WASHINGTON (AP) — EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says he’s closing a one-room museum on the company’s Washington headquarters, saving taxpayers $600,000 a 12 months in working prices.
Zeldin, who has vowed to slash agency spending, mentioned in a video posted Monday that the museum price $4 million to construct and attracted fewer than 2,000 guests because it opened final 12 months.
The museum is “one more instance of waste by the Biden administration,” he mentioned, including that it’s overly targeted on environmental justice and local weather change, two Biden administration priorities.
Whereas admission is free, the museum’s working prices — coupled with low attendance — means it prices taxpayers about $315 per customer, Zeldin mentioned. “This shrine to EJ (environmental justice) and local weather change will now be shut down for good,″ he mentioned.
The video was filmed in the EPA museum, which encompasses a pen utilized by President Lyndon Johnson to signal amendments to the Clear Air Act in 1967 and a primary version of “Silent Spring,″ Rachel Carson’s landmark e-book on the hurt attributable to the pesticide DDT. The 1963 e-book helped launch the environmental motion.
The museum additionally describes the company’s founding in 1970 beneath President Richard Nixon, the creation of the Superfund program to wash up poisonous waste, and the federal response to the 2010 BP oil spill within the Gulf of Mexico.
Zeldin mentioned the museum “conveniently” omitted point out of President Donald Trump’s first time period and vowed to do his half to assist Individuals “be taught extra in regards to the superb work of our company to offer cleaner, more healthy and safer land, air and water.”
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That mission might be completed “with out paying greater than half one million in tax {dollars} on a museum that’s barely visited and designed to inform an ideologically slanted, partial story of the EPA,” Zeldin mentioned.
Info on the museum was eliminated Monday from the EPA’s web site.
