Trump Picks Former Congressman Lee Zeldin to Lead EPA

(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Donald Trump has selected former New York congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, placing the Long Island Republican in charge of his plans to boost energy production and curb regulations.

“He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” Trump said in a statement. “He will set new standards on environmental review and maintenance, that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”

Zeldin, in a social media post, said he would work to “restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI.”

Zeldin’s portfolio is expected to include ending the Biden Administration’s pause on constructing new natural gas export terminals, redrawing national monument boundaries to permit mining and development, and withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement.

He may also be tasked with relocating EPA headquarters to outside Washington. Members of the president-elect’s transition team have been discussing moving the roughly 7,000 federal employees at EPA elsewhere, the New York Times reported last week. 

Zeldin is the second Republican from Trump’s birth state to be selected for the Cabinet, after he tapped Elise Stefanik over the weekend as his ambassador to the United Nations. Both appointments were first reported by the New York Post.

When he was in Congress, Zeldin helped mount Trump’s impeachment defense. 

(Updates to add details on Zeldin’s support for Trump. An earlier version corrected references to Zeldin’s title in the headline and lead.)

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