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House Appropriations Committee hearing on the EPA’s budget, where EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin (Trump’s appointee) was testifying before the Interior and Environment Subcommittee with Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro, D-CT.DeLauro pressed Zeldin aggressively on the Trump administration’s EPA approach to climate change, accusing it of “abandoning” responsibilities under the Clean Air Act, particularly Section 202.She criticized budget cuts, rollbacks of prior climate rules/fuel standards, speaking engagements, and what she framed as prioritizing polluters over public health and science. She described the budget proposal as reading “like a climate change denier’s manifesto” and at one point declared, “You do NOT have the right to say climate change is a hoax!” Zeldin responded by grounding his points in statutory text and recent Supreme Court precedents that limit agency power:• Section 202 of the Clean Air Act does not explicitly mention “climate change” or carbon dioxide as a criteria pollutant in the way DeLauro implied; EPA actions on GHGs have relied on interpretive expansions.• Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), which overturned the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Courts (not agencies) now decide what the law says.• West Virginia v. EPA (2022) and the “major questions doctrine,” which held that EPA lacked clear congressional authorization for sweeping climate regulations (like the Clean Power Plan) that fundamentally reshape the energy sector without explicit statutory backing.Zeldin essentially challenged her on the legal basis and whether she was familiar with these controlling cases, pointing out that EPA must now follow the best reading of the statute as written by Congress, not expansive interpretations. DeLauro appeared unfamiliar with Loper Bright (or struggled to engage directly with the specifics), grew visibly agitated, interrupted, deflected by reframing it as denialism or personal attacks on his past positions, and pivoted away from the legal/statutory discussion. Critics framed it as her being unable to defend the prior regulatory regime on statutory or constitutional grounds post-Loper Bright and West Virginia. Supporters of DeLauro saw it as her rightly confronting what they view as dangerous rollbacks and denial of established climate science.