← Videos · Energy & Permitting

Zeldin Testifies at the House Energy and Commerce FY2026 EPA Budget Hearing, May 20, 2025

May 20, 2025 · The Union Herald · 2:46:17

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

What happened

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin testified on “The Fiscal Year 2026 Environmental Protection Agency Budget” before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment on May 20, 2025, in The Union Herald’s carry of the hearing. The subcommittee chair’s opening statement welcomed the Administrator’s February announcement of the “Powering the Great American Comeback” pillars and the 31 regulatory actions he announced in March to support energy production, auto manufacturing, a more predictable permitting process, and a more state-based enforcement system, as the chair described them, while urging cooperative compliance with industry over pushing beyond what compliance timelines and technology allow.

Zeldin’s opening statement presented the first-100-days record he carried through that week’s hearings — including, as he stated it, travel to 17 states to engage regional staff and scientists and hear from farmers, business owners, and community residents, alongside the Los Angeles wildfire cleanup and the Superfund and state-plan figures. The committee’s Democratic members posted the same hearing under a title framing the budget as harmful, and pressed the Administrator on the proposed reductions, as the hearing record shows.

Why it matters

Energy and Commerce is the EPA’s authorizing committee in the House, and this hearing is the fullest single record of the FY2026 budget fight on the policy side: the 31-action March deregulation package defended before the committee that oversees the statutes those actions reinterpret.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the fiscal year 2026 EPA budget and the 31 regulatory actions of March 2025 as Zeldin defended them on May 20, 2025. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: The Union Herald, “House Hearing on FY 2026 Budget for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency” (House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment, May 20, 2025, embedded above; remarks as delivered at the hearing).