From food waste and plastics pollution to green energy, Lee Zeldin quickly transformed the EPA

Long a conservative target for reform, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has witnessed a radical overhaul under Administrator Lee Zeldin in his first year of leadership.

The former New York congressman has gone beyond the typical deregulation and budget cuts championed by Republicans to MAGA-populist topics like plastics pollution tied to infertility, a pivot that has made Zeldin a close ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again initiative.

On New Year’s Eve, for instance, the EPA announced its plans to impose regulations on phthalate chemicals, which are commonly used in plastics to make them more flexible.

After the EPA conducted a Toxic Controlled Substances Act (TSCA) risk assessment, Zeldin moved to regulate the use of the chemicals, hailing the move as a “MAHA win.”

“We upgraded the science,” Zeldin told the John Solomon Reports podcast in an episode aired on Saturday. “Instead of relying so much on rodent data, we were able to rely on human health data, and we were very excited to be able to make this announcement the last couple days and to move forward with that regulatory process to be able to protect workers in the environment.”

“We found that worker exposures in certain settings exceed safe levels and could cause endocrine disruption and reproductive health impacts, which is something that the MaHA community has been talking about for a while, and the research backed it up,” he added.

Zeldin insisted the move was part of a broader worker risk reduction effort from the EPA that would include additional regulatory rules in the near future.

“EPA will consider personal protective equipment, engineering controls, other practical solutions,” Zeldin said, before hailing the public comment process for administrative rulemaking and promising to engage with the labor community on the issue.

“Feed It Onward”

In September, the EPA launched a “Feed It Onward” initiative to reduce food waste and simultaneously improve food security. The plan came amid still-ongoing concerns over food prices, inflation, and domestic agricultural woes.

Feed It Onward began in Illinois with a partnership between the local Frey Farms and Scott Air Force Base. The program is a series of voluntary partnerships between farms, military bases, restaurants, grocery stores, and other organizations.

When announcing the initiative, Zeldin observed that roughly one-third of food in the United States goes uneaten and thrown away due to sizing standards and other regulations. The program aims to put that product to good use through other organizations that need it.

“We announced Feed It Onward during a visit a few months back to Scott Air Force Base in Southern Illinois, where a local farm came with watermelon that would be considered imperfect,” Zeldin explained on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “It's, you know, it tastes delicious. It's perfectly healthy. There's nothing wrong with it, other than it not having the perfect dimensions for the grocery store. But otherwise, there's nothing wrong with it.”

“And what was happening is that a watermelon like this would end up going to a landfill, get wasted,” Zeldin added. “What we did was we brought in the watermelon and sweet corn and pumpkins, and on short notice, we put a call out to the military community at Scott Air Force Base, and they showed up in large numbers. And it was just so great to see this connection get made. And we realized internally, wow, like, this is something that could be going on all across America.”

Climate Change Cuts

Among the most expected moves of Zeldin’s tenure at the EPA was a cutback in climate change research and myriad grants, both for budgeting purposes and to contend with fraud and abuse.

Last year, Zeldin canceled $20 billion in grants connected to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which received money through the Inflation Reduction Act. He also canceled $7 billion in grants through the Solar for All program. 

Zeldin outlined the process whereby the administration sends money to the EPA, which then directs the billions in funding to non-governmental organizations and other entities with the official aim of advancing environmental work.

“Even though the EPA’s annual operating budget is about $10 billion, the decision was to send more money through the EPA than the EPA knew how to get out. And in standing up this greenhouse gas reduction fund, they essentially had the money… pass through entities, where the entities were filled with unqualified recipients, self-dealing, conflicts of interest,” he sai.

Zeldin expressed optimism that the cuts would survive legal scrutiny and defended the move, saying “you know, we're doing right by the taxpayers, and that's something that makes it easy to go to sleep at night.”

Ben Whedon is the Chief Political Correspondent at Just the News. Follow him on X.