Senate Confirms Lee Zeldin As America’s 17th EPA Administrator

LOADING ERROR LOADING The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm Lee Zeldin as the nation’s 17th administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. “A big part of this will require building private sector collaboration to promote common-sense, smart regulation that will allow American innovation to continue to lead the world.” Zeldin recognized the EPA’s authority to limit greenhouse gases under the Endangerment Finding, a legal standard the agency adopted after the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that planet-heating gases posed a risk to public health and therefore merited regulations under the Clean Air Act. Evergreen Action, a climate policy group formed by former Democratic staffers, called Zeldin a “Trump loyalist” bent on advancing an “agenda of environmental destruction.” “Just days after Trump’s brazen attempt to block funding that Americans rely on, it is deeply disappointing that some Senate Democrats failed to stand against Zeldin’s nomination,” Lena Moffitt, the executive director of Evergreen Action, said in a statement. “The American people deserve an EPA Administrator who will fight for their health and safety — not a yes-man who will look the other way while Trump breaks the law to serve his billionaire donors and polluter allies.” The Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental group that boasted of filing more than 100 lawsuits against the first Trump administration, expressed cautious optimism that Zeldin could temper more radical elements in the White House. “While President-elect Trump has trafficked in climate denial, today Lee Zeldin accepted the scientific consensus on the causes and reality of climate change and said that the EPA has the legal authority to treat greenhouse gases as a pollutant,” Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement after Zeldin’s initial confirmation hearing.