efron. “Remember that my team and I are here to provide you with ethics advice when you need it. Until then, hang in there, Brent.”
He tried to hang in there. He called some close friends and then his parents in Massachusetts to tell them what happened and get their support. He strengthened the privacy settings on his social media. But Elon Musk posted the video on X to his 221 million followers, and the onslaught came. Strangers found his cell number, though he still doesn’t know how. Their voice mail messages, teeming with obscenities, called him “scumbag” and “American traitor.”
“We want our stolen tax dollars back, you disgusting criminal,” someone on Instagram messaged him. “By the way, Trump is your president again.”
A month later, Mr. Efron left the E.PA. in January, hoping the worst was behind him.
An Interview with the Feds
“Huge news! Our awesome team @EPA just located BILLIONS of dollars worth of “gold bars” that the Biden Admin threw “off the titanic.”
The post on Mr. Zeldin’s official X account in February, just two weeks after he was confirmed to lead the E.P.A., went out to his more than 240,000 followers and was retweeted 17,000 times.
That brought a fresh torrent of abuse, Mr. Efron said. By that point he had loosened the privacy settings on his LinkedIn account to look for a new job. People found him there — some not even bothering to hide their identities. Most of the attackers took aim at Mr. Efron’s sexual identity.
“Any hope you had of infiltrating the government with your tyrannical and sick LGBTQ agenda is now FINISHED,” one person wrote. “Time to ramp up that rainbow résumé.”
Then came the knocks on his door. Mr. Efron was still in bed the morning of Feb. 21 when two people from the E.P.A.’s office of the inspector general asked if they could come in to ask some questions.
“I asked them, do I have to answer them?” Mr. Efron recalled. They said he did not, and left their business cards.
He spent the rest of the day finding a lawyer. Mark Zaid, who specializes in representing people who work in national security and is suing the founder of Project Veritas in connection with a different undercover video, is representing Mr. Efron pro bono.
On Feb. 24, Mr. Efron came back from a run to find more business cards in his door. This time an F.B.I. agent had written, “please give me a call I would like to speak to you,” on the back.
A few days later, at Mr. Zaid’s office, Mr. Efron sat for questioning. Two F.B.I. agents were in the room. So was a prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office. Two investigators from the E.P.A.’s inspector general’s office were on speakerphone.
“On the one hand I had nothing to hide and I just told them the truth, but it was really scary,” he said.
“I mean, this whole thing was stemming from me saying something that’s been taken of context and twisted,” he said. “I also was scared of the exact same thing happening again.”
Feigning Amazement
The Project Veritas video of Mr. Efron fits a pattern. During the Biden administration, the outfit released a string of surreptitiously recorded videos of young, mostly male federal workers, breezily complaining about dysfunction in their departments or about policies with which they disagreed.
Most appear to be filmed in bars or restaurants. In many of the videos, a male voice can be heard behind the hidden camera, alternately gushing (“Amazing!” fawned Brady when Mr. Efron said he worked on climate change), or asking probing questions.
“Mr. Efron openly described his experience ‘throwing gold bars off the Titanic’ at Biden’s E.P.A. to our journalist in his own words,” Project Veritas said in a written statement. “If he disagrees with Project Veritas’ reporting, he should reflect on his own statements, as we published his words as the story.”
Mr. Zeldin’s office, meanwhile, continues to maintain that Mr. Efron’s “gold bars” comment was an admission of government wrongdoing.
“This video started a public discourse about very real issues with the way the Biden administration lit tens of billions of tax dollars on fire,” his spokeswoman, Molly Vaseliou, said in a statement. The administrator continues to maintain his zero tolerance policy for waste and abuse.”
The agency is fighting legal challenges from the groups that had been awarded the $20 billion in grants.
“It is extremely important the American people be made aware that not only did the Biden administration know that what they were doing was wrong, but they were deliberately trying to push as much money out the door as possible before President Trump was inaugurated,” Ms. Vaseliou said.
But every outgoing administration uses the last weeks of its term to insulate its policies from the incoming president. And Biden administration officials said the E.P.A. grants were approved by career staff who used a complex scoring system to vet applications.
“It was by the book with a high degree of both diligence and integrity,” said John Podesta, who oversaw implementation of the 2022 climate law for the Biden administration.
Seeking a New Start
Mr. Efron’s D.C. apartment lease expired recently, and he is staying with friends until he figures out his next steps. He still has not found work, and thinks employers fear they could become a target of the Trump administration if they hire him.
Mr. Zaid said Mr. Efron has few concrete ways to hold Project Veritas accountable for the disruption in his life. In Washington, D.C., it is legal for a person to record their own conversation with someone else without consent.
Mr. Efron has tentatively returned to dating apps. But background searches are now a must and he tends to stick to meeting people with whom he has friends in common.
He said he regrets his choice of words in the Project Veritas video but will not apologize for sharing his personal political opinions during what he thought was a private moment.
“I have so much regret that my words have been twisted to be used to go after all these programs as a sort of justification,” he said. “I regret that I was not careful enough in vetting who I was talking to, and shouldn’t have been talking about work. But I also think that what I said was something I should have been allowed to say.”
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
The post An Offhand Remark About Gold Bars, Secretly Recorded, Upended His Life appeared first on New York Times.
