Lee Zeldin Keeps His Cards Close to the Vest

Confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s energy and environment appointees continued Thursday, with Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum appearing before the Senate for their nominations as Environmental Protection Agency administrator and secretary of the Interior. While Burgum was long tipped to get a major energy-related position in the Trump administration, Zeldin’s nomination was more of a surprise. While he worked on some local water and environmental issues during his time as a congressman from eastern Long Island, he was mostly known for his work on foreign and defense policy issues.

While Zeldin is likely to be confirmed thanks to the Republicans’ 53-47 Senate majority, he did not receive the same bipartisan lovefest as Chris Wright did in his hearing Wednesday for his nomination as secretary of Energy. Zeldin was formally introduced only by a Republican, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, whereas Wright received introductions from a Democrat and Republican on the panel examining him.

Here are three takeaways from today’s proceedings:

1. Literal climate denial is dead.

When asked by Senator Bernie Sanders “Do you agree with President-elect Trump that climate change is a hoax?" Zeldin, a former member of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus when in the House, said “I believe that climate change is real,” but then went on to say that Trump’s frequent claims, largely made during the 2016 presidential campaign, that climate change is a hoax was more a criticism of policy than a judgment of climate science.

When asked by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about what effect carbon dioxide emissions had on the atmosphere, after some back and forth about listening to scientists and what obligations the EPA had to regulate carbon dioxide, Zeldin said “trapping heat.”

2. But Zeldin does not take an expansive view of the EPA’s role.

Throughout the hearing, Zeldin returned again and again to the idea that he wanted the EPA to focus on, as Trump often says, “clean air and clean water,” that he wanted to “increase productivity of the EPA,” and that he wanted it to be “accountable and transparent.” While this sounds like so much Washington boilerplate, it is likely a sign that Zeldin will not be advocating for any increase in the EPA’s roles or responsibilities and would try to operate the agency with budgetary and conceptual restraint.

Zeldin did not endorse a proposal to move EPA’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., or comments by Department of Government Efficiency co-head Vivek Ramaswamy that the government headcount should be reduced by three-quarters, instead saying “I’m not aware of a single person fired at the EPA during the first Trump administration” (many employees left under the leadership of Scott Pruitt).

3. Industry will likely have a friendlier ear at EPA.

Several Republican senators had specific grievances with the current — or past — Democratic EPA leadership and policy, largely around how the agency deals with local industries. Senator Todd Sullivan of Alaska criticized the EPA (in 2013) for sending armed agents to inspect a mine in Alaska; Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas was critical of “one size fits all solutions” that applied to the state’s low-productivity “stripper” oil wells; Senator John Boozman of Arkansas said the EPA agenda under Biden “was shaped by the input from narrow group of stakeholders,” and asked Zeldin “how will you work with industries more collectively to ensure that their concerns are addressed while maintaining a balanced approach to environmental protection?”

“The worst thing that I could possibly do, that the EPA could do is to turn a blind eye to great substantive feedback that will better inform our decisions,” Zeldin said, indicating that industry perspectives on environmental rules and enforcement actions will likely receive a kinder ear under Zeldin than his predecessor.

Exactly what those issues will be was not immediately clear in the hearing. Any discussion of greenhouse gas emissions had to be practically extracted from Zeldin by Democratic senators, while at the same time Zeldin would not commit to scrapping Biden-era rules on power plant and tailpipe emissions (which Trump frequently targeted on the campaign trail), instead saying that he wouldn’t “prejudge” any rule-making.