The Daily Signal - Zeldin Vows to Prevent Another 9/11 Air Poisoning Disaster After LA Fires

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin rolled back protections against “forever chemicals” in order to make safeguards even stronger, he says. PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” are linked to cancer, infertility, and more.  Zeldin announced a rule May 20 proposing repealing limits on four types of PFAS in drinking water, and delaying regulations on two others, sparking criticism from the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.  But Zeldin, who agreed that consumers “should be” worried about water contamination, said his goal is to make the tap more, not less, safe. The Biden administration didn’t follow the procedures laid out in the Safe Drinking Water Act, so he is redoing them, he said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. I'm at the Environmental Protection Agency with Administrator Lee Zeldon. Thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you, thank you for being here. The president put you in charge of handling the response to the California wildfires from last January. What are you doing to fast-track the rebuilding process there? So we started off doing the traditional federal responsibilities last year.

EPA coming in, we completed our hazardous debris removal in less than 30 days. Army Corps then came in to complete their phase two debris removal in 100 days. Small business administration gave about half of their disaster loans in 2025 towards the LA rebuild. But at the one year mark, President Trump was looking at the rebuild pace, and he saw all these non-federal log jams still in place. And he said, you know what, let's start getting involved with tearing through these non-federal obstacles that are left. First, we were tackling the permits. There's since have been thousands of new permits done.

EPA was essentially doing constituent services, calling individuals who lost their homes to figure out what they needed, what was the obstacles still in front of them, and then help navigate that tape that was in front of them. Insurance companies, we got good feedback on how some insurance companies were doing a great job. Others were doing a not-so-great job when President Trump heard. when President Trump heard about it, he immediately posted on Truth Social, naming names,

looking for those companies to really step up. Some of these people were requiring, some of the victims were being required to provide a whole lot of documentation, even though they lost everything. It was taking too long, and at the end of the day, they were getting offered and underpayment of their insurance policy. Then the president heard about the banking front, and how banks could be stepping up more. And the president then posts on true social and naming names. There's, we always had Governor Newsom in the office here last week. We had a meeting to discuss the LA rebuild.

It's a federal, state, local effort. There's responsibilities of different levels of government are responsible for. And the president essentially wants to see this rebuild as fast and efficiently as possible. So the work is very non-traditional at this point to try to help out even on, stuff that you might not typically see the EPA involved with.

When the Daily Signal was out in LA during the wildfires, we heard a big concern from a lot of people who lost their homes was how much red tape there was in California and how long it would take them to get back to where they were. What can be done at the federal level to address that? So a lot of those obstacles are non-federal. So it's interesting. 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.

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. So I think the president just directly being able to weigh in the way he has has had a massive impact. There's also a request for federal aid. Some of that money would require a new act of Congress, so that's something that Congress

would have to debate and vote on what the right amount would be. Some of the money that's requested wouldn't require a new act of Congress, most of it would. Veting it out between what is viewed as the most necessary versus what is aspirational, that's also something that has the federal government involved. I would also say that the conversations include what can the federal government do using its bully pulpit to get reforms at the state and local level. So on the wildfire prevention front, right next to the palisades was a park. The park should have had brush cleared right near the border with the houses.

Creating that buffer gives more time for people to be able to flee their homes, for fire departments to be able to stage. So leaning into that level of fire prevention is important. Water flow. You have a lot of hills in that area. Water can either go down with gravity or it goes up with pressure. When people turn on their sinks, their sprinkler systems, when fire hydrants start getting used, pressure goes down. It becomes harder for those systems with the infrastructure that they've had to get the water going uphill. So talking about redundancy, what kind of permits need to be given by the state. It's a very robust conversation where state and local entities can be doing more, and we can help in asking for those reforms in the meetings that we're having on these particular topics.

