by Alex Guillén, Jean Chemnick, and Kevin Bogardus
Greenwire
Three of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members have resigned in the past two months and rumors swirl about who else will get the ax ahead of the coming midterm elections.
But not Lee Zeldin.
The head of EPA is sitting comfortably in the eye of the storm, leveraging his unexpected appointment to become one of the most stable and effective of Trump’s lieutenants.
“The president set a pretty clear agenda for EPA, and [Zeldin] has executed on it,” said Joseph Brazauskas, who led the agency’s congressional and intergovernmental relations office in Trump’s first term and is now a partner at Bracewell. “And I think the president noticed that.”…
Steve Milloy, an adviser to President Donald Trump’s first transition team, said the secret to safely navigating an administration role is “pretty simple.”
“You need to be executing on the president’s agenda,” he said. “He has some very definite things that he wants done, and his perception is that Lee Zeldin is getting them done at EPA, and Pam Bondi was not getting his agenda done at [the Department of] Justice.”…
“He didn’t appoint Zeldin to EPA because Zeldin was some expert on the environment,” noted Milloy, who publishes the climate-contrarian blog Junk Science. “He appointed him because he could trust him.”
