EPA head Lee Zeldin wants to steal $20B of green

It's even dumber than you think, and yet Trump's DOJ is playing along.

Zeldin (sitting) at an EPA event last week. (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty)

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Lee Zeldin is an ambitious man. The former congressman, who left office in 2022 to get routed by Kathy Hochul in the New York governor’s race, has only been head of the the Environmental Protection Agency for three weeks. But he’s already looking to make a name for himself.

Luckily his former House colleague Kristi Noem, currently the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has provided a template. After a grossly misinformed tweet by Elon Musk accusing New York of misappropriating disaster relief funds to house illegal migrants in luxury hotels, Noem snatched $80 million from the city of New York’s bank account. The money had been congressionally allocated and was being used exactly as intended. But Noem took a victory lap, blustering on X, “Mark my words: there will not be a single penny spent that goes against the interest and safety of the American people.”

And Lee Zeldin said, CAN DO!

The babyfaced politician warned of “an extremely disturbing video circulated two months ago featuring a Biden EPA political appointee talking about how they were ‘tossing gold bars off the Titanic,’ rushing to get billions of your dollars out the door before Inauguration Day.”

“The gold bars were your tax dollars!” he intoned indignantly, adding that “tossing them off the Titanic meant the Biden administration knew they were wasting it.”

Despite the hype, DOGE hasn't found a shred of fraud

This leap of logic is sadly the least ridiculous part of this episode. Because the “disturbing video” was made by Project Veritas, the rightwing smear factory that specializes in deceptively edited videos of Democrats. Their reprehensible stunts included founder James O’Keefe attempting to seduce a CNN reporter and film her having sex on a boat, sending a woman to impersonate a sexual abuse victim in a meeting with the Washington Post, and paying someone to steal Ashley Biden’s rehab diary.

In this case, the outfit appears to have secretly filmed a former EPA advisor in a bar talking about the rush to disburse clean energy funds before Trump took over and gutted the place. The advisor’s fears were well-founded: Just hours after his inauguration, Trump demanded that the government halt distribution of congressionally-allocated funds, purporting to unilaterally cancel the grants and contracts that he didn’t like. And he continues to do it despite multiple court orders instructing him to knock it off.

Unelected billionaire breaks laws to "restore" democracy

Zeldin was unbothered by the video’s sordid provenance. He gleefully seized on the “gold bars” turn of phrase to raise his own profile, while attempting to ingratiate himself with Musk by crediting the DOGE bros with the discovery. In interviews with conservative outlets like Newsmax and the Washington Free Beacon, he hyped the story, even concocting a stringboard theory to connect it to Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams.

“ICYMI: Administrator Lee Zeldin Finds Gold Bars from EPA at Stacey Abrams’ Connected Group, Biden-Harris Ethical Red Flags,” an EPA press release trumpeted, attaching Zeldin’s press clippings like a campaign webpage.

Unsurprisingly, Zeldin was also repeatedly given free rein to lie to his heart’s content on Fox. On Maria Bartiromo’s show, he went as far as to allege that the lawful distribution of congressionally appropriated funds is tantamount to a “criminal scheme.”

But as with the FEMA fiasco, Zeldin’s “discovery” turned out to be both legal and congressionally mandated. The $20 billion was part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is — lest the current administration forget — a federal law. (The tipoff is the word “Act” right there in the name!)

Congress allocated the funds to support “greenbanking,” essentially block grants to local nonprofits to lend out money in partnership with private entities. The money was earmarked to support environmental projects, particularly in economically disadvantaged areas, and would cycle in and out to fund new endeavors once the original loans were repaid.

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As the New York Times reported in April, the funds supported everything from a replacing a rural grandmother’s broken heat pump to large commercial developments. The Biden administration projected that every dollar spent would attract $7 in private investment. And it was no secret that they were racing disburse the money before the election.

“With climate impacts increasingly impacting all Americans, and especially those in communities that have been historically left behind, EPA knew it had to move swiftly and deliberately to get this historic funding out the door,” Zeldin’s predecessor Michael Regan said in August. “Two years after he signed the law, President Biden is delivering the full $27 billion that he secured in this legislation. American families will soon feel the benefits in the form of lower energy costs and revitalized communities, while the United States leads the clean energy economy of the future.”

But following Noem’s lead, Zeldin charged ahead, claiming to have found evidence of gross impropriety. And worse still, he got the Justice Department to play along.

Elite lawyers sell out the rule of law

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove made news last week by blowing up the prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams in spectacular fashion. But along the way, he also found time for Zeldin’s fake scandal.

According to the Washington Post, Bove’s office instructed the US Attorney in DC to impanel a grand jury to issue investigative subpoenas with respect to the $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund cash which is currently sitting in accounts at Citibank. The acting US Attorney in DC is Ed Martin, a Missouri lawyer with very little criminal experience. He did, however, attend the march on the Capitol on January 6, and his first official act was to launch an investigation of January 6 prosecutors. And that was good enough for Trump, who nominated him to run the office permanently.

Martin tasked Denise Cheung, a prosecutor with 24 years of experience at the DOJ, who was then the head of the criminal department in DC, with carrying out Bove’s directive. Cheung spent all of the President’s Day holiday weekend watching the Veritas sting video and going back and forth with the FBI and Bove’s office about what she could ethically do.

“I conferred with others in the Office, all of whom have substantial white collar criminal prosecution experience, and reviewed documentation provided by [the Office of the Deputy Attorney General], in determining whether the predicate for opening such a grand jury investigation existed,” she wrote, in a letter obtained by the Post.

In the end, she wound up drafting a “freeze letter” for the FBI to send to Citibank ordering it not to distribute any funds from the account. But Martin was not mollified, and he chastised Cheung for using provisional language. He ordered her to draft a new letter for them both to sign instructing Citibank “not to release any funds in the subject accounts pursuant to a criminal investigation being run out of [the US Attorney’s Office in DC].”

“Because I believed that I lacked the legal authority to issue such a letter, I told you that I would not do so. You then asked for my resignation,” Cheung wrote, offering her resignation and expressing the hope that the colleagues she leaves behind “will continue to uphold that pledge they have taken, following the facts and the law and complying with their moral, ethical, and legal obligations.”

The "cognitively irresponsible" presidency

The episode is staggeringly corrupt, of course, but it also illustrates the way that abject lies drive so much of the Trump administration. Rightwing agitators meme-ify something legal to make it look like a conspiracy; ambitious politicians abuse the public trust by amplifying the lie through official and unofficial channels; and the lie is used to justify an illegal expropriation of congressionally allocated funds in contravention of both the Constitution, which gives Congress the power of the purse, and the will of the people as expressed through their congressional representatives.

It’s the Noem/FEMA play, and we’re likely to see it many time over the next four years. The only difference here is that Bove and Martin tried to spin up an actual criminal investigation based on Zeldin’s lies. But like the FEMA case, this one is likely to lead to litigation. On Friday, the City of New York filed suit to get their $80 million back, and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grantees will certainly come looking for their $20 billion. And when they do, Cheung’s letter will be Exhibit A in the complaint.

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Liz Dye is a legal columnist and producer of the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast.

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