Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has taken the ax to over $22 billion in environmental-justice and DEI grants and contracts in order to help reprioritize the agency’s commitment to protecting human health and the environment, rather than allowing it and its mission to be co-opted by progressives who use them to further its own socialist agenda.

While former President Joe Biden was in office, his administration handed out billions of taxpayer dollars to a number of activist organizations that placed their ideological agenda ahead of taking action to legitimately provide solutions for environmental issues impacting communities across the United States. One of the most famous examples of this is failed Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

Abrams was handed $2 billion by the Biden administration’s EPA to buy green energy appliances for Americans. “Stacey Abrams linked Power Forward Communities received $2 billion in tax dollars in 2024 after reporting just $100 in revenue the year before. They were so unqualified that the grant agreement required the NGO to complete ‘How to Develop a Budget’ training within 90 days,” Zeldin said in an interview with Fox News.

“$2 billion in hard earned tax dollars should not have been doled out to this organization for many reasons, especially if they don’t even know how to put together a budget. The Biden EPA ‘gold bars’ scheme is riddled with self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unnecessary middlemen, unqualified recipients, and massively reduced government oversight. The funds are currently frozen, and the DOJ and FBI are investigating,” he explained, according to the report.

“One Biden EPA staffer described the agency’s frantic multibillion-dollar spending spree at the end of the administration’s term as ‘tossing gold bars off the Titanic,’” Zeldin said in a piece he penned for The New York Post. “Those ‘gold bars’ were awarded to just eight pass-through nongovernmental organizations — including one tied to Georgia activist Stacey Abrams.”

Zeldin noted that this amount was, staggeringly, 20 million times more than Abrams’ group’s 2023 reported income, which was only $100. Later in the piece, Zeldin detailed his approach to the EPA and its mission, saying, “Instead of handing off the responsibility of environmental stewardship to unqualified NGOs, or prescribing every last solution from behind a desk in Washington, DC, I am visiting communities across our country, working with our state and local partners on the ground and meeting with Americans to understand the issues they face.”

He then wrote, “Nationwide, we need federal funding to advance that core mission: for new water infrastructure to ensure safe waterways and drinking water, air monitoring to ensure clean air, Superfund and brownfield remediation to protect community health and emergency responses to help rebuild in the face of unthinkable disaster.”

Concluding his piece, he spoke about President Trump and his promise of bringing the country into a new golden age, explaining that such a goal isn’t just for the elite, but for everyone. “When President Trump speaks about a golden age for America, it is for everyone. Under this administration, EPA is serving all Americans with equal dignity and respect — and providing real environmental solutions, not false.

American Tribune