When you speak to Governor Newsom about these types of reforms, do you think you're on the same page about this, or is there still work to be done there? I guess it kind of depends on what the topic is. You know, there were some new ideas that I was sharing of things that could still get implemented. Then we were also talking on other topics on items that the state has implemented some changes on where that's a good thing. But there's certainly more that can be done. And that's a good thing that we have this open dialogue to be able to discuss these ideas. Because we get a lot of feedback on the ground with the community. They share ideas because it's their home. They've lost

their home, they lost their community, but they're staying there, they want to rebuild. And they come up with their own vision that is far more than a back of napkin vision. So being able to receive that feedback and then turn it into real progress has been awesome. That's great. And a variety of substances burned in the fires causing some amount of toxins to go into the air. What can the EPA do to make sure that Californians don't face long-term health effects from the air from those fires? Yeah, that's something I'm really sensitive to because EPA post 9-11 was telling residents in

the lower Manhattan that the air was safe to breathe. And you had all these first responders on the pile and too many have lost their lives because of those consequences. I actually think that's the worst moment of EPA history was misleading the public on air quality. So we are following a principle very strictly with a whole lot of discipline to never do that. We have air monitors that are out with 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. We found almost 100% of the homes that level of

remediation got their properties below that federal lead limit so that was good we didn't have to do that but we want to make sure that we're following best practices for the future we put air monitors out and we will always be publicly transparent whenever an air monitor comes back and it's showing a level that is higher than where it should be I don't want our agency to keep that information to ourselves 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. Some California officials have blamed the extent of the fire on global warming. What are your thoughts on that?

I think that the fire prevention, and water flow points are incredibly essential to understand and comprehend as to why this fire was able to cause as much damage as it did. You need to be able to do prescribed the burns. You have to be aware of the Santa Ana wins. This isn't a new concept. This didn't just start over the course the last few decades all of a sudden there's a wind blowing in california it's been happening there for hundreds of years if not more but as far as we know of of americans uh living uh living there's just been this long history of this wind this this happens so what you have to do is make sure that when you have homes that are next to a whole lot of brush uh and if a fire was to start that that

that brush with the wind is going to be able to swoop that fast across that residential area. You just, you have to plan ahead for it. And I believe that the infrastructure could have been better for firefighting, both from the forest management standpoint as well as the water piece. You know, I was mentioning earlier that gravity to get water down, the pressure pumps to get the water up. Another idea that right now the LADPW has to create redundancy is, across that same park I told you where there should have been a brush clearance, you can put a water pipeline to go straight across that park to make sure that at

that top of the elevation if pressure was not getting up to that elevation the way that it should that there's there's access to water from another source. That's really what I look to first and foremost. I believe that we could be a lot better, especially inside of some of these Western states where they're most prone to wildfires. They can be better in planning ahead and predicting and making sure that you don't have your own residents losing their homes as a consequence of not preparing for the future as well as we should. L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt has gotten a lot of attention for drawing attention to some of those preventative measures that were not taken that you just described that caused so many Californians,

himself to lose their homes. Why do you think this message from your experience dealing with these wildfires resonates so much with Californians? When you lose your home, that's as personal as it gets. For a lot of Americans, their American dream is achieved when they're able to get that key to their home. And it might be their first home, might be where they're raising their family. You have all the precious things you own, the personal property that has a price to it, but then you also have all the pictures and the memories, all the sentimental aspects of it, and it happens out of nowhere. And beyond a person losing their home, a family losing their home, in a way, you're also seeing a community lost. And when it happens, the entire

community comes together, so you have a relationship with your neighbors that maybe you never had before, all sharing that same experience, rallying together, joining forces for this of rebuilding families, of rebuilding streets, and rebuilding communities. So 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. And when you lost your home yourself, that's a whole other level of it.

It's, you know, obviously, it's, you know, it's not one thing when you live in another part of L.A. And you're talking to someone who lost their home, but you yourself living out of a trailer, that's, I think, a story that a lot of other people are connecting with. Moving over to Clean Water, you have proposed a change to the Biden era standards on PFA's, also known as Forever Chemicals. Could you explain why you're doing this? Well, first off, the standard on PFOA and PFOS are staying. Those are the two most studied, though those levels are going to stay.

There's a 2029 compliance deadline. We are going into a public comment period where we'll solicit comment on a opt-in process where some of these local water systems that are having a struggle to meet the 2029, date can apply for up to two more years to be able to come in the compliance. That was one, that's one piece of this that we inherited. The other, there's four other chemicals where there was a level set, but the way that they did it under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Biden EPA did not follow the sequential process that is laid out in the Safe Drinking Water Act.

