They matched on Tinder shortly after the November presidential election, shared their mutual disappointment about Donald J. Trump’s victory and agreed to meet for a drink.

Sitting at a table at Licht Cafe, a bar on Washington’s U Street corridor, Brent Efron and his date, Brady, talked a bit about home and hobbies. But Brady — or at least that’s the name he used — repeatedly steered the conversation back to Mr. Efron’s job at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It was a boring date,” Mr. Efron, 29, recalled. “He just wanted to talk about work.”

Brady took a particular interest in the fate of billions of dollars that Congress had ordered the E.P.A. to spend on tackling climate change. Mr. Trump had promised on the campaign trail to repeal climate programs, so the Biden administration was “trying to get the money out as fast as possible,” Mr. Efron told his date.

Mr. Efron, a passionate believer in the E.P.A.’s mission “to protect human health and the environment,” came up with an analogy to describe what was happening: The agency was a cruise ship that had hit an iceberg. It needed to launch its lifeboats — climate and clean energy projects — right away.

“It truly feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge,” he told Brady.

Brady left after about an hour and Mr. Efron said he barely thought about the date again. Until a video of him appeared on the website of Project Veritas, a right-wing group known for using covert recordings to embarrass political opponents. Brady, who had posed as a politically liberal commercial real estate agent and recent transplant to the capital, was actually a Project Veritas operative with a hidden camera.

The conversation — particularly the phrase “gold bars” — has come to haunt Mr. Efron. Conservative media and Republicans immediately trumpeted those words as supposed evidence that the Biden administration had mishandled funds.