The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cut hundreds of grants totaling $1.7 billion in the latest cuts to align spending with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the results of the fourth round of cuts identified with help from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project on Monday. The agency said it has cut around $2 billion since Trump took office in January.
“Working hand-in-hand with DOGE to rein in wasteful federal spending, EPA has saved more than $2 billion in taxpayer money,” Zeldin said in a statement. “It is our commitment at EPA to be exceptional stewards of tax dollars.”
The agency is working to claw back $20 billion in funds that the Biden administration doled out under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The funds were turned over to Citibank in the months leading up to the election and held under the names of eight nonprofits. Those nonprofits intended to disperse the funds to other groups and programs.
Citibank has frozen the funds while the Department of Justice probes the issue. Zeldin has said he wants the money returned to the federal government.
Zeldin has called the funds “gold bars” that were shoveled out of the agency at the last minute. Last month, the EPA head said that $20 billion had been directed to go to a group of “pass throughs” that would then funnel the money to other pass throughs with the effect of funding friends and allies of the Biden administration.
$2 billion of the $20 billion was directed toward a group called Power Forward Communities, a green group linked to Democrat Stacey Abrams. Zeldin suggested last month that the example represented a serious case of waste and fraud that the Trump administration is working to rectify.
“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word. When we learned about the Biden Administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this,” Zeldin said in a statement.
“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been. It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023, was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue,” he said.
