There was no love lost between EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse at the opening of a budget hearing Wednesday, with each immediately lobbing broadsides at one another.
Their contentious interaction followed two other budget hearings this week in which Zeldin eagerly tangled with Democrats.
In his opening remarks, Whitehouse said Zeldin had a “huge part” in delivering for fossil fuel donors to President Donald Trump — and promised a “reckoning.”
“All the climate denial fraud that you helped propagate, all the corrupt dark money, your polluter bosses sluice through this building — none of that will stand against nature’s reckoning, a reckoning that is inevitable, as inevitable as a sunrise we ignore, at our own peril,” said Whitehouse, top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
