EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin joined Hugh today to discuss changes made to the agency’s “elevation” policy and how the Administrator could make the unwieldy agency far more responsive to permit seekers and fair to targets of alleged illegal or unpermitted activity by the agency’s Enforcement Division:

Audio:

09-25hhs-zeldin

Transcript:

HH: I’m joined now by Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, an old friend of the program. Mr. Administrator, welcome back. Great to see you. Congratulations. You’re doing great stuff over at EPA.

LZ: Thank you. It’s great to be with you, Hugh.

HH: Well, rather than throw softballs, though, I want to throw four hard questions at you in the ten minutes I’ve got. Number one, I read your March 7th policy on elevation. You know, I spent 25 years working with Region 9. Elevation routinely abused my clients. They would elevate 404 permits. They would elevate this. They would elevate that. Why not put a policy into place that no one gets to elevate anything unless Lee Zeldin approves it first, and have like challenge flags in the NFL. If they try and elevate the wrong things twice, you fire that person.

LZ: Right. Well, you know, I’m not going to be able to answer for last administrations or future administrations, but as far as this one, at the Trump EPA, we are fast-tracking approvals. We are working closely with these other agencies. We have the power to gum up the works. We also have the power to speed things up. And we’re utilizing that power. What we do want elevated up to headquarters is, we want to be involved in these key decisions where we’re trying to get pipelines over the finish line. We’ve been to Alaska. There’s the talk of NESE and Constitution. And there’s Enbridge in the Great Lakes area. There’s a big natural gas pipeline in the Southwest going from New Mexico to Arizona. We’re also reconsidering the definition of Waters of the United States, which also has implications on this particular topic. But we are fast-tracking everything across the board all year long, consistently and proudly.

HH: How many elevations have you done this year, though? That really does gum up the works. It screwed so many of my clients for 25 years that, you know, you’ve got bureaucrats down way below you. Oh, we’re going to elevate this, and all of a sudden, your project’s dead in the water.

LZ: Yeah, no, we haven’t slowed anything down over the course of this year. We’ve just been speeding things up. We have headquarters getting involved with the regions, but not for the purpose of making sure that anything goes any slower. It’s to ensure that there’s total accountability and involvement, that the administration’s priorities are being implemented. And that means getting this stuff done as quickly as we can. And part of that process with the headquarters and myself wanting to have more oversight and involvement is that when the President calls me about these projects, he’s not just calling me about the EPA decisions, the EPA equities. He’ll ask me what other agencies in the federal government are preventing this particular proposal from getting done. So we are able to blow through any type of bureaucratic red tape not just in our own agencies, in our own agency, but helping the President get through red tape in other agencies, too.

HH: Well, God speed on that. Second suggestion, Mr. Administrator, there are tens of thousands of permit applicants out there, and thousands of people who are subject to enforcement actions by EPA. You know what captain’s mast is, when the Navy ship commander brings in whoever’s been accused of doing wrong, or they’ve got a complaint. Why not once a month grab all your administrators, your associate administrators, all your regional directors, and let permit applicants talk to you directly about their permit. Put a career staffer on the other side of the room, and you render a decision. And similarly, if someone’s the subject of an enforcement action and they’re getting screwed, they have a chance to talk to Lee Zeldin. Because I’ve got confidence in Lee Zeldin. I do not have confidence in your career people. And you issue decisions. Why not let that happen?

LZ: So we, I have been meeting directly with all sorts of different individuals, companies investing in our country. We are fast-tracking permits all across the entire country. And the same point that I gave as it relates to your last question, the President personally gets involved in some of this work as well. So there is that level of total accountability across the administration. I’ve been to 38 states so far. We have a very busy October coming up. I’m continuing to travel all throughout the entire country. When I’m traveling, I am often meeting with these project proponents in that particular municipality, in that state, in that region, to help get this stuff over the finish line. And those meetings, by the way, aren’t just about their permit requests as it relates to interacting with EPA. I am often interacting with them as it relates to their larger permit request and that federal process. And also in the spirit of advancing cooperative federalism, we’re often engaging state partners to make sure that the states are getting this stuff done on the enforcement and compliance effort. This was a priority of mine out of the gate. I sat down with the people in our office of enforcement and compliance. I wanted to make sure that there is no one in side of that team going rogue. I want fairness and consistency. There are plenty of people out there who are private actors who understand that there’s environmental issues that need to be remediated on their property. They want to work with the Agency to be able to deal with that land and water contamination that either they inherited from someone who had their property before them, or maybe they were responsible for it. Maybe they’re on a Superfund site. Maybe it has something to do with the Brownfield site. And it is such a better policy than just coming in, wanting the heavy hand, the stick of enforcement, and then you end up not getting that investment from that private actor because they’re immediately engaged in some conflicted, adversarial, legal battle. And you know, maybe they’re not so inclined to invest in that remediation, because they’re busy taking the advice of their attorney to battle to the death with litigation inside of courts.

