By Valerie Volcovici
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate Democrats on Monday asked Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to end his campaign to claw back funds previously granted for greenhouse gas reduction projects, saying that effort is illegal.
The senators, who sit on the Senate environment and public works committee, said Zeldin’s well-publicized social media campaign to seize $20 billion appropriated through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act defies legal authority and will destroy jobs created as a result of that funding throughout the US.
“Your announcement is the latest example of the Trump Administration and its government efficiency ‘experts’ using unfounded claims of waste, fraud, and abuse as a smokescreen to ignore congressional spending authority and ignore court orders in order to freeze or terminate programs designed to reduce carbon pollution,” said the letter, signed by the nine Democrats on the committee led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
Democrats are stepping up pressure on the EPA and Justice Department for illegally trying to seize money that was appropriated by Congress. Last week, four senators asked the office of the inspector general to investigate these efforts.
Zeldin has touted what he has called the agency’s discovery of billions of dollars awarded through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund aimed at supporting clean energy projects in communities across the U.S. that he said was fraudulently disbursed, and accused the Biden administration of obligating the money “in a rush job with reduced oversight.”
Trump administration officials had instructed Denise Cheung, a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office, to start a criminal probe of the funding in an effort to claw back the money that is currently held by Citibank, which holds a financial agency agreement with the Treasury.
Cheung resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s office last week, saying she believed the request was not supported by evidence.
The senators said in their letter that Zeldin’s accusation that the Biden administration rushed to get billions out the door was undermined by the fact that the agency had announced its selection of Citibank as the manager of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants in a public press release in April 2024, seven months before election day.
The senators asked Zeldin to respond by March 3 to explain how the agency plans to end the financial agency agreement with Citibank and what would be done with the funds held by Citi that were not yet drawn down by grantees.
(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Sonali Paul)
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