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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here for the 305th time with my increasingly weathered and battered ``Time to Wake Up'' chart to warn this Chamber about a corrupt danger to our country--a danger powered by fossil fuel industry money, orchestrated by dark money front groups, and now executed at the highest levels of a corrupted executive branch.

In previous speeches, I described the four phases of climate denial.

Phase 1 was bury the evidence. The fossil fuel industry scientists told them what the science was. They ignored it, and they buried it.

Phase 2 was lie about the evidence, pretend it wasn't true, as the rest of the scientific establishment came on board with what their scientists had already told them.

Phase 3 was flood our politics with dark money to protect fossil fuel's pollute-for-free business model. After Citizens United, out poured the money.

Now we have entered into phase 4, the most dangerous phase yet-- weaponizing the government itself to attack clean energy, protect polluters, and steamroll lawful government process.

Today's speech is about a lie. We are now so deep in phase 4 that heads of executive Agencies feel entitled to lie to Congress if it helps carry out President Trump's fossil fuel-captured agenda.

Notice what distinguishes phase 4. Phase 1 involved buried evidence kept secret. Phase 2 involved lies filtered through think tank reports with plausible deniability for the fossil fuel interests behind the front groups. Phase 3 flooded politics with dark money through anonymous front groups--all hidden. But phase 4, using the government itself to execute the polluters' agenda--against the law, against Congress, and against the courts--that must be done out loud, under oath, before judges, and before this body, in plain view. In phase 4, the lying becomes official, brazen, on the record.

There once was a time when lying to Congress mattered; when swearing an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth meant exactly that; when if someone lied to Congress, even Members of the liar's own party would hold them to account. Unfortunately, those days are gone. But truth should still matter.

So this evening, I present to you the story of Lyin' Lee Zeldin. I will show you what happened when EPA Administrator Zeldin came before two congressional committees in May of last year. Our review of thousands of pages of sworn court filings, internal EPA emails, and other communications and documents produced under the Freedom of Information Act proves it. Let me walk you through the sorry saga.

At the beginning of his term, Trump, following the Project 2025 blueprint, instructed Agencies to cut off funding that his fossil fuel donors didn't like. Remember, Candidate Trump had promised Big Oil a massive return on their investment if they donate $1 billion to get him elected. Well, fossil fuel companies indeed donated massively--hundreds of millions, maybe even the full billion--and Trump dutifully provided the payback in innumerable policies benefiting fossil fuel and kneecapping fossil fuel's clean energy competitors. The heavy hand of government was put to work for fossil fuel.

As soon as Zeldin arrived at EPA, he diligently obeyed President Trump by freezing and then terminating as many as 781 grants with awards totaling over $1.7 billion. These grants were congressionally appropriated and obligated to the grantees to fund projects in clean energy, coastal resilience, lead pipe removal, and improving air quality for children.

EPA's own inspector general found, after reviewing one of the grant programs that had awarded $1.5 billion in canceled funds, that the Biden EPA had done so in a fair, transparent, and legally compliant way.

There simply was no excuse to claw back this money except that the fossil fuel donors wanted it done. You won't be shocked to learn that it is actually illegal for the executive branch to unilaterally roll back appropriated and obligated congressional grants. So it prompted a swath of lawsuits against the EPA.

From Washington, DC, to Rhode Island, from Maryland to South Carolina, from Biden judge to Trump judge alike, Federal courts over and over reached the same conclusion: The grant freezes and terminations were likely illegal, and the grant money should go to the recipients.

One Federal court ruled that EPA had to conduct individualized grant- by-grant reviews and could only cancel grants based on specific findings related to the unique characteristics of a particular grant.

It is a pretty simple rule grounded in separation of powers. The executive branch cannot veto congressionally appropriated and obligated funds outside the veto process, particularly not based on big donors' political resentments. That is the law. To cancel a grant, EPA must review each grant itself, its terms, its conditions, its obligations and have a specific reason for doing so.

Note here the difference between individually reviewing grants versus reviewing entire grant programs under which may fall dozens or even hundreds of individual grants. The review can't be grant program by grant program; it has to be individual grant by individual grant.

In response to court orders, EPA made a huge production of documents. After sifting through the ``thousands of documents'' EPA offered up, the court found this:

Not one document showed any individualized review.

The court said it went through thousands of documents and looked at them and said:

Not one document showed any individualized review.

There was no grant-by-grant analysis, nothing that met the legal individualized review standards. Instead, what the court found was illegal targeting based on the grant containing general terms that the big donors didn't like, like ``climate,'' like ``greenhouse gas emissions,'' like ``environmental justice.''

