Lee Zeldin has spent much of his tenure as Environmental Protection Agency administrator hyping his DOGE team’s cuts to Biden-era environmental programs across social media, cable news and articles published in friendly outlets — trumpeting his agency’s triumphs to millions of viewers at a time.
Its missteps have garnered far less attention. Behind the scenes, serious errors were made throughout the EPA DOGE team’s blitz. Mistakes that saw millions of dollars’ worth of grants accidentally canceled. Mistakes in what the EPA reported to the General Services Administration. And mistakes in what the agency leader boasted to millions.
“We just cut another 21 grants heading toward DEI and environmental justice, saving American taxpayers another $67 million,” Zeldin said during a Fox News appearance less than a month into his tenure.
NOTUS found that neither figure in Zeldin’s claim was accurate; the dollar amount was overstated by millions of dollars. Zeldin never publicly corrected it.
EPA officials kept Congress in the dark about many of the details of its sweeping cuts, with Hill staff repeatedly requesting information only to be stonewalled, internal documents show. At the same time, EPA employees readily shared the precise details of various rounds of cuts with writers at friendly publications, providing them all the information they needed to either laud the Trump EPA or target its predecessor.
The cost-cutting effort at the EPA is ongoing while the agency wages multiple court battles to defend its cuts.
“To date, EPA has canceled at least $29 billion in wasteful spending—which represents a figure that is nearly three times the annual operating budget of the agency,” an agency spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement for this article.
Internal records that EPA turned over to a district judge earlier this year as part of a lawsuit against the Trump administration offer the clearest view yet of the EPA’s full-throated embrace of DOGE and its subsequent stumbles. The administration appealed a judge’s ruling that failing to carry out congressionally mandated spending is unconstitutional.
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The EPA’s DOGE team carried out its first major round of cuts within two weeks of Zeldin taking the agency’s top job in late January. The agency’s DOGE lead, Kathryn Loving, started with Zeldin’s team in December, according to her LinkedIn. She wrote online that she “joined DOGE to help solve the national debt problem” and “ended up at the EPA,” adding, “I knew at the start that this quest might be hopeless, but I knew I had to try to help.”
Loving worked alongside 24-year-old DOGE engineer Cole Killian and Erica Jehling, who had made the jump from SpaceX. All three were special government employees who did not take government salaries, the EPA told NOTUS. Loving, Killian and Jehling did not respond to requests for comment on their work at the EPA for DOGE.
In addition to their cost-cutting work, records show the team was tasked with cataloging public tips sent to an X account and signing off on EPA expenditures exceeding $50,000.
Loving second-guessed some requests sent in by regional leadership, withholding her approval of funding measures until she got more up to speed about how the EPA operated. (“Could you tell me more about the various boats owned by EPA?” Loving asked one Region Five official who had sent in funding requests.)
The DOGE staffers worked with other senior EPA officials and Zeldin aides who helped carry out and publicize the cuts. Agency spokesperson Molly Vaseliou asked colleagues if “LZ” wanted the first batch of cut contracts announced individually or “lumped into a press release.”
Zeldin’s chief of staff, Eric Amidon, noted that many of the cuts didn’t yield any savings, “so I think lumped together this time.”
The next round of cuts had a slightly larger dollar figure. “Political leadership” signed off on a second round of cuts targeting federal grants, according to records. On paper, the EPA would recoup $67.4 million in awarded but undistributed funds, per an internal spreadsheet that Daniel Coogan, an EPA deputy assistant administrator, shared with colleagues.
The list had the sign-off of EPA leadership but contained a significant error. Both the second and third grants listed were for the Institute for Sustainable Communities, a nonprofit focused on climate resiliency and clean energy.
EPA staff had listed the same grant twice, causing the total savings from the cuts to be inflated by over $6 million.
The EPA initially planned to announce the cuts publicly on Feb. 23, but the media campaign kicked off a day early for reasons not made clear in the emails, catching some senior staff by surprise.
The news first broke not in an agency press release, but in a New York Post article headlined “DOGE, EPA cut $67M in grants for lefty groups pushing Biden’s ‘environmental justice’ mandate.” The pair had “put the kibosh on more than $67 million in grant money … The Post has learned,” the article reads. Breitbart and Fox News Digital ran similar pieces touting that overstated dollar amount.
The New York Post story states that “the biggest loser is Vermont-based Institute of Sustainable Communities, which has yet to receive $12.4 million of the $16 million it was promised under two separate Biden-era grants…” The claim is untrue; the Post had conflated the spreadsheet’s duplicates and added their totals together.
UPDATE: I just cancelled another 21 wasteful DEI and Environmental Justice grants, with the help of our amazing @DOGE team, racking up $67M more in savings! https://t.co/NKPc6sURqs
— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) February 22, 2025
Zeldin touted the $67 million figure across various right-wing outlets, national television and social media in a Feb. 22 post viewed over 3 million times.
