WASHINGTON (AP) — EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says he is closing a one-room museum at the agency's Washington headquarters, saving taxpayers $600,000 a year in operating costs.
Zeldin, who has vowed to slash agency spending, said in a video posted Monday that the museum cost $4 million to build and attracted fewer than 2,000 visitors since it opened last year.
The museum is “yet another example of waste by the Biden administration,” he said, adding that it is overly focused on environmental justice and climate change, two Biden administration priorities.
While admission is free, the museum's operating costs — coupled with low attendance — means it costs taxpayers about $315 per visitor, Zeldin said. “This shrine to EJ (environmental justice) and climate change will now be shut down for good,'' he said.
The video was filmed in the EPA museum, which features a pen used by President Lyndon Johnson to sign amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1967 and a first edition of "Silent Spring,'' Rachel Carson's landmark book on the harm caused by the pesticide DDT. The 1963 book helped launch the environmental movement.
The museum also describes the agency's founding in 1970 under President Richard Nixon, the creation of the Superfund program to clean up toxic waste, and the federal response to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Zeldin said the museum “conveniently” omitted mention of President Donald Trump's first term and vowed to do his part to help Americans “learn more about the amazing work of our agency to provide cleaner, healthier and safer land, air and water."
That mission can be accomplished "without paying more than half a million in tax dollars on a museum that is barely visited and designed to tell an ideologically slanted, partial story of the EPA,” Zeldin said.
Information on the museum was removed Monday from the EPA’s website.
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