Top EPA air policy official Bill Wehrum has come under fire recently after documents released to the Sierra Club under the Freedom of Information Act brought to light his continued relationship with former clients.
Is he officially violating ethics rules? Probably not. But does it look like Wehrum is still at his former clients’ beck and call? Hell yes.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. While serving in the EPA under George W. Bush, Wehrum repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) went to bat for polluters. As Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) pointed out at Wehrum’s Senate confirmation hearing, the last time Wehrum was in charge at the EPA, courts ruled against him 27 different times. It was after this stint under President Bush that Wehrum went to work as a partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams (now Hunton Andrews Kurth) where he represented many industry groups. After all, who doesn’t like to sit around and get real paid?
Apparently, Wehrum not only made money on K Street, but also friends. As the Washington Post reports this week, Wehrum is putting in the time to maintain those relationships but claims that his former clients and coworkers are “just friends.” Though the line between friendship and business is far from clear, Wehrum insists that he can “still be friends with” them as long as they haven’t mixed bizness with pleasure.
As Politico reported last week, documents show that in June of 2017 a coalition of utilities that Wehrum represented called Utility Air Regulatory Group, or UARG, strategized about installing friendlies at the EPA as regulators to shape federal policy in their favor. Wehrum was a part of that meeting. Less than six months later, he became one of those key regulators. If that’s enough to cause some nausea, stop reading now, because it gets worse.
Technically, there is no federal rule that stops Wehrum from working on regulations that impact the industry he once represented. And measures taken to redact the information that identifies the company, in order to prevent a conflict of interest, doesn’t do much when the content makes it clear it was an issue in which Wehrum was intimately involved. “The scandal here is what is legal,” law professor and ethics expert Kathleen Clark told Politico.
Wehrum also signed an ethics pledge that requires him to recuse himself from matters involving his former employers and clients for two years--with a loophole. As Wehrum has said before, everything is apparently above board as long as meetings with industry are “open to all interested parties.” But that doesn’t mean these parties are where it’s at, and any member of the public could join. Instead, according to Wehrum anyway, means any meeting with more than five participants, even if all those participants were former industry clients.
Since UARG got paid by EEI, the utility industry’s propaganda arm, rather than Hunton itself, it’s not a formal entity and can describe itself as an “ad hoc” group of utilities. It also adds a layer of secrecy: UARG can just claim contributions from EEI, and not the individual companies who donate funds to EEI that pass through to UARG. So if you’re looking for transparency and funding disclosure, that may be a lost cause.
While Wehrum maintains he’s done everything by the book, no everyone is convinced. Last week, Rep. Pallone Jr., Sen. Whitehouse and Sen. Carper asked the EPA’s Office of Inspector General to investigate Wehrum’s conduct, contending that he has paid no mind to the ethics pledge requiring he recuse himself from matters involving former clients and employers.
But since it appears that in order to violate ethics rules preventing a lobbyist from improperly aiding a client, that client merely needs to be a group of companies instead of a single one, and then you can funnel your money through that group to make transparency impossible, Wehrum just might get away with pushing policies that would create a lot of new pollution.
In this “Drain the Swamp” administration, if you have polluters’ dollar bills lining your clothes, you don’t uphold ethical norms, you Wehrum down.
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