You have a preliminary regulatory determination, a final regulatory determination. then you propose a rule. There are multiple public comment periods in this process, and the law lays out a sequential process. So because the Biden administration didn't follow that process, we inherited this litigation that what we're going to have to do is redo the process following the sequential process under the law to set a standard on those four chemicals.

It's not a desire to be rolling, back the level that was set on those four. It's about the calculation that if you decide that we're just going to roll the dice and we're going to fight what is likely to be a losing litigation battle that eventually a court is throwing out the standards and then you have to restart the process anyway, you're going to end up losing years. So we're fixing that. The good news is that a lot of these local water systems coming into compliance on the PFOA and the PFOS standards that are staying, the methods for treatment, for destruction, for removal also treat these other chemicals as well. So it's not like a treatment method for a PFOA and PFOS only gets after PFOA and PFOS.

So that's a good thing cleaning up more PFS than what must be cleaned up on in meeting the PFOA and PFOS levels. What would you say to Americans who maybe are still concerned about their being in these forever chemicals in their water in the meantime during this process? I think they should be. You know, that's why the levels got set. One of the issues is that local water systems right now are passive receivers. They bear the cost of cleaning it up and then they pass it off to their repairs.

And I hate the idea that an American would be responsible for cleaning up PFS contamination that they're not responsible for causing. This is something that I brought up to Congress, members of Congress have brought it up to me. They want to look towards amendments to law to make sure that they're able to tackle the passive receiver status so that people aren't responsible for cleaning up contamination in water and that the the polluter pay model is the one that ends up ruling the day. People and entities who cause the contamination should be the ones responsible for paying to clean it up. But the whole reason why the levels got set is because of a real concern that exists out there. When I was in Congress, I was a member of the PFAS Task

Force. I voted for the PFAS Action Act. I represented the district with a number of PFAS contamination issues. We worked on securing funding for the Suffolk County Water Authority in New York to be able to tackle drinking water. So it's an important topic for this agency. We want to make sure that we're setting these rules, these levels in a way that's durable, that can survive litigation, and those challenges are real. And it's very simple. Just follow the law. That's the principle that we're adopting from the moment that we got in here in the first place, about 15, 16 months ago. Another clean water concern last week, Senator Patty Moran asked you a question about abortion in the water. This is a strange phrasing for the

question, but pro-life advocates have raised concerns about the increase in women taking the abortion pill leading to antiprogesterone metabolites in the water. Is this something that your EPA is concerned about in dealing with? Well, you're asking the question a lot more intelligently than the senator. What I said in my answer, which I'll repeat here is, you know, unless that senator was referring to the hundreds of pharmaceuticals included in the recent contaminant, candidate list six that the agency put out then I didn't know what she was getting at. Now I think what she meant to ask if she was huddling up and did her homework was the contaminant candidate list, which we just released just a few weeks ago and hundreds of

pharmaceuticals were included in that and this is the first step of a regulatory process. It triggers more research, more focus, more priority. And there, again, I think it's 374 pharmaceuticals, including this one. And the agency will continue to lean into this effort. It's the first time that it's been included on the contaminant candidate list. We also included microplastics. We included more PFAS, as well as in a total about 75 chemicals. This is the first process of that regulatory sequential process that I was talking about earlier

when we're talking about PFAS. Before you get to, with PFO and PFOS, the preliminary regulatory determination, a final regulatory determination, a proposed rule, at the beginning of it, starts out by being put on a contaminant candidate list. And that's why we added the 30070-fold chemicals to. to what's called CCL6. Your name has been on the list for a while of potential options to be the next Attorney General. What's your response to that?

My head is 100% focused on my current job. I love serving as EPA administrator. It is an honor. It's a great agency. We've done an agency-wide reorganization. We've saved tens of billions of dollars. We are protecting the environment on the one-year anniversary of President Trump's term in office. We released a list of our top 500 pro-environmental actions

from that first year. At the same time, we're also doing more deregulation than entire federal governments in history have ever done across all agencies of the federal government combined across entire presidencies. We believe that you could protect the environment and grow the economy. This is what keeps me up at night.

It's where my focus is. That's my job to be focused on that. And that's where my head stay. Absolutely. Thank you so much. for doing this conversation today. Yes, ma'am. Thank you.