Two days later, Loving sent a note to Coogan and Vaseliou. She’d found the mistake.
“Just want to flag so you both are aware, there’s a duplicate below … so I think the sum total of potential savings here is only $61M, not $67M,” Loving wrote. “I know press on this already went out, but I’m going to just report the shorter list to WH unless you are aware of a missing one that’s not on this list!”
On Feb. 25, Deputy Associate Administrator Cora Mandy ran a press release past Zeldin that listed the correct figures: “More than $60M” saved across 20 grants.
Zeldin kept up his post with the inflated total. While the EPA chief’s media blitz reached millions online, the press release with the correct figure garnered fewer than 4,500 views on X.
The EPA declined to address the error in its statement to NOTUS.
Senior staffers and the EPA DOGE team regularly coordinated their press releases and social posts.
“A social media worthy bite based on today’s report might be: ‘In less than two weeks, EPA DOGE has terminated 29 contracts, helping the American taxpayer avoid over $121M in costs,’” Coogan wrote to colleagues, adding that he was “Deferring to the media folks on editioralizing [sic] with ‘wasteful’ et al adjectives.”
In a separate email chain, Loving flagged to Vaseliou that “we actually already tweeted about $45M of the cancelled contracts” and the statement should instead read $77 million. “I wanted to run this list by you before I report to the DOGE team,” she wrote. “Do you/Lee want to post this or should DOGE do it?”
Zeldin was directly involved in social media strategy. In one email thread, he weighed in on whether or not to post a Fox News op-ed — he said no because he wasn’t “crazy about posting op-Ed’s that are not easily accessible due to firewalls.” (It had an email registration pop-up.)
Mistakes continued. In March, EPA staff mistakenly terminated tens of millions of dollars’ worth of grants for projects in the Midwest and South Central United States despite provisions in their terms and conditions that should have precluded the cuts.
“This was terminated (mistakenly on our part, as there was some confusion, regarding T&Cs and multiple links),” a regional EPA official wrote to Coogan about one of the grants.
The cuts prompted a flurry of questions from recipients and other interested parties, including Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga, whose office privately sought answers from the EPA’s congressional liaison about a terminated $20 million award in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
That grant was eventually restored. “It has been brought to my attention the Termination Letter you received … was accidently [sic] sent,” the EPA representative who had delivered the initial termination notice wrote in a follow-up to the recipient.
Inside the EPA, Coogan told the congressional liaison that “While we have not terminated this grant yet, it is on our list and we will.” He advised her to pass along the agency’s boilerplate statement regarding grant reviews, summed up with the line: “The agency’s review is ongoing.”
Before the end of April, the EPA again terminated the award.
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Officials in the GSA began to catch some of the errors in the EPA DOGE team’s submissions to the GSA termination log as they tracked canceled grants and contracts. GSA staffers repeatedly raised errors with Loving and Jehling’s submissions, similar to the one that led Zeldin to misstate the total savings of the second round of cuts.
“The EPA spreadsheet provided includes several contract # duplicates (I counted 12) with different ceiling and savings values,” a GSA senior procurement analyst wrote.
In one email, Loving wrote that “Canceling grants before they are awarded is easier, and more impactful in terms of $savings, so we are planning to do several more this week that are pre-award.”
Initially, many of the draft awards had been listed as cuts yielding zero dollars’ worth of savings. But Loving set a new savings value for each one: the maximum dollar amount that each recipient could have potentially received from the government. “This is debatable,” Loving conceded of the adjustments, “but I discussed with Erica, and we think treating this as savings is more accurate.”
The EPA’s cuts continue to be adjudicated months after its cost-cutting blitz.
Zeldin has argued that EPA grant money ought to be spent more conservatively on solely remediating specific environmental issues. His criticism of Biden-era programs like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which includes funding for clean energy programs or the weatherization of existing infrastructure in the face of climate change, casts recipients as “left-wing activist groups.”
Early this month, two Trump-appointed judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia cleared the way for Zeldin to claw back $16 billion that had been awarded to nonprofits from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
As March drew to a close, the agency continued to cancel grants and contracts and defend its cuts in court, but there was steadily less and less emphasis on DOGE. A review of EPA press releases and Zeldin’s social media shows scant mention of DOGE from April on.
The EPA’s DOGE team has disbanded, with all three DOGE staffers having departed the agency. According to her LinkedIn, Loving departed DOGE and the EPA in June. On her personal website, she wrote that she “loved working with both political and career staff at the EPA who want to push for ‘environmental ROI’ as a new metric for the agency.”
“Best wishes to you all from the sidelines!”