EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin just pulled back the curtain on what might be the most perfectly designed government grift in American history — Biden-era "environmental justice" programs that used your money to fund activists who trained other activists who then lobbied Congress for even more of your money. It's a perpetual motion machine powered entirely by your wallet.
You almost have to admire the craftsmanship. Most government scams at least pretend to accomplish something. This one skipped the pretense entirely.
Zeldin sat down with Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on The Alex Marlow Show and laid out exactly how the racket worked. The EPA — which operates on an annual budget of $10 billion — somehow managed to obligate and spend $60 billion in 2024 alone. That's six times the budget. If your household ran like that, you'd be in prison. When the government does it, they call it "environmental justice."
But here's where it gets truly beautiful in its corruption. Zeldin explained that grant money earmarked for actual environmental remediation was getting funneled through layer after layer of middlemen. "We had examples where the grant was going through up to four different passthroughs, where each passthrough entity was getting at least 15% to administer their part," Zeldin told Marlow. So by the time the dollar actually arrived somewhere, it had already been picked clean by four different sets of sticky fingers.
And what did the remaining pennies go toward? Not cleaning up pollution. Not protecting waterways. Not anything you'd recognize as "environmental" in any meaningful sense.
"The money that gets appropriated in the name of environmental justice... then the dollar goes to an activist group to train other activist groups... like, wait, I thought we were spending this dollar to remediate an environmental issue," Zeldin said. Yeah, Lee. We all thought that. Silly us.
It's government-funded Inception. A grift within a grift within a grift. Taxpayer money flows to Group A, which trains Group B, which then marches up to Capitol Hill and demands Congress send more taxpayer money to Group A. Rinse, repeat, and retire with a pension. Meanwhile, whatever "environmental injustice" they were supposedly fighting remains conveniently unsolved — because solving it would end the gravy train.
And the numbers Zeldin is uncovering are staggering. "Over the first year that I was in this position, we saved $30 billion," he said. Thirty. Billion. Dollars. That's not trimming fat — that's discovering the entire cow was made of fat.
Zeldin made clear this isn't just about efficiency. "It's the principle that there needs to be a zero tolerance policy for any waste and abuse," he said. Novel concept in Washington, I know.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island — a Democrat, naturally — has been one of the biggest champions of these "environmental justice" slush funds. These are the same people who lecture you about your carbon footprint while funneling billions through activist networks that produce nothing but more activists demanding more billions.
The solar grant programs were another piece of the puzzle. Same playbook — wrap the spending in green language, pass it through enough hands that nobody can trace where the money actually went, and make sure the recipient class has every incentive to lobby for the spigot to stay open.
This is what $60 billion in one year looks like when the adults leave the room. Not roads. Not bridges. Not clean water. Activists training activists to ask for more money to train more activists.
Zeldin is shutting it down, and the only people screaming about it are the ones who were cashing the checks.
