Years before leading President Donald Trump’s charge to kill EPA’s “endangerment finding,” agency boss Lee Zeldin voted against a GOP effort to gut the climate policy.
The EPA chief joined Trump in the White House on Thursday to celebrate the elimination of a climate policy Zeldin labeled the “holy grail” of “regulatory overreach.”
But as a lawmaker representing New York in 2019, Zeldin was among 21 Republicans who bucked their party in rejecting an amendment that sought to block EPA from using funds to enact the endangerment finding.
That finding, formally made in 2009 by the Obama administration, sets the stage for EPA’s climate regulations. The finding has long been a target for conservatives, but it wasn’t a top priority for the first Trump administration and it remained intact until this administration announced its repeal this week.
