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Administrator Zeldin and Rep. Rob Menendez Clash at Hearing over Waste and Conflicts Claims, Apr. 29, 2026

April 29, 2026 · U.S. Environmental Protection Agency · 0:01:37

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

In the hearing excerpt published by the EPA, Rep. Rob Menendez challenges Administrator Lee Zeldin, restating Zeldin’s earlier claim — as Menendez characterized it — that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act spending produced waste, fraud and abuse benefiting people in the Biden orbit. Menendez asks whether Zeldin has any issue with what he describes as the President asking the oil and gas industry for a billion dollars during the 2024 campaign in exchange for supporting the rollbacks EPA is now administering.

Menendez also raises what he describes as a $220 million DHS advertising campaign under Secretary Noem that he says went to Trump operatives, and presses Zeldin to say the Secretary was wrong. Zeldin responds by asking, as he put it, about the conflicts of interest during the Biden EPA, and the exchange ends in overlapping argument without either question being answered on the record shown.

Why it matters

The clip captures the oversight fight over the EPA’s fraud narrative in miniature: each side answering the other’s conflict-of-interest charge with one of its own, on the hearing record.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard candidate: the $220 million DHS advertising figure and the billion-dollar campaign claim, as Rep. Menendez stated them, and the Administrator’s counter-claims. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no verdict given here.

Sources: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Administrator Zeldin and Rep. Rob Menendez Clash at Hearing over Waste and Conflicts Claims, Apr. 29, 2026”, 2026-04-29 (official upload, embedded above; published 2026-04-29). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.