HH: You know, usually, it is my experience, we couldn’t get to the administrator. We could get to Region 9, Felicia Marcus, somebody like that, once in a blue moon. But normally, if you make yourself available, people will come to you. Question three. This is, A) you’ve done a great job in the California fires. EPA and the Corps have done a great job. But my friends in the fire zone tell me nothing, or very little, is getting built. That’s the city, the county, the regional agencies, and the state. Can you go out there and bring attention to the fact that Gavin Newsom isn’t doing crap to get those houses rebuilt?

LZ: Hey, Hugh, this is a really big issue. I raised this as the last Cabinet meeting. President Trump had the media in there for over three hours. And President Trump went around the room like he always does during these Cabinet meetings. And when it came to me, I made a point of talking about not just the EPA’s response to take care of all of the hazardous material removal, phase one effort in less than 30 days, but the Army Corps then came in. They completed their phase two debris removal. The federal government did everything that we need to do in record time. And as you just pointed out, a lot of these locals who want to be able to build on their property have struggled to get the permits from that local government. They’re not getting the support from the state. That’s why we amplified it at that Cabinet meeting. That’s why, you know, here we are talking about this here. And there should be no finger pointing from any of those local government officials. At the federal government, President Trump has said it over and over again. I will reiterate it now. There are no property owners anywhere inside of that fire area, over 13,000 properties were destroyed. Nobody is waiting for any action or approval from the federal government. The Trump administration, working with all of our agencies, that process is done. We did it historically fast, and we’re proud of it.

HH: I am very glad that we can underscore that, because Gavin and Karen Bass are screwing those people over out of their property rights. Last question, because your team told me ten minutes, Mr. Administrator. EPA has got 17,202 employees. When the government shuts down, Russ Vought can do an RIF, a reduction in force, of permanent government. How many of your 17,202 are essential? How many can be RIF’d?

LZ: So when we came in, actually, in January, the number of employees here was 16,155. We are going through reorganization right now. We’ve been leaning into this effort of finding efficiencies all year long. We haven’t needed any motivation or prodding by anybody else. We’ve done it on our own initiative. We are in the process of going down to 12,500. We’re reorganizing all of our program offices and headquarters. There are statutory obligations that Congress has put into law, statutory obligations requiring EPA to do stuff under the Clean Air Water, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, CERCLA, RCRA, TSCA, and more. We inherited a lot of backlogs on these statutory obligations. 14,000 in pesticide review, several hundred with new chemicals, hundreds of state implementation plans backed up, a couple hundred of these small refinery exemptions. The list goes on of these backlogs that we inherited from our predecessors. We are going to do more with 12,500 employees of tackling these statutory obligations than our predecessor did with 16,155.

HH: Can you get below 10,000, Mr. Administrator?

LZ: It’s about focusing on priorities.

HH: Can you get below 10,000?

LZ: Well, what I don’t want to do is be unable to fulfill our statutory obligations. So the plan is that we’re going from, we’re going with 23% reduction from 16,155 to twelve-and-a-half. And we’re going to be assessing the performance of fulfilling those statutory obligations. But Hugh, I want to add one other point that’s incredibly important to you and your listeners. You guys have been fighting for this for a long time. This deregulatory agenda, we’re protecting the environment and growing the economy. This agency inherited a big mess from the Biden administration. We are going to do more deregulation in one year than entire federal governments have done across all presidencies, across all agencies, across entire terms of presidents. Just the proposed recission of the 2009 Endangerment finding alone would be, if finalized, the largest deregulatory action in the history of this country. So right now, our priority to making sure that we are implementing the Trump mandate that we are fulfilling the agenda that is demanded by the American public. We’re going through these efficiencies. We’re delivering the deregulatory work that the American public demands, and we are proudly also doing a lot to help protect our environment across the country. But what I don’t want to do is to come on air with you and others and tell you how we’re falling on our face by not fulfilling a statutory obligation. And those are our priorities summed up here in a minute of where we have had our heads at over the course of this year. Oh, and by the way, I’ve cancelled over $29 billion dollars in grants.

HH: I like that.

LZ: We’ve consolidated real estate. We have cancelled media subscriptions. We closed the $4 million dollar Biden EPA museum that nobody was going to. The list goes on of all of the ways to pursue efficiencies. The staff reductions end up amounting to over $750 million dollars as well. So we have a zero tolerance policy towards wasting even a dollar of tax dollars, and that’s something that we will continue to pursue going forward.

HH: Thank you, Mr. Administrator. Next time, give me 30 minutes, and we’ll go over all of it. Great to talk to you. Congratulations. I appreciate what you’ve done and what you’re going to do. Thank you, Administrator Lee Zeldin.

LZ: Thanks, Hugh.

End of interview.