Trump’s new EPA administrator on California wildfire aid: ‘Nothing is holding us back’
ALTADENA (KTLA) — While Gov. Gavin Newsom met with President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill on Wednesday in an effort to secure disaster relief funds, the new EPA Administrator had boots on the ground in Altadena on Thursday.
Lee Zeldin, a Trump appointee who was sworn in to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just last week, told KTLA’s Eric Spillman in an exclusive interview that the department isn’t being held back in assisting with relief efforts after wildfires devastated parts of Los Angeles last month.
“The charge I’ve received [from the Trump administration] is to do everything in my power to assist,” Zeldin said. “There has been nothing holding me back.”
Zeldin added that, if anything, he’s been given “positive pressure” to aid victims quickly from the president.
Those statements come after Trump’s previous comments stating that he planned to place conditions on federal aid for California’s wildfire recovery efforts.
“I want to see two things in Los Angeles. Voter ID, so that the people have a chance to vote, and I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state,” Trump told reporters.
Trump took matters into his own hands with the water release, which was met with mixed reviews, as critics note that the water released by his executive orders was being stored for farmers to use during dry, hot summer months.
Newsom, who met with Trump in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, has come out against Trump’s conditions for aid, stating that it’s “wrong.”
While speaking to Spillman in Altadena, Zeldin said that he feels “really good” about the agency’s ability to clean up hazardous waste in the fire-affected areas of L.A. County. Service members from the U.S. Military are set to join the more than 1,000 EPA workers to help, he said, adding to the manpower needed to execute such an operation.
More than 7,000 structures were destroyed by the Palisades and Eaton fires in January, making for a massive cleanup job conducted by several public agencies.
As Zeldin was in Altadena, federal workers nationwide were facing a deadline to decide whether they’d remain in their current positions. The deadline for Trump’s federal buyout program, which is expected to result in a significant downsizing of the government workforce, is Thursday.
Zeldin told Spillman that he didn’t expect that deadline to affect the amount of staff cleaning up the fire zones.
“We’ve been able to flex up and hit our target goals,” he said.
Prior to his appointment to head the EPA, Zeldin served eight years in Congress as the representative of New York’s 1st District, which covers parts of Long Island. He was the Republican nominee for governor of New York in 2022, when he lost to current Gov. Kathy Hochul.