Entire grant programs were canceled en masse. Internal emails said ``cancel them all.'' It was the opposite of what the law requires. In short, the court found, after extensive review, that Administrator Zeldin did not follow the law.

Administrator Zeldin then made an astonishing move. That same day, May 20, 2025, that the court rejected the EPA's claims as ``hard to believe,'' Zeldin walked into a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing and repeated the same discredited story he had tried to sell the court, plus an added new twist.

He claimed that he personally conducted the individualized review of what he called ``every single grant'' before he canceled them.

The court, based on the actual evidence from those thousands of EPA documents, had not bought that story, but Zeldin figured that a Republican-controlled congressional subcommittee just might. The very next day Zeldin came to our Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and--under oath--told me the same false story; that he had personally reviewed every grant, this time adding that his deputy also individually reviewed every single grant.

The problem with all of this? The evidence shows that the opposite is true. Remember what the court found after reviewing those thousands of pages EPA had produced:

Not one document showed any individualized review.

But wait, there is more. That deputy that Zeldin claimed also reviewed every single grant individually? He filed a sworn declaration to that same court averring only that he had conducted a review of grant programs. Remember the difference between grant programs which contain dozens of potential grants and the individual grants.

All he would say under oath is that he had reviewed grant programs, not individual grants. Under oath in court, the deputy in charge of coordinating the grant review would only swear his name to a declaration about a review of programs, not of individual grants.

Other circumstantial evidence also cuts against Zeldin. We looked at detailed EPA calendars obtained by FOIA requests showing that the Administrator held five meetings with EPA staff related to grants. Total time across all five meetings: 2 hours and 45 minutes. His calendar showed no entries for other personal time to review grants.

So do the math: 2 hours 45 minutes to review 781 grants individually. That is about 13 seconds per grant. That math ain't ``mathing,'' as they say.

And then look at what eventually happened within the five grant programs at issue. Every single grant in every single program was canceled except one outlier, a government-to-government grant, the only one to a single State. All the rest, swept clean.

Another tell here was Zeldin's behavior in our committee: his madcap yelling, accusing, fist-banging. It is Trump administration standard operating procedure to yell and shout and accuse when they can't answer a legitimate question. We have seen that play run over and over and over.

So all the evidence points plainly in one direction: Zeldin didn't follow the law, and he lied about following the law. Why? Why lie about that? Well, here is why: Trump demands two things from his Cabinet; one, fawning flattery; and two, slavish implementation of his political instructions.

Zeldin admitting that he messed up the grant cancellation process would batter EPA's chances in litigation. He would be guilty of failure to execute on Trump's big donors' political agenda. He would have to face the White House's ire.

So Administrator Zeldin became Lyin' Lee, desperate to keep Trump's illegal plans alive to carry out the political purge of clean energy grants, all to satisfy that audience of one by rewarding Trump's thuggish fossil fuel Kingmakers.

This kind of gangster and ``Gong Show'' absurdity, this kind of brazenness, shows what happens when fossil fuel private interests own the executive branch of the U.S. Government.

Follow the money. This is phase four. This is what it looks like when government is captured by polluters and put to their service.

Zeldin's testimony was no inadvertent statement; it was a calculated stratagem to lie and try to shout his way out of the pickle he was in.

Let's be clear who is hurt here, what the real costs are. Lying to a court is bad. Lying to Congress is bad. Lying to frustrate judicial review is bad. Lying to thwart Congress' constitutional power of the purse is bad. All of that is bad.

But behind all of that were real people trying to earn a living on the other end of those grants that Zeldin lied about and canceled. Those grants funded tangible projects that would cut people's energy costs, protect people from natural disaster, create real jobs for real people. It was real stuff.

Here is some of the real stuff the illegal grant cancellations held up: In North Carolina, residents were relying on a nearly $20 million grant to replace residential water service lines to get dangerous lead out of their drinking water. Other lead drinking projects were canceled in Indiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

Another one, Kipnuk, AK, lost a nearly $20 million grant to stabilize its riverbank. Those consequences were real and immediate. In October of 2025, the remnants of Typhoon Halong swept through, flooded the river, leveled the town, killed 1 person, and displaced over 1,500 people.

A climate specialist at the University of Alaska had noted a pattern. Three devastating ex-typhoon storms hit Western Alaska in 4 years. Zeldin's canceled grant did not just fail to prevent a predictable flood; it may actually have contributed to the permanent erasure of a Native community's home.

Just last week, Kipnuk Tribal members voted to relocate away from their flooded ancestral village. The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe was planning to use nearly $20 million to create a Tribal resilience hub that would have provided essential services during emergencies. Anybody who has had to evacuate in an emergency knows how important that is-- gone.

