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The Environmental Protection Agency misled the public about the dangerous air in New York City following the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, Commissioner Lee Zeldin said. He vowed to prevent a repeat of this disaster in the aftermath of the 2025 California wildfires.
“I actually think that’s the worst moment of EPA history was misleading the public on air quality,” he told The Daily Signal in an exclusive interview. “We are following a principle very strictly, with a whole lot of discipline, to never do that.”
Zeldin said the agency is taking a different approach to environmental issues after the fires of January 2025.
“We have air monitors that are out,” he said. “We monitor air, land, and water on the land front. We just ramped up an extra redundant soil sampling just to confirm that excavating to six inches was the right level to go down to, and we found almost 100% of the homes that level of remediation got their properties below that federal lead limit, so that was good.”
Zeldin promised “public transparency” about the safety of the air.
“I don’t want our agency to keep that information to ourselves,” he said. “We want to share it. The same thing with water quality, whether it’s the Safe Drinking Water Act to make sure residents have access to clean water, which was a really big deal at the beginning of the timeline, right after the fires hit, for those first few months, and then also just access to water in general, and our obligations under the Clean Water Act, obligations for both the federal government and the state.”
President Donald Trump tasked Zeldin with leading wildfire recovery efforts in California because he was displeased with the rate of rebuilding.
“There’s responsibilities that different levels of government are responsible for, and the president essentially wants to see this rebuilt as fast and efficiently as possible,” Zeldin said, “so the work is very nontraditional at this point to try to help out, even on stuff that you might not typically see the EPA involved with.”
Many of the obstacles to rebuilding are state and local regulations, Zeldin said.
“It’s not like you can just change a federal law or a federal regulation to remove a federal obstacle when really you’re talking about local permitting, you’re talking about a state regulatory environment on insurance or banking,” he said. “However, the president has used the bully pulpit, and when he posted on the insurance company effort, you then saw the insurance companies stepping up, same thing on the banking front.”
“I think the president just directly being able to weigh in the way he has has had a massive impact,” he added.
Zeldin said that Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt resonates with voters because he relates to many residents’ struggles of losing a home to the fires.
“If you’re trying to make a connection with a voter or a resident on something that’s personal to you and personal to them, and you’re talking about people either losing their homes, almost losing their homes, or who are concerned their community could be next—it’s something that certainly resonates,” he said. “And when you have lost your home yourself, that’s a whole other level of it.”
Zeldin said that Pratt understands this through his experience of moving into a trailer park, and later, a hotel, after losing his home in the fires.
“If you’re trying to make a connection with a voter or a resident on something that’s personal to you and personal to them, and you’re talking about people either losing their homes, almost losing their homes, or potentially could be they have their own concern that their community could be next—it’s something that certainly resonates,” he said, “and when you lost your home yourself, that’s a whole other level of it.”
“Obviously it’s one thing when you live in another part of LA, and you’re talking to someone who lost their home,” he added, “but you yourself living out of a trailer, that’s, I think, a story that a lot of other people are connected with.”
English (US)