Dozens of Long Islanders protested outside as Lee Zeldin talked about his experience as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency at the Crest Hollow Country Club in Woodbury on Friday, April 11.

“There’s a lot more to do across this entire country,” Zeldin said to a room filled with local leaders.

LIA President Matt Cohen asked Zeldin a wide range of environmental questions during the Protecting our Environment and Unlocking Economic Prosperity event, including about the recent cuts to the federal agency.

“The EPA is going to fulfill all of our core statutory missions,” he said.

Zeldin said that those missions are nonpartisan and that the agency wants clean air, land, and water. The EPA chief also talked about the agency wanting to advance cooperative federalism and push for reforms, as well as bring auto jobs back to the U.S., all initiatives that the Trump administration has pushed over the past few months.

Zeldin said that the EPA would fulfill its obligations when asked about the message to protestors who lined the entranceway to the country club with signs calling for better environmental protection before the start of Friday’s event.

Eric Weltman, the senior organizer of the protest, led chants against the EPA and said that Zeldin should be familiar with the environmental needs of the region.

“You could argue that being from Long Island, he should be well aware of the environmental conditions,” he said. “He has abandoned his principles.”

Another protestor said he works directly with the cleanup of Bethpage Community Park, which used to be an old Grumman site and has been partially shut down to the public for decades due to environmental concerns, and that he doesn’t think Zeldin is qualified to be the head of the EPA.

Zeldin served as a state senator from 2011 to 2014. He was then a U.S. Rep. for the first congressional district for eight years. He was a member of the PFAS task force while in Congress, which dealt with research efforts related to PFAS cleanup and treatment technologies. He also voted in favor of other pro-environmental legislation while in that role

“Zeldin is a sellout and he is not keeping us safe,” another protestor said.

Zeldin began the talk on Friday about his employer, President Donald Trump, who he said is one of the hardest-working people he knows. The president signed an executive order on his first day in office titled “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements,” which took the country out of the Paris Agreement. The administration has made several cuts to the EPA, including a 31-action deregulation of the agency in March.

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down the cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” Zeldin said in a press release on March 12 after the EPA made sweeping changes to policies.

“There’s no planet bigger,” a third protestor on Friday said. “He’s undone a lot of what Biden had done.”

The White House hinted in February that the federal agency’s funding may be cut by 65% after Zeldin said the previous administration had allocated too much money to it. The EPA’s budget was set at $10.99 billion for fiscal year 2025, which runs until Sept. 30.

“If you’re running an agency, you don’t want one more or one less [employee] than you need to be able to do your job,” Zeldin said regarding possible staff cuts. “We’re in the process of determining exactly what that right number is going to be.”

He also said that the agency is not trying to “strangulate the economy” after the event.