Our favorite former congressman, Lee Zeldin, kicked up quite a storm of tomfoolery this week when he announced, as President Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, that the E.P.A. had discovered a cache of metaphorical “gold bars” valued at $2 billion that, Mr. Zeldin claimed, had supposedly been siphoned off by his predecessor at the E.P.A. to cronies at a shady but possibly fraudulent startup agency called Power Forward Communities.
Press releases from federal agencies have always been known for their dry language — very demure, very mindful, as the jocular meme vernacular has it — but the announcement that Mr. Zeldin’s E.P.A. had sleuthed out a stunning case of mustache-twirling Biden-era villainy was made on the E.P.A. website in a press release that was astonishing both for its rip-roaringly partisan propagandistic content and its cringingly subliterate grammar and syntax. (As the experts and experienced civil servants are forced out, it would appear, the interns are running Washington.) The release cited articles from the Free Beacon, a Washingtonian website devoted to what it calls “combat journalism,” alongside Newsmax and Breitbart.
“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,” Mr. Zeldin was quoted as saying. He specified that $2 billion of this $20 billion had hastily been squirreled away at a suspect green-energy nonprofit, Power Forward Communities, run by pals of Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia State representative.
In a video on social media, Mr. Zeldin described the recipients of these “boatloads of cash” as “far-left activist groups” and announced he was going to claw the grant money back. Indeed, the E.P.A. was attempting to prevent it from being released by Citibank. “We’re not going to rest,” Mr. Zeldin boasted in an interview on Fox News.
Billions of dollars? It does sound pretty alarming, doesn’t it? And what’s this about “gold bars”?
The back story there is that an adviser to the Biden-era E.P.A. was videotaped describing how that agency had moved swiftly in 2024 to apportion funds for environmental initiatives and green-housing programs before the new administration — hostile as it was to anything earth-friendly — took over: “Get the money out as fast as possible before they come in,” Brent Efron said. “It’s like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.” And, well, yes. We’re sure they did. Any administration will attempt to push forward its agenda before the four-year time clock runs out.
But scratch the surface of hysteria and this narrative, like so many coming out of Washington these days, crumbles to dust. The scary-sounding $20 billion that Mr. Zeldin describes as fraud money? It was allocated by Congress as the Greehouse Gas Reduction Fund in 2022. And this suspicious new nonprofit and “far-left activist organization” called Power Forward Communities put in charge of $2 billion in metaphorical “gold bars”? It’s an umbrella nonprofit among whose members are United Way and Habitat for Humanity. Yep, that United Way. Yep, that Habitat for Humanity.
“I’m a little perplexed that this is at all controversial,” the head of Power Forward Communities, Tim Mayopoulos, a former C.E.O. of Fannie Mae, told Politico. “We are in violent agreement with the president that the cost of housing and the cost of energy is too high for many Americans, and we are looking to address that issue.”
Sadly, those Americans who are, to borrow the helpful phrase employed by Volodymyr Zelensky last week, “living in the disinformation space” will believe Mr. Zeldin’s colorful and exciting narrative. It’s up to the rest of us to keep rational heads and keep speaking truth to power.