As EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin pursues plans to gut the agency’s research arm, he appeared ready Thursday to shield at least one facility: a laboratory located in the district of House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole.
The work done at the Robert S. Kerr Environmental Research Center in Ada, Oklahoma, is important and “should be enhanced,” Zeldin told the Oklahoma Republican during a House Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the Trump administration’s EPA budget proposal for next year.
His answer appeared to satisfy Cole, who had asked Zeldin to explain how the Kerr Center’s work — which includes groundwater research and ecosystem restoration — informs EPA’s ability to carry out its statutory functions.
But the lab is part of EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which would effectively be dissolved as a stand-alone entity under the first phase of a restructuring unveiled by Zeldin earlier this month.
