EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin just made it official: President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is taking a sledgehammer to bloated bureaucracy and wasteful spending — and leading what may be the largest deregulation effort in American history.
Appearing on Breitbart’s Fight Club Founders’ Roundtable on Tuesday with Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle, Zeldin laid out a bold, no-nonsense vision for the agency under Trump’s leadership: cut the waste, kill the woke, and get America back to business.
“One month ago, we announced what amounts to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the country,” Zeldin said. “One agency will do more deregulation in 2025 than the entire federal government has ever done under any previous administration.”
And the numbers speak for themselves. Zeldin said the EPA — which operates on a $10 billion annual budget — has already canceled more than $22 billion in unnecessary grants and contracts. That’s more than double the agency’s entire yearly operating budget.
Zeldin, a former congressman and one of Trump’s top reformers, is leading the charge to eliminate taxpayer-funded programs that have little to do with clean air or water. That includes scrapping DEI initiatives, slashing environmental justice grants, and tearing down politically motivated programs that ballooned under the Biden administration.
“We’re going to bring down costs. We’re going to create jobs — including in the auto sector. We’re going to make it easier to buy a home. Easier to heat your home,” Zeldin said. “This is the mandate. This is what people voted for last November.”
Indeed, Zeldin’s leadership marks a return to what the EPA was originally designed to do — protect human health and the environment — without the progressive fluff or red tape that’s been weaponized to hurt small businesses, energy producers, and everyday Americans.
Zeldin’s vision is straightforward: get back to basics, empower the states, and put American jobs first. And the Trump EPA has already put those words into action.
Here are the five pillars Zeldin said are guiding the agency’s comeback plan:
- Clean air and water for all Americans — not special interests.
- Energy dominance by unleashing American resources.
- Permanent reform through cooperative federalism — working with states, not against them.
- Making America the AI capital of the world — removing red tape that stifles innovation.
- Bringing back American auto jobs — especially in manufacturing strongholds like Michigan and Ohio.
Zeldin also promised to tackle hundreds of backlogged clean air cases that were ignored during the Biden years, saying the previous administration was too distracted by “partisan ideological pursuits” to actually focus on the agency’s mission.
“We’re going back to the basics,” he said. “We’re going to power the Great American Comeback.”
Zeldin closed out the roundtable with a shoutout to the conservative grassroots audience tuning in.
“The rule about Breitbart Fight Club is that everyone needs to talk about Breitbart Fight Club,” Zeldin said with a grin. “I’ve been following what you guys are doing here, and I think this audience is only going to continue to grow.”
Zeldin’s appearance sent a strong message: under Trump’s leadership, the EPA isn’t just cutting paperwork — it’s clearing the path for an American revival. From ditching radical policies to restoring jobs and energy independence, the agency is fast becoming a symbol of what can happen when government gets out of the way.
So while the left clings to their climate hysteria and DEI handouts, the Trump team is delivering results — and returning power to the people.