Texas A&M University would have received $14 million to install wastewater treatment systems throughout 17 counties in Alabama that had inadequate plumbing capacity where residents suffer from preventable conditions like hookworm, but I guess that was too woke for Lyin' Lee.

A $500,000 grant for the Childhood Lead Action Project--a project launched in 2018 to reduce lead exposure in children--gone. The list goes on, but the mass cancellations share the same characteristic.

Zeldin and his merry band of DOGE boys killed off grant programs based on ideas and phrases they didn't like and wanted to cancel: ``environmental justice,'' ``DEI,'' ``climate change.''

None of this was based on the required individualized review he pretended to have done. That is the Zeldin lie under oath, the Zeldin lie that is sanctionable, but it is not his big lie. His big lie is Zeldin repealing EPA's 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, the bedrock scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. He boasted it was the ``single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.''

What he did not say is this: EPA's own scientists disagreed. The National Academy of Science had just reaffirmed the Endangerment Finding, saying it ``was accurate, had stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence.''

So EPA, having trouble challenging that science, argued that the Clean Air Act does not authorize EPA to regulate greenhouse gases at all, which was an argument the Supreme Court had already rejected back in 2009 in Massachusetts v. EPA.

The science has not changed. The law has not changed. The fossil fuel industry's complete infiltration of our government is what changed.

Lying to Congress about grant reviews is serious, but lying about science, that is big. Even bigger and even more consequential for the American people is the enormous lie which Zeldin, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright spout constantly.

The enormous lie is that clean energy is more expensive than dirty polluting energy; the fact of the matter is that it is not. And the easiest way to prove that it is not is to look at what is called the generation stack of the electric grid. As we all turn on lights and air-conditioners and electric appliances, powerplants get called up to provide the power to meet the demand.

For obvious reasons, grid operators call up the lowest cost power first. Here is what that looks like for two of our electric grids: ERCOT covers Texas; PJM runs westward from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest.

This shows the order in which, in real life, they actually call up their powerplants, least expensive first. And guess what? Solar and wind and hydro come before coal and gas. Same here, solar, wind, and hydro come before coal and gas.

In real life, based on real prices actually bid into the electric grid, that is how they stack up. Solar, wind, and other renewables come first because they are less expensive. So it is indisputable that Burgum, Zeldin, and Wright are lying.

Here is another proof point. This time series compares costs on the Texas grid ERCOT at various levels of demand in 2018 and in 2024. This line shows the demand cost curve of ERCOT in 2018. This line shows the same information for the same grid in 2024 after a huge clean energy surge went onto the Texas grid--17.6 gigawatts of new clean energy joined the grid.

Look here at the high point in 2018 when demand peaked at about 68 gigawatts. What was the price point? Mr. President, $75 per megawatt hour.

You hit that exact same level of demand 6 years later with all of that new clean energy on the grid and the price had fallen by two- thirds. It is now $25 per megawatt hour--$75 before the clean energy surge, $25 after. In real life, in real time, Texas saw clean energy press prices down.

It is a before-and-after look at how clean energy reduces prices of electricity. With power costs down when clean energy goes up, this is more evidence that Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright are lying.

Here is another example: Australia. Australia is loading up on clean energy. They are loading up on residential, solar, and other clean energy arrays. And that allows them now to have their grid propose 3 hours of scheduled free electricity every day.

Three hours a day, no matter who you are. If you are using electricity, you plug in, you run your dryer, you run your washing machine, and for those 3 hours you know, that is free electricity. It is free electricity from Australia's abundant clean power strategy. Literally, clean power so cheap it makes electricity free.

One last data point on costs. The court filings of the state attorneys general fighting the illegal Trump stop work orders against offshore wind farms off Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Here is what our States asserted about Revolution Wind in court where lying is sanctionable.

Once operational, Revolution Wind alone will provide hundreds of millions of dollars each year in energy bill savings to New England.

Hundreds of millions of dollars each year in energy bill savings to New England.

The ISO New England's grid operator wrote that had offshore wind been online, it would have saved regional production costs by $80 to $85 million over a 2-week cold snap in 2017 to 2018, resulting in $11 to $13 per megawatt hour, less costs in what the grid charged ratepayers.

Zeldin, Burgum, and Wright could have come into that courtroom and offered their evidence to the contrary, filed affidavits asserting the cost savings of fossil fuel. It was a great opportunity for them to make that case in court that they were spouting on FOX News and on X. Well, guess what? In the forum where lies are subject to court sanction, they had nothing to say.

The Trump administration's attack on clean energy may reward Trump's big polluter donors, but people, people who already face the Trump affordability crisis, they see their costs go up when clean energy is kept off the grid.

When the Big Oil cartel hikes prices, families pay the cost. When volatile natural gas prices spike, families pay the cost. When cheaper clean energy is blocked from the grid, families pay the cost.

In this case, Texas families, had it not been for that clean energy, would have paid an additional $50 per megawatt hour. In this Trump clean energy scam, money goes from regular people's pockets, from customers' pockets, straight to Trump's big fossil fuel donors, in billions. In billions. It is the biggest payback for political support that I can remember.

Banning clean energy, it hurts homeowners and renters. And as climate disasters surge, insurance markets falter. They are already staggering in Texas and Florida.

The Economist magazine has warned of a potential $25 trillion collapse in global real estate value as properties become uninsurable and unmortgageable, and in some cases, even unlivable.

The chief economist at the mortgage giant Freddie Mac predicted a cascade. Climate risk makes regions uninsurable, which makes properties there unmortgageable, which crashes property values, which all collapses in a 2008-style economic recession.

Canceling clean energy investments to help out big polluter donors accelerates that dangerous trajectory until property values crash.

Clean energy is where the jobs are. Over 400,000 had been created since 2020, with a faster growth rate than the rest of the energy sector.

Fossil-fueled sabotage of this sector means fewer of those jobs in America, more in China, and a shrinking economic future for American workers. And, yes, attacking clean energy means more emissions, more disasters, more billion-dollar storms, more hits to communities like Kipnuk.

NOAA shows that Americans suffered over $100 billion per year in disaster costs in each of the past 5 years, half a trillion dollars. And that cost gets worse. And that harm cascades, from the families struggling with a soaring property insurance bill, to the worker whose clean energy job never materializes, to the taxpayer footing the bill for ever more costly disasters.

These are the real consequences of government by falsehood. When truth is denied, when science is ignored, when courts are defied, the public ends up bearing the cost. And that cost grows every day that the polluters' evil machinery is left to run unchecked.

Zeldin lying about his review of grant programs is obviously a lesser matter than the wholesale lies designed to mislead the public and prop up the failing and polluting fossil fuel industry. But those lies to Congress were under oath--under oath--and that ought to matter.

There is no exception to the duty to tell the truth for lies that benefit Trump's big fossil fuel donors. For years, fossil fuel interests believed that they could pollute for free, deceive the public, buy elections with dark money, and do it all without consequence.

They have bought and paid for this administration and now use operatives like Zeldin to run the Federal Government from the inside. The brazenness of executive branch officials on the polluter payroll is there for everyone to see.

Zeldin's own EPA colleagues are saying so too. Over 1,200 EPA employees, career scientists, lawyers, and enforcement staff have signed a public letter to Zeldin laying out their concerns that he has spread misinformation through official EPA channels; that he has promoted a culture of fear among his own staff; and that he has redirected the Agency's mission from its legal mission to protect public health to the service of big polluters.

Separately, a watchdog organization has sued the EPA in Federal court after the Agency failed to produce any documentation backing up a Zeldin claim made in front of the President at a Cabinet meeting that EPA employees were absent or were ``ghost workers.'' Zeldin doesn't just lie to Congress, he lies about his own people at the EPA.

Accountability is coming. The courts are waking up. The public is waking up. Even some in the business community are waking up to the looming peril.

And President Trump is losing steam, losing cases, losing credibility, losing his popularity, losing the illusion of invincibility that cowed so many into silence.

It is long past time for Republicans to discover their oaths of office, to stand up for the Constitution and for Congress as an institution, and to defend our American constituents from Trump and his gangster government.

One place to start is with a really simple rule for our witnesses: You do not lie.

So for that reason today, I am calling on Lee Zeldin to go. It is bad enough that he has weaponized the EPA to do the bidding of the giant fossil fuel and chemical corporations that donated to Trump's campaign.

But if he can't be relied on to tell the simple truth to Congress, to answer simple questions honestly, how could anybody in this body believe him? Or is the new rule that lying is OK if it is done for big polluters?

Late last year, Moms Clean Air Force and their 1.6 million members called on Zeldin to resign. Earlier this week, a coalition of over 160 organizations, led by the Climate Action Campaign and Moms Clean Air Force, demanded that Zeldin resign or be fired.

Moms Across America and many others in the Make America Healthy Again movement are fed up with Zeldin flip-flopping on toxic regulations and failing to respect the core mission of EPA to keep Americans healthy and safe.

People across America on both the left and the right are waking up to the dangers of Lyin' Lee Zeldin running a corrupted EPA. It is time for us here in the Senate to do the same.
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