Funds Misused at EPA Under Biden

Lee Zeldin: Last December, there was a Biden EPA employee who appeared in a Project Veritas video talking about how they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic—rushing to push out billions of dollars before President Trump is inaugurated.

And members of Congress, during my confirmation process, were asking me if, once confirmed, I would commit to thoroughly investigating this matter. I said yes, absolutely. We will make it a top priority to investigate as quickly as possible and report.

Senator, I was concerned when, a few weeks ago, there was a video of a political appointee at the EPA talking about throwing gold bars off the Titanic.

So we've been working on it—through the confirmation process and the transition. And once confirmed, we started working on these grants.

Now, we have people inside the agency—they work for the EPA. They've been working on this project with Doge to identify grants that were unnecessary, that didn’t align with the priorities of this administration, in order to bring those grants in line with the Trump administration’s priorities.

In four rounds, working with Doge, we canceled over $2 billion. This is in addition to the $20 billion in grants I canceled from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was part of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

The EPA’s annual operating budget is approximately $10 billion. In 2024, the EPA committed and spent over $60 billion.

In my first 100 days as administrator, I canceled $22 billion in grants—more than double our total operating budget.