Washington DC - The National Environmental Museum (NEM) will be shuttered, along with another small museum, as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lee Zeldin continues his purge.

Zeldin announced in a statement on Monday that the immediate closure of the Museum, which was located inside the EPA's headquarters in Washington DC, will save taxpayers $600,000 annually.

"Our commitment to responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars remains unwavering as I continue to oversee a line-by-line review of agency spending," Zeldin said in the statement.

He also took the opportunity to go after former President Joe Biden's legacy, claiming that the NEM was "yet another example for waste by the Biden administration that could have instead been spent on remediating environmental issues in forgotten communities."

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Zeldin said that the museum was built to "proliferate a political agenda" and focused on environmental justice rather than the EPA's "core mission."

The museum was created in 2016, well before Biden's term in office, but was expanded from the Ronald Reagan International Trade Building to the EPA headquarters in May last year.

According to numbers provided by the EPA, the free museum costs more than $600,000 a year to operate, an amount that equates to about $315 per person.

Over recent weeks, Zeldin has revealed a string of deregulation measures and spending cuts at the EPA, including rolling back controls on harmful greenhouse gas pollution, which some say may risk lives.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said former EPA administrator Stan Meiburg when asked about the NEM by The New York Times.

"I doubt very much this is about cost savings," he said. "It's about trying to erase the past."