Alex Guillén at PoliticoPRO revealed on Monday that when changing a key policy to let industry off the hook, the EPA lifted language directly from industry comment asking they be let off the hook. At issue is a policy memo regarding how to calculate emission changes from upgrades at polluting facilities, with industry seeking to avoid the air permitting process under the EPA’s New Source Review.
In a memo issued in December of 2017, Pruitt decided the EPA would take industry’s word on whether or not they polluted enough to require further regulating instead of actually doing due diligence and verifying it. And we know the EPA was responding directly to industry’s concerns, and accommodating them. In that memo, Pruitt apparently lifted, verbatim, a line written by an industry group requesting the change.
Given that Scott Pruitt got busted back in 2014 for putting his name on an industry’s letter during his tenure as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, that he continued this practice at the EPA should come as no surprise.
Those who have been paying attention to Bill Wehrum’s obvious conflict of interest issues will be similarly non-nonplussed to learn that the group who wrote the stolen line, the Air Permitting Forum, includes at least four of Wehrum’s former clients: Chevron, Exxon Mobil, General Electric, and the Koch’s Georgia Pacific.
While Guillén is careful to note that there is no direct evidence connecting Wehrum’s past work with these clients with the EPA’s decision to grant their wish, at the center of the policy shift is a lawsuit involving DTE, for whom Wehrum formerly lobbied.
And this isn’t Wehrum’s first run-in with his former clients at DTE since starting at the agency. Back in February, we learned that the EPA deftly avoided any conflict of interest issues with Wehrum weighing in on a DTE request by simply redacting their name on the paperwork. The request regarded a planned policy change that Wehrum had a hand in. Surely the redaction of the company’s name made it so that he was totally unaware that this was a plan his dear friends at his former firm had developed.
Staffers for Senators Tom Carper (D-DE) and Whitehouse (D-RI) first found the plagiarism, and have used it to renew their calls for the EPA’s Inspector General to examine the “potential” conflicts of interest between Wehrum and his former clients who just so happen to be getting pretty much everything they ask for.
As the Center for Progressive Reform’s James Goodwin told Guillén, that Pruitt “lifted this language confirms he was not acting with the integrity of our regulatory system in mind and that was deeply unethical.”
This is true, but implicit in the criticism is the idea that Trump’s administration is at all concerned about integrity and ethics. In reality, this behavior is likely the exactly the reason Pruitt was installed in the first place.
And even though he’s gone, there are plenty of other lobbyists left in political leadership positions at the EPA. As far as industry backers of the GOP are concerned, they’ve got their agents right Wehrum they want ‘em.
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