← Videos · Energy & Permitting

Zeldin Testifies at the House Appropriations FY2026 EPA Budget Hearing, May 15, 2025

May 15, 2025 · House Appropriations Committee · 1:44:33

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin testified on the fiscal year 2026 budget for the EPA before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies on May 15, 2025, in the committee’s official upload of the hearing. The chair opened by noting that the EPA had received $100 billion in supplemental funding outside the annual appropriations process — more than ten times the agency’s annual funding — and raised the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund’s program-integrity questions and the more than 1,300 additional staff hired with that one-time money, as the chair stated them.

Zeldin’s opening statement carried the same first-100-days record he presented across that week’s hearings — the under-30-day Los Angeles wildfire cleanup, the PFAS steps, 21 Superfund sites advanced across 13 states, and the Waters of the United States revision to align with Sackett, as he stated them. Under questioning on fossil-fuel regulation, he laid out the five pillars of his “Powering the Great American Comeback” agenda as he enumerated them: clean air, land, and water for all Americans; unleashing energy dominance; permitting reform and cooperative federalism; making America the AI capital of the world; and bringing back American auto jobs.

Why it matters

The House hearing is where the Zeldin EPA’s stewardship case and its governing agenda met in one record: the $100 billion supplemental and the “gold bars” grant controversy on one side, and the five-pillar program the Administrator says the budget serves on the other. Both framings are now on the appropriations record against which the agency’s funding bills are written.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the fiscal year 2026 EPA budget request and the five-pillar agenda Zeldin defended on May 15, 2025, together with the supplemental-funding and staffing figures the chair put on the record. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: House Appropriations Committee, “Budget Hearing – Environmental Protection Agency” (Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, May 15, 2025, official upload, embedded above; remarks as delivered at the hearing).