Yesterday, the Heartland Institute’s environment site--which is usually ordered chronologically with new materials at the top--reposted a policy brief from 2014. The proposal? Replacing the EPA with a “Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies.”
Eight years ago, this idea was a pipe dream. No policymaker in Washington would have seriously considered a plan to slash the EPA’s budget by 80 percent, eliminate staff from 15,000 to just 300 employees, and move the headquarters from DC to Topeka, Kansas.
The brief, written by Heartland’s science director (lol k) Jay Lehr, claims that “today, EPA is all but a wholly owned subsidiary of liberal activist groups.” This sentiment was, of course wrong in 2014, but it’s especially ironic today: the EPA is essentially now a subsidiary of the Kochs brothers, at least at the leadership level. (Note to career EPA staff who may see this: We love you, keep doing your job protecting Americans as best you can. And certainly don’t try and protect Pruitt, because if he’ll “ratfuck” his loyal aides, there’s no telling what he’ll do to you.)
But Pruitt’s dedication to polluters and their propagandists like Heartland means that while it may have just been an accident or tech glitch that reposted the policy brief atop the new material, there’s also a serious possibility that this is something it’s pushing in a serious fashion. Emails show Pruitt asked Heartland for who to put on his Red Team, recorded a video for a Heartland event, and tapped them to defend his scandal-ridden tenure and they hope he’ll cite them to justify his climate denial. It’s not crazy, then, to think that he might just take this suggestion seriously.
In the brief, Lehr, with zero evidence, claims that state agencies are “less vulnerable to lobbying” than the national EPA office. (Though, of course, it’s the “activists and special interest groups” Lehr’s worried about, not the actual polluters who the EPA regulates.) But that’s laughable. It’s a whole lot easier for a state-based business to exert its economic and political power over a state regulatory body than it is for it to do the same at the national level.
Unlike Lehr, we can provide evidence for our claim. Because earlier this month ThinkProgress found fourteen examples of state environmental agencies being run by someone who previously worked for an industry they now regulate, including a former coal lobbyist running the show in West Virginia and a career coal employee in charge in Kentucky.
And four states--Kansas, Colorado, South Carolina and North Dakota--don’t even have a centralized environmental agency at all. That’s about to change for North Dakota, but not necessarily for the better. A new state law will create a singular environment agency, but it will have an advisory board that, by design, will be stacked with oil and gas interests. Eight of thirteen seats are reserved for industry voices.
Lehr’s policy brief concludes with a note “to those who say [the proposal] would fail to adequately protect the public’s health or the environment,” encouraging critics to “reflect on the poor job currently being done by the EPA.” Given the EPA’s planet-friendly agenda in 2014, this was clearly partisan, pro-polluter nonsense. But reading it in 2018, well… Boy, have things